Push to Expand Chicago’s Violence Prevention Efforts Hits Inflection Point as Funding Dries Up | FIRSTHAND: Peacekeepers

Until the COVID-19 pandemic, Chicago officials followed a well-worn playbook when a sustained surge of crime and violence seized the spotlight, particularly if it was felt beyond the South and West sides.

That blueprint demanded that grim-faced elected officials appear alongside sharply uniformed police brass at a news conference where they vowed to crack down on lawbreakers and hire more police officers as quickly as possible.

But that model began to crack as the pandemic upended nearly every aspect of life in Chicago in March 2020. An economic collapse blew a multibillion-dollar hole in the city’s budget, making it impossible to hire more officers, as a tsunami of red ink threatened to overwhelm the city’s coffers.

But it was the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 that broke the mold for good.

Floyd’s murder not only spurred nationwide calls for criminal justice reform amid a racial reckoning, but also supercharged the ongoing push to reform the Chicago Police Department and reimagine what public safety meant in Chicago after the police murder of Laquan McDonald.

Despite ample evidence violence prevention programs can effectively break the cycle of crime and violence all too familiar to many Black and Latino Chicagoans, the programs’ futures are uncertain, threatening their initial success.

“This is too important not to invest in,” said Peter Cunningham, of Chicago CRED, or Create Real Economic Destiny.

Advocates for violence prevention programs are now staring into a financial abyss after hitting the so-called “fiscal cliff,” as Chicago’s federal COVID-19 relief funds – the city’s largest source of funding since 2021 – dwindle.

City and state officials, grappling with multibillion-dollar deficits, will be hard-pressed to replace the now-exhausted COVID-19 relief funds. And it is unlikely that President Donald Trump, elected on a platform that promised to restore “law, order, safety and peace” with a return to aggressive policing, will support budgets that include significant amounts of money for non-law enforcement approaches to public safety threats.

No one is quite sure what happens next.

“There is no doubt it is a challenging moment for community violence interruption groups,” said Amanda Kass, an assistant professor in DePaul University’s School of Public Service who is studying how cities and states are spending federal COVID-19 relief funds on violence prevention efforts. “The funding needs to be ongoing, because the problem is never-ending.”

A New Approach to An Old Problem

In Chicago, the outrage over Floyd’s murder brought new attention and energy to an already underway effort by a number of nonprofits devoted to testing ways to fight crime and violence without relying on police to make arrests and judges to impose long prison sentences.

Instead, the groups – under the banner of violence prevention and community violence intervention – work to stop shootings, carjackings, assaults or robberies before they happen by addressing what causes people to commit the vast majority of crimes in the first place: trauma, abuse and poverty, supporters said.

For more than a decade, several violence prevention groups operated on shoestring budgets in some of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods under the radar. The best known group, Ceasefire, drew international attention and enjoyed some success, but faltered after facing intense criticism from Chicago police leaders for employing former gang members officers believed were still committing crimes. First then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, and then former Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, slashed CeaseFire’s budget, and recommitted to a “tough on crime” approach to public safety.

But after McDonald’s murder, an effort that relied not on taxpayer dollars but on private funds from Chicago’s philanthropic and business community led by former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan quietly took root. Duncan, a close ally of former President Barack Obama, founded Chicago CRED in 2016 with Laurene Powell Jobs, a philanthropist and widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

In the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, and the racial justice protests it triggered, those programs found themselves in a white-hot spotlight.

As the clamor for new solutions reached a fever pitch amid a surge of crime and violence to record-breaking levels, officials soon promised to put a massive amount of money behind violence prevention efforts, changing the trajectory of the violence prevention movement in Chicago.

Then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot promised to use Chicago’s nearly $2 billion share of the American Rescue Plan Act, designed by former President Joe Biden to help the country recover from the ravages of the pandemic, not just to shore up Chicago’s battered finances but to strengthen the city’s tattered social safety net and provide direct aid to those struggling to recover from the pandemic.

Although those plans were announced with great fanfare, the grand ambitions of 2021 had failed to materialize by the end of 2024, amid changing priorities and a maze of red tape.

While Chicago’s violence prevention efforts began on the South and West sides and remain concentrated there, the city’s network of two dozen community violence intervention groups is active in about half of the city’s 77 community areas, city records show.

While every program is designed to reach those at highest risk of being shot or shooting someone else, each program has its own approach and targets different groups of people, who have different needs.

Some programs offer behavioral and mental health care that can include substance abuse treatment designed to help those suffering from the ripple effects of trauma. Other programs assign social workers to keep tabs on participants and work to keep them on track with intense case management services.

Still other programs help participants earn a high school diploma or associate degree while preparing them for a job with specialized training.

That is the only way for someone to transition into the legal economy and gain a solid footing in an independent life, supporters of violence prevention efforts said.

Other programs are focused on preventing the next shooting, much like police officers focus on responding to 911 calls after shots are fired. Peacekeepers, or violence interrupters, who were once involved in gangs or other criminal organizations, can also negotiate peace treaties between warring factions.

