May 2026 concentrate on hyper-violent offenders and the individuals most likely to drive retaliatory cycles. This is where law enforcement has a unique responsibility. The people most associated with shootings are frequently known to police in some form, whether through prior arrests, warrants, calls for service, intelligence holdings, parole status, or their nexus to violent networks. Chiefs who prioritize targeted investigations are not simply reacting to the last shooting. They are attempting to identify the next one before it occurs.
Hot spot policing remains just as important. The presence of police in high-crime areas can mitigate violence, but evidence-based policing has refined this idea beyond simply deploying more officers to rough neighborhoods. Research has shown that violent crime can be reduced through focused interventions in very specific places, and those interventions do not necessarily require significant resources. The operational lesson is clear: certain persistent locations require sustained attention even as overall crime declines. Evidence-based approaches refine practice not only by helping chiefs identify where officers should go, but by shaping how long they should remain and how they should deploy once there. That is a clear reminder that place matters, duration matters, and disciplined focus matters.
Community Violence Intervention in Practice Community violence intervention has a place within a broader shooting hit reduction strategy, but it should be discussed with precision and honesty. Community-based organizations, violence interrupters, faith-based partners, and hospital-based initiatives can be valuable where they are credible, targeted, measurable, and tied to the reality of the criminal shooting environment. The difficulty is that these efforts are often spoken about more broadly than they are executed.
In some jurisdictions, CVI personnel do not have the relationships, standing, access, or practical ability to touch the very people most likely to shoot or be shot. In others, the strategy is not sufficiently integrated with police intelligence, hot spot analysis, or the real-time identification of retaliatory risk. In many instances in New Jersey, there has been a gap between CVI policy intentions and actual outcomes. Some initiatives rely heavily on self-reported success or operate without meaningful measurement. That helps explain why some efforts fall short. If information regarding imminent shootings is tied to a few individuals and a few places, then any intervention, including CVI, must have a credible path to those individuals and those places.
Without that, CVI risks becoming more aspirational than operational.
For police executives, the proper view is not that CVI should be rejected, but that it should be targeted, measurable, and integrated into a broader framework rather than treated as a stand-alone answer. When CVI can actually reach the people most likely to shoot or be shot, and when it is aligned with a disciplined understanding of the few people and few places driving violence, it can add real value. When it cannot, chiefs must be candid enough to say so.
Connected Technology & the Camden County Model None of this works well without connected technology. America has a relatively small number of police officers compared to the total population, which makes timely and focused law enforcement action impossible without data and technology serving as a foundation. Chiefs cannot be expected to mitigate shootings if the information necessary to understand the criminal shooting environment remains trapped in separate systems. CAD tells part of the story. RMS tells another part. Body-worn camera evidence, ALPR, gunshot detection, parole information, warrants, criminal intelligence, and NIBIN information all contribute to an understanding of problem people and problem places. If those systems remain disconnected, chiefs are forced to make decisions with partial visibility. That slows response, weakens targeting, and limits the ability to pull levers surgically.
Connected technology changes that. When police leaders can see data in a unified operational picture, they are better positioned to identify the right people and the right places for enforcement action. Patrol can be directed with greater precision. Investigators can focus resources on the people most likely to drive violence. Analysts can support command staff with a more complete picture of retaliatory risk, movement patterns, violence clusters, and emerging hot spots. Program impact can then be assessed through process and outcome, not assumption.
For New Jersey chiefs, the Camden County Police Department offers a practical model of how connected technology and a data-driven approach can support enforcement action directed at the right people and the right places. The lesson is not technology for technology’ s sake. The lesson is that chiefs need systems that connect information in a way that advances precision policing and measurable impact.
Leadership, Legitimacy, & Sustainable Practice The deeper issue is leadership. A chief can have access to evidence-based concepts and still fail to reduce shootings if the department lacks policy, partnerships, measurement, and relentless follow-up. The levers must be understood as complementary treatments that can be combined, scaled, and sequenced. Chiefs need professional education, codified and sustainable partnerships, community support, and a willingness to remove barriers that prevent action.
They also need the courage to resist the false choice between assertive enforcement and public trust. Law enforcement treatments, even when practiced with precision, are adversarial in nature. That is why legitimacy matters so much. The goal is not more enforcement for its own sake. The goal is to mitigate shooting violence through targeted, evidence-based action without diminishing public trust. Communities most impacted by violence deserve both safety and fairness. They deserve relief from gunfire, and they deserve confidence that police action is focused on those causing the harm rather than broad tactics that unnecessarily burden entire neighborhoods.
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