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Defunding police ideally means shifting more of a city’s budget to social services, and we’ve found yet another reason why that’s a good idea: Doing so helped drive down gun violence in Oakland, California, a city long known for high murder rates.

And I mean it has seriously driven down gun violence. As I reported in a new investigation, shootings in Oakland dropped in half from 2011 to 2017, after Black activists convinced the mayor and local residents to invest more in social services—from job training to housing to life coaching—for men who had shot someone or been a victim of gun violence.

Andre Reed, 37, went through a life-coaching program after he was shot eight times at a party in 2018. His coach, Leonard Haywood, helped him find a job and build confidence. I followed them over the course of about 10 months as Andre got his feet back on the ground after the shooting. Today, they refer to each other as brothers.

One study showed that less than 1 percent of Oakland men who participated in the same life-coaching program were rearrested for another shooting in 2018. And only 10 percent were rearrested for any crime that year. That’s major progress when you consider that nearly three-quarters of California men in their early 20s with juvenile records end up arrested again within a few years of their release from detention.

Shootings are rising again during the pandemic—in Oakland and elsewhere. Even so, the city’s gun homicide rate is still half of what it was before this particular life-coaching program kicked into full gear. Police departments in New York City, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Washington, DC, have all sent officials to observe Oakland’s model for preventing gun violence. There’s a lot of work to be done, but it’s a promising argument for why investing more in social services can make us safer. Read my full investigation here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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