Aquil Basheer

The 2010 California Wellness Foundation's Peace Prize recipient, certified award winning Aquil Basheer who has been described as "one of the nation's most premier public safety, crisis survival, threat elimination professionals & hard-core gang intervention practitioners" in society today." He is an internationally known, certified, award winning lecturer and author, instructional coach, violence/crisis intervention specialist and street survival "extraordinaire." Rated one of the top elite training instructors and practitioners currently involved in this line of work nationally he has traveled the world over providing his expertise to those in need and assisting municipalities to strengthen their public safety infrastructure.

Over the course of four decades of working unheralded in the streets and saving countless lives, Aquil developed a model for gang-violence intervention which has become an accepted prong of the city of Los Angeles’ battle against street violence, and is also used in many other cities nationwide. In more recent years, he has expanded the concept to community intervention to address the needs of inner-city neighborhoods wracked by poverty and violence. His strategies are compiled in his Professional Community Intervention Training Institute, a national model that has set the standard for this area of work, one of few formal, certified interventionist training courses in the country. The course takes the onetime perpetrators of violence and turns them into peace counselors. It also puts forth an advanced theory of intervention that the needs of the whole community must be addressed to give residents the tools they need to empower themselves to stand up against violence. Aquil has professionally certified thousands of community based intervention peacekeepers throughout the nation. Look for the new Documentary entitled “License to Operate” which Mr. Basheer has a starring role in. It will be out in the summer of 2014.