MHB Annual Report | FY22

St. Louis Area
Violence Prevention Commission (VPC)

Handle with Care

The St. Louis Area Violence Prevention Commission (VPC) works to reduce violent crime in the region by promoting and advocating for coordinated, well-resourced policies, support systems, and interventions among area governments, institutions and agencies that serve individuals and families most at risk of violent crime. As a regional, cross-sector collaboration, VPC’s role is to align, convene, communicate, and connect the organizations addressing Gun Violence Prevention and Reduction. VPC’s goal is a reduction in gun-related crimes, injuries, and deaths throughout the St. Louis Region focusing on high-risk youth.

The VPC envisions:

A St. Louis region where communities enjoy quiet nights and the sounds of children playing during the days
A St. Louis that is a safe and desirable destination for businesses and residents
A St. Louis in which all community members feel protected and served by law enforcement and empowered to have a voice in important regional issues.

To achieve its vision,
VPC has three objectives:

Improve community-level response to nonfatal shootings
Advance trauma-informed and evidence-based violence prevention practices in community, systems, and service delivery
Activate communities to strengthen police legitimacy

Since 2017, MHB has served as the fiscal sponsor and backbone organization supporting VPC toward achievement of its goal and objectives, working together for a safer St. Louis.

Handle with Care launched in the City of St. Louis in October 2021. It is now in place in 71 schools and in FY22, there were 161 Handle with Care notices sent. The goals of Handle with Care are:

To respond as a community when a student experiences or witnesses a potentially traumatic event out of school.
To help kids build resilience and improve their sense of safety by providing trauma-sensitive supports in school.
To connect students with accessible mental health services if any additional support is needed, in school or in community.
To establish or enhance relationships between schools and law enforcement.

Handle With Care

In 2020, the St. Louis Area Violence Prevention Commission (VPC) participated in a meeting convened by Mayor Jones’ Office to discuss the response to shootings where children were injured or killed. School administrators said they often found out a student was injured or killed when they saw it on the news or when the child started acting out at school and was disciplined. There was no consistent communication between law enforcement and the schools. The communication primarily relied on relationships. If a responding officer knew someone at the school, they would contact them, but there was no system-wide notification process. One factor that may have contributed to the absence of a formal notification process was that law enforcement no longer had a direct presence in the schools. In the past, law enforcement officers known as School Resource Officers, were embedded in the schools. Currently, school security is provided by St. Louis Public Schools’ staff.

VPC volunteered to identify best practices for timely communication between law enforcement and schools. The model identified and selected was Handle with Care, pioneered in West Virginia. In the St. Louis implementation, police officers, firefighters, and other first responders can send a confidential notification when a child is at the scene of a traumatic incident such the arrest of a family member, drug overdose of a family member, house fire, or community violence. The school receives an alert letting them know the student needs to be handled with care after the trauma, without disclosing details of what happened. This trauma-informed approach ultimately enables teachers, counselors, and other school staff to identify signs of trauma in children who have experienced one of these events and to connect them to services to help them heal.