“A few months went by and ended up 13 more people got killed. That’s after we knew who the murderers were. We had a witness, but we didn’t know what to do with that.”

Kurt and his friend Carlos Hernández were compelled to stand up to violence in their community. Together they organized a team of brave Hondurans – a lawyer, a psychologist, and an investigator – to help victim’s families and murder witnesses feel safe enough to testify. They also provided technical support to improve the police’s investigations of crimes. Over time, murders in the neighborhood dropped from about 42 to a year to 8 a year!

Next, the ASJ team decided to tackle the police, long known for being either corrupt or ineffective. Alongside other civil society groups, ASJ participated in a national commission to purge and transform the national police.

The commission evaluated every single police officer, and as a result, Kurt reports,

“They’ve ended up firing over 5,000 out of a total of 13,000 cops. That’s almost half of the police force.”