Chicago Was a Pioneer in Violence Interruption. Cities Across the Country Are Now Evolving the Approach | FIRSTHAND: Peacekeepers

Attempts to break the chain of violence have been around as long as violence itself – that is to say, just about forever.

But over the last quarter century, those efforts have been formalized, quantified and studied in a way that hadn’t been seen before, driven by a set of best practices adaptable to different communities and a mindset that violence should be treated like a public health problem.

That mindset, many experts say, was born out of work that began in Chicago. Over the years, it has spread to other communities around the U.S. and world. At the same time, the structure of gangs, prevalence of guns and rise of social media have all required organizations across the country to continually adjust and refine their approaches.

First launched in the West Garfield Park community in 2000, CeaseFire focused on targeted interventions aimed at people likeliest to commit acts of violence. They deployed “interrupters” to talk with gang members and others liable to pick up a gun, trying to stop the cycle of violence that shootings often spark.

After about two decades of direct intervention work, CeaseFire has transitioned into an organization called Cure Violence Global that offers training and technical assistance to groups looking to begin violence intervention programs in their communities. Charles Ransford, Cure Violence Global’s director of science and policy, said CeaseFire’s direct outreach wasn’t necessarily an innovation in Chicago, citing decades of work by organizations like the Little Village Project.

But where CeaseFire did innovate was its mindset of treating violence like a public health crisis best addressed by an epidemic control approach.

“People that are violent have themselves experienced violence, and it’s that exposure to violence that is the main factor in picking up violent behavior,” Ransford said. “We were able to show that the very first time we implemented this, there was a 67 percent drop in shootings in West Garfield Park, the first community. And then we subsequently had an evaluation in Chicago which showed statistically significant results – in other words, that the program itself was reducing violence in many of the communities.”

Ransford said CeaseFire’s approach stood out from the tactics other cities deployed – outreach workers taking their cues from police, for example, or a tight focus on open air drug markets. The approach faced some criticism from competing studies that found people were dissatisfied with the organization’s offerings and academics who argued it was difficult to truly prove whether the work was effective in reducing violence. It also faced some political tug-of-war – during the administration of former Gov. Bruce Rauner, CeaseFire saw all its state funding suspended.

But Ransford and other advocates of the model stand by its efficacy and its adaptability to other communities.

“The city of Chicago was on a trajectory below 500 homicides and getting lower,” Ransford said. “It was really a successful thing, and then politically, things just got zeroed out. From 2015 on, you really had much more of a fragmented approach, where you have several groups doing several different things, … but there are some great things going on in Chicago, and it’s a hotbed of innovation.”

Daniel Webster, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, says much of the early success of violence interruption work in Chicago was driven by the ability of violence interrupters to focus on gang leaders.

Today, gang structures tend to be more fragmented, he said, making the work of violence interruption more challenging.

“You got a lot more people with guns; their rivalries and conflicts don’t map always neatly across geographic space,” Webster said. “You’ve got a lot more … that you cannot influence like social media, drill music, and so I think the landscape is harder.”

Despite the challenges, the violence interruption model championed by Cure Violence Global is one that is now helping organizations around the world deploy, chiefly around the U.S. and in Latin America.

Spreading the Word

Before Rahson Johnson became a violence interrupter for the Brooklyn-based program Save Our Streets, he said he made decisions that “fractured” his community.

“I’m a product of the community that I actually was involved in,” said Johnson, who now serves as director of youth and community development for Neighbors in Action, which operates the Save Our Streets program.

“Now, I’ve become the servant, the one that actually is serving that community,” he said.

Save Our Streets is a violence interruption program established in 2010 that employs the Cure Violence model.

A study found that in the two years after the Save Our Streets program was implemented in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, average monthly shooting rates decreased 6 percent while surrounding areas saw increases between 18 and 28 percent.

Today, leaders with the Save Our Streets program say that the program has since expanded on the Chicago model to include a hospital responder program, community engagement liaisons, education and career specialists, and community events hosted throughout the year. The Save Our Streets program is one of the services administered by its umbrella organization, Neighbors in Action, and services often layer and complement one another to help reduce violence, according to project director Anthony Rowe.

“Mediating the conflict is mediating that particular conflict, but for us: What is the root cause of the conflict?” Rowe said. “Is it economic? Is it poverty? Is it food insecurities? Housing insecurities? Most people don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘I want to be angry and I want to commit a crime.’”

Thinking Therapeutically

One organization thinking through those root causes – and how to address their effects on mental health – is Roca, which runs violence interruption programs in Baltimore, Maryland, in addition to sites in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The program’s core is a culmination of what leaders call “relentless outreach” by workers to engage young people at high risk of shooting or being shot to take part in a three-year program that incorporates a non-clinical version of cognitive behavioral therapy to help them address trauma.

Program leaders describe high-risk individuals as living in a constant state of fight, flight or freeze. By addressing unhealed trauma through cognitive behavioral therapy, they said, it helps participants learn skills to achieve long-term behavior change.

Roca outreach workers go out into communities to make first contact with potential program participants and also check in with those who have agreed to take part in the program. Workers are sometimes met with resistance, avoidance and threats. Director of Roca Baltimore Tyrone Kent said this is where the “relentless outreach” component of the Roca model comes in. It starts by helping young men feel safe to have conversations with outreach workers, according to Kent.

