In 2011, the city created a task force to fight a rash of shootings. In 2017, a mayor proposed something different — a program that would wrap its arms around the neighborhoods doing the shooting. By 2025, gun violence had dropped to its lowest level in a decade. On October 13, 2011, Mayor Jim Gray asked Commissioner Clay Mason to bring someone before the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council. Commander Douglas Pape, Division of Police, had news: there had been a rash of shootings. The city was creating a Violent Crime Task Force to combat them. Council Member Ford, whose district had been hit hardest, thanked the police for their efforts. Then a community member named Cory Dunn took the microphone and said what the official response had not: high-crime areas in Lexington suffered from “the deficiency in the community of resources with which to combat crime.” What was needed, he said, was more funding for community-based initiatives. Six years later, the city tried what Dunn had described. The Enforcement Years Before ONE Lexington existed, Lexington’s approach to gang violence was almost entirely law enforcement. In 2007, the city received a Department of Justice grant through the Eastern District of Kentucky for an Anti-Gang Initiative Program. Between 2003 and 2014, it applied for — and received — Project Safe Neighborhoods grants six times, funding a Violent Gang and Gun Crime Reduction Program. In 2008, officers ran the G.R.E.A.T. Program — Gang Resistance Education and Training — in schools. In 2009, the city created a gang coordinator position in the County Attorney’s Office and funded a Gang Enforcement Specialist at $144,000 a year. The council debated a graffiti ordinance in February 2008 after officers caught suspected gang members carrying spray paint in their backpacks. The 2015 budget included $92,000 for an additional civil attorney assigned to the gang violence unit. Grant by grant, position by position, the city built an enforcement apparatus. The shootings continued. The Proposal In April 2017, Mayor Gray proposed something new in his budget address: a program called ONE Lexington. By April 2018, he was describing it to the council in his next budget address. “For the past year ONE Lexington has been bringing together people from all over town,” Gray said, “people inside and outside City Hall, people from the faith community, people from non-profits, neighbors, parents, people from our schools. They have one thing in common: they want to get at the roots of violence.” The first director was Laura Hatfield. She had met with more than 80 community members to identify resources and gaps in services. The program started in the Winburn neighborhood. It was, by any measure, modest — a single director organizing mentoring summits and mapping what already existed. The New Director On May 19, 2021, Mayor Linda Gorton announced a new director for ONE Lexington: Devine Carama. Carama was not a typical city hire. He was a hip-hop artist — an Emmy Award-winning one. He was an adjunct professor at the University of Kentucky, teaching a course that merged hip-hop writing and community engagement. He was the founder of Believing In Forever, a nonprofit that had collected and delivered more than 15,000 coats to children in Central and Eastern Kentucky. Before any of that, he had been a left-handed relief pitcher in the Cleveland Indians organization. “Devine’s career is hard to contain on a resume,” Gorton said, “but his focus is clear and that is young people.” Carama said he would spend his first weeks listening and learning — meeting with community organizations and police officers before doing anything else. He started June 7, 2021. That year, Lexington recorded 37 gun homicides and 135 shootings. The Model By May 2022, ONE Lexington had formalized its approach into a framework it called the PIER Model: Prevention, Intervention, Enforcement, Re-entry. The council received a full presentation at a work session. Prevention meant community forums, student interactions, scholarships. Intervention meant a Violence Intervention Workgroup that met every Wednesday to review the week’s gun-related incidents, and crisis response advocates deployed to scenes. Enforcement still included the Division of Police — the Gang Resource Unit, the Violent Crimes Reduction Unit, the Intelligence Unit. Re-entry meant GED programs, health department services, life skills training, and the Clean Slate Expungement Clinic. The model was designed to do what Cory Dunn had asked for in 2011: combine enforcement with community-based resources. Carama called the approach “All Hearts on Deck” — public safety, courts, faith communities, schools, nonprofits, and survivors, all working together. That year — 2022 — was the worst. Lexington recorded 44 homicides and 119 shootings. The Workgroup On March 14, 2023, Carama appeared before the Social Services and Public Safety Committee with two members of his team: Kenneth Payne, Community Outreach Advocate, and Larry Johnson, Community Response Coordinator. Carama described ONE Lexington as a city initiative targeting youth and young adults ages 13 to 29. Payne spoke about the intervention work: the weekly Violence Intervention Workgroup, the 50 families they had served in the past year. Johnson described the coordination with police on youth mediation and crisis response. Then Carama named the constraint. Asked about reaching students in Winburn and Eastland, he was direct: they would like to be in all the districts, “but the bandwidth is too small.” He described the strategic plan as “a guide for the next four years that shows how to reimagine the relationship between public safety and underserved communities.” And he named the hardest staffing question: “the biggest issue for youth programming is peer support and whether those with ‘lived experience’ will be allowed to come into community centers to lead programming.” The Mediators By August 2025, Carama had built something the enforcement-only approach never had: a crisis response system rooted in neighborhood relationships. At the August 26 Council Work Session, Council Member Sheehan asked Carama to explain one of the new business items — funding for ONE Lexington crisis response mediators. “The crisis response mediators are those who we deploy anytime there is a shooting incident,” Carama said. “We had four for about the last three years and we just added a fifth one. All five of them have unique connections to different parts of the city and so if there’s a shooting that happens in a specific neighborhood we want to deploy an outreach advocate that already has a connection in that neighborhood.” The scope was broader than most people assumed. “This just isn’t fatal shootings, this just isn’t injury shootings, but even when a house gets shot up and nobody is injured we deploy this advocate. Their job ranges from connecting families with resources to possibly even mediating a conflict. Sometimes they’ll show up and be on the scene as soon as the shooting happens.” At the same meeting, Carama described a new position: a survivor liaison. Instead of a crisis response advocate making first contact after a homicide, the city would hire someone who had lost a loved one to gun violence to reach out to families. “This just isn’t a nine to five type of job that is built on your education qualifications or your experience,” he told the council. “This is a very, very unique” role. Council Member Lynch asked whether an RFP process was used. It wasn’t — the position fell below the threshold, and Carama said they wanted to “use our professional discretion” based on community feedback “to target somebody specific.” The Numbers The decline started in 2023 and kept going. From 2021 to 2025: a 60 percent decline in community violence. The lowest homicide count in a decade. The fewest gunshot victims since 2010. Four consecutive years of declining gun violence. By 2025, ONE Lexington’s “It Takes a Village” programs had reached 5,635 youth and young adults across 25 Fayette County public schools. Crisis advocates deployed to 93 situations. The program’s budget reached $767,341 — including $280,000 in student scholarships, $203,024 in crisis response support, and more than $150,000 in grants to grassroots organizations. Police Chief Lawrence Weathers credited the approach: “The ONE Lexington P.I.E.R. Model has shown to be an effective and efficient way to promote a continuum of care.” The Shift The language in the archive tells its own story. From 2007 to 2015, the council discussed “gangs” — anti-gang initiatives, gang enforcement specialists, gang violence units. After 2017, the word shifts. It becomes “gun violence,” then “community violence.” ONE Lexington’s own scope expanded from youth gun violence to include crisis response for homelessness, substance use, and mental health. The enforcement apparatus didn’t disappear. The Gang Resource Unit and Violent Crimes Reduction Unit still operate. Project Safe Neighborhoods grants still get filed. But the center of gravity moved — from task forces and prosecutors to mediators and mentoring summits, from arrest counts to the number of families served after a shooting. In 2011, Cory Dunn told the council that the city needed community-based initiatives. In 2018, a director started meeting with 80 neighbors in Winburn. In 2021, a hip-hop artist took over and said he’d spend his first weeks listening. In 2025, five mediators with connections to specific neighborhoods deployed every time a house got shot up, and a survivor liaison made first contact with grieving families. “Together, we are all ONE Lexington,” Carama told reporters at the end of 2025. “Public safety, courts, faith communities, the business sector, nonprofit organizations, the school system, survivors, and more — all working together to make Lexington a safer place.” Forty-four homicides became twenty. The question now is whether the bandwidth — the word Carama used in 2023 when he said the program couldn’t reach every school district — can grow fast enough to keep the numbers falling. This investigation was conducted using the LFUCG Meeting Archive, a searchable database of Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government meeting transcripts, summaries, and minutes spanning August 2007 to present. The archive’s ChatLFUCG AI-powered QA tool was used to identify key meetings, followed by deep-dives into individual transcripts, agendas, and official minutes. Supplementary reporting drew on city press releases, local news coverage, and ONE Lexington annual reports. Sources: LFUCG Meeting Archive — Urban County Council, October 13, 2011 (Clip 2209) — Violent Crime Task Force, Cory Dunn testimony LFUCG Meeting Archive — Mayor’s Budget Address, April 10, 2018 (Clip 4491) — ONE Lexington first described, Laura Hatfield LFUCG Meeting Archive — Council Work Session, May 3, 2022 (Clip 5565) — PIER model presentation LFUCG Meeting Archive — Social Services Public Safety Committee, March 14, 2023 (Clip 5783) — Carama, Payne, Johnson presentation LFUCG Meeting Archive — Council Work Session, August 26, 2025 (Clip 6528) — Crisis response mediators, survivor liaison City of Lexington — ONE Lexington releases 2024 annual report Lex18 — City gun violence drops 60% since 2021, ONE Lexington’s 2025 report shows Lex18 — Lexington sees 4th straight year of declining gun violence WKYT — Activist, hip-hop artist Devine Carama tapped to lead Lexington’s anti-violence initiative City of Lexington — ONE Lexington reports The post All Hearts on Deck: How a Hip-Hop Artist and Five Crisis Mediators Cut Lexington’s Gun Violence by 60 Percent appeared first on The Lexington Times. ...read more read less