As major cities throughout the United States have struggled to deal with rising gun violence over the years, one community in California is seeing a reversal of the trend in its own backyard.

Oakland has cut its annual homicides and nonfatal shootings by nearly half since 2012, a huge drop for what used to be considered one of the more violent cities in the U.S., according to a new report by the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

The reduction is no random miracle but rather an overwhelming effort made by the entire Oakland community to address some of Americas daily gun violence in a city whose communities of color also deal with intergenerational poverty, housing segregation and systemic racial oppression.

The Oakland Ceasefire Initiative

Giffords April 24 report, A Case Study in Hope, looked at how Oakland leaders used a comprehensive, rehabilitative method to tackle gun violence, reduce recidivism and heal the community. The method is a change from historically used police tactics of invasive stops and seizures, severe sentencing and measuring success by the number of arrests, which criminologists said do not reduce violence in communities and instead contribute to mass incarceration.

Giffords produced the study in collaboration with Faith in Action , a faith-based national community-organizing network, and the Black and Brown Gun Violence Prevention Consortium , a partnership of institutions led by people of color that work to implement strategies to reduce gun violence in affected communities.

In 2012, city leaders launched Oakland Ceasefire , a violence reduction initiative that formed an ongoing partnership between community members, social service providers and law enforcement officials. Those leaders work together to reduce violence, build trust between police and the community, and help those who are at high risk of engaging in violence.

In August 2018, lead criminologist Anthony Braga and his team of researchers released results of their Ceasefire analysis and found that the initiative is associated with an estimated 31.5% reduction in the citys gun homicides. The city recorded 68 killings last year, Oaklands lowest number of homicides in nearly two decades and a nearly 50% reduction from 2012, according to the report. Oakland also had a more than 50% reduction in nonfatal shootings over the same period, from 561 in 2012 to 277 in 2018.

In Oakland, weve embraced the notion that we cant arrest our way out of the gun violence epidemic, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said in a statement. Instead, we looked at who was actually most at risk of engaging in violence, and worked together as a community to open a new door for them.