“The young men that we serve don’t believe in people, based on life experiences,” Kent said. “We gotta show you that we commit to what we say we could do for you and we’re gonna show up regardless. Once we do that, they eventually tolerate us, they eventually give us a chance.”

Violence interruption programs vary based on whether or to what extent to involve law enforcement in their strategies. Some programs that don’t work with law enforcement will point to, in part, that doing so can hurt the credibility and effectiveness of outreach workers when engaging with individuals with previous negative interactions with police.

Roca works with law enforcement and correctional facilities as a referral source to help identify high-risk individuals, and that information “flows one way,” said Director of Roca Western Massachusetts Solomon Baymon. Roca also trains police officers with cognitive behavioral therapy skills as part of its strategy to also engage with institutions that impact the high-risk individuals Roca aims to serve.

Federal Support

Roca is just one of the organizations around the U.S. that has received funding from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice programs.

Over the years, OJP has supported community violence intervention efforts – but only recently did it do so at scale, launching the grantmaking Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative in the fiscal year beginning in October 2021. That initiative awarded nearly $200 million in community violence intervention grants over a two-year span.

“Yes, we need enforcement strategies. Yes, we need prosecution,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Brent Cohen told WTTW News in a January interview prior to the change in administrations. “But we also need to engage those communities that are closest to and best positioned to engage those folks who are most likely to either be victims or perpetrators of gun violence. Frankly, community violence intervention strategy should be a component of every jurisdiction’s community safety plan if they are grappling with gun violence in their community.”

Cohen said that violence intervention initiatives like the one OJP supports have drawn bipartisan praise, and added that the cost of both fatal and non-fatal shootings can be immeasurable, both in economic and emotional terms.

“My strong hope here is that this is a long and lasting part of OJP’s approach and the Department of Justice’s approach to tackling gun violence,” Cohen said. “Regardless of who’s in office, regardless of leadership transition that may take place, this is a community safety effort.”

Best Practices and Tailored Plans

Beyond the debate among violence intervention advocates over how closely to work with police departments or municipal leadership, if at all, there’s widespread agreement that for efforts to be effective, they have to be adapted to the specific conditions of each community.

Anthony Smith, executive director of Cities United, said his organization works with jurisdictions around the U.S. to come up with “comprehensive public safety plans” aimed not just at stemming violence but at improving overall outcomes for communities. For Smith, it’s key not just to include municipal leaders and elected officials.

“We include those young men and women who are most at risk of being impacted by gun violence, making sure that they’re at the table from the beginning of the work, not just as a piece of the work, but as a leader of the work,” Smith said.

In addition to advocating for violence intervention programs, Smith’s organization also pushes to dismantle inequitable systems – such as improving the school system or workforce access – as well as pushing for greater investment in underserved communities.

“What we’re really asking folks to do is to keep in mind those communities and the people who have always been most at risk, and how do we make sure those investments get to them first,” Smith said. “You start thinking about education, employment, housing. You start thinking about what kind of different data sets that you’re looking at, right? Because most of the time we’re only looking at homicide and shooting data.”

Broadening the focus to go beyond direct measures of violence is another element that intervention advocates in Chicago and around the U.S. said is key to success.

Many community-based violence interruption programs in the U.S. have built out their strategies beyond “credible messenger” outreach and conflict mediation.

Programs found to be promising in reducing violence tend to be ones that also change the way people think and behave, and present them with different opportunities and social networks, according to Webster.

One organization working to present underserved young people with a different path forward is YouthBuild Global, which offers education and workforce training. Many of its programs, each of which is tailored to its specific community, focus on developing construction skills and building affordable housing.

“I used to say I was a construction trainer,” said Neil Qusba, YouthBuild’s director of construction and green industries. “Now I say I’m in the business of human transformation.”

For Qusba and his colleagues, it’s important to bear in mind that many people who have committed and/or been the victim of violence, or who have served time, are often dealing with trauma, unstable family situations, and other mental and emotional challenges.

“When you come into a YouthBuild program, you’re going to be showered with love,” Qusba said. “Trust is huge. Some of our young people who are coming out of incarceration have huge trust issues, so ensuring that they feel that they’re in a safe place.”

Looming Challenges

Cure Violence’s Ransford said that while he’s been heartened to see the explosion of violence intervention programs using the Chicago-birthed model of epidemic control, he’s concerned about a coming fiscal crunch. Many communities started or expanded their efforts using federal COVID-19 relief money that will soon dry up.

“There’s some indication that there’s bipartisan support for community violence intervention work,” Ransford said. “There are some people that are hopeful, and there’s reason for hope. We’ve established the effectiveness of the work.”

Johns Hopkins researcher Webster said violence interruption work can be increasingly difficult to implement and that more research is needed on the effectiveness of programs.

But despite differences among U.S. cities, the success of a violence interruption program in one city can also mean success in another, according to Webster.

“There are a lot of people who will say, ‘This is Baltimore, we do things differently in Baltimore, this is D.C. and you need a D.C. strategy, and this is Chicago, and so this is how it should look,’” Webster said. “I think there's more commonality than there are differences.”