Some programs will pay former gang members or those with criminal records to physically occupy corners likely to see violence at moments of heightened tensions to deter altercations and mediate conflicts before they spiral out of control.

In 2024, crime and violence finally returned to rates last seen in 2019.

But while homicides in Chicago dropped 7.6 percent in 2024, as compared with 2023, murders decreased 11.5 percent in New York and 10.2 percent in Los Angeles, which have much lower per capita homicide rates.

Supporters of violence prevention programs say Chicago won’t close that gap until efforts to address the root causes of crime are expanded and made a permanent part of the city’s public safety infrastructure.

The initial stages of that work are already paying off, despite facing fierce headwinds and an uncertain future, officials said.

The first comprehensive study from an outside institution to examine the impact of community violence intervention programs found that those who completed the CRED program were more than 73 percent less likely to be arrested for a violent crime for the next two years, as compared with individuals who did not participate.

Researchers from the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research and Science at Northwestern University found that all CRED program participants experienced some programmatic benefits, but those who completed a 24-month program had the best outcomes.

Unrealized Promises

Lightfoot announced plans in 2021 to spend $136 million in federal COVID-19 aid to fund the city’s first-ever violence reduction plan she dubbed “Our City, Our Safety.”

But by June 2023, after voters showed Lightfoot the door following a campaign dominated by concerns about crime and public safety, she had already scaled back those plans by nearly 40 percent, to $84.5 million, according to reports filed with the U.S. Department of the Treasury as required by federal law.

By the deadline for city leaders to tell federal officials how they planned to spend their remaining share of federal COVID-19 relief aid, the amount of money set aside for violence prevention funds dropped again, to $75.5 million, records show.

In all, Chicago spent just $44 million in federal aid on seven programs to address the root causes of crime and violence from 2021 through the end of 2024, according to the most recent report from city officials to the federal government.

Chicago officials have until the end of 2026 to spend an additional $31 million, the remaining federal COVID-19 funds set aside for violence prevention efforts, as provided by federal law, according to federal regulations.

Chicago’s halting efforts to spend the federal aid quickly have frustrated residents, officials and group leaders desperate for funds. Officials have struggled to complete requests for proposals, select organizations to complete the work and cut the checks in part because of the crush of other work and the high number of vacancies in the city.

Chicago has also been slow to spend state money set aside for violence prevention efforts, with less than 68 percent of the funds flowing out the door, according to a WTTW News analysis. City funding also slowed during Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first full year in office, according to that analysis, as Budget Director Annette Guzman worked to fix the way the city was spending COVID-19 aid.

State officials have also boosted funding for violence prevention efforts, with $175 million starting to flow in July, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said.

The push to expand violence prevention initiatives in Chicago has also been fueled by a renewed financial commitment by Chicago’s business and philanthropic community. The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago spearheaded that effort, raising $100 million to supplement city, state and federal funding for violence prevention programs.

There is no dispute that Chicago’s approach to public safety must be reimagined, said Bob Boik, the senior vice president of public safety at the Civic Committee and the Commercial Club.

“There is widespread agreement that we have to go beyond policing,” said Boik, who led the Chicago Police Department’s Office of Constitutional Policing until August 2022.

In all, the plan crafted by the Civic Committee calls for $400 million to be spent through July 2029 in an effort to figure out which violence prevention and community violence interruption programs work, and how they can be expanded to reach a critical mass of Chicagoans at risk of committing a violent act or becoming a victim, Boik said.

That plan needs another $100 million before it can be completed, according to Boik.

Finding that money will no doubt be made significantly harder with the state confronting a projected $3.1 billion budget deficit in the 2025-26 fiscal year and the city in dire financial condition after closing a gap of $982.4 million at the end of 2024.

An Inflection Point

The hard-fought agreement that the Chicago City Council reached to close that budget shortfall in December used approximately $90 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds to help avert a politically infeasible property tax hike.

That included $31 million Johnson wanted to use to restart the effort that sent $500 per month to Chicagoans living below the federal poverty line as part of a basic income program and $8 million from violence prevention programs.

Ald. Matt Martin (47th Ward), one of two members of the Progressive Caucus to vote against the budget, said the cut to violence prevention program funding was a mistake, since there is ample evidence violence prevention efforts reduce crime and stabilize communities.

“I have serious concerns about the city’s willingness to continue and increase funding for these programs,” Martin said. “Even though it is a no-brainer investment.”

Garien Gatewood, the deputy mayor for community safety, said he has “big concerns” the city won’t be able sustain the current level of violence prevention funding, even though he acknowledged it is not sufficient to fund violence prevention programs at a level that could significantly reduce the citywide murder rate.

“I’m glad it was only $8 million,” Gatewood said of the cut to the city’s 2025 budget for violence prevention programs.

The way Chicago funds violence prevention and community violence interruption programs should change, Gatewood said, and those efforts should complement efforts by the police department to respond to public safety threats.

The city now funds violence prevention programs from the budgets of three departments: the Department of Family and Support Services, the health department and CPD. A more centralized effort would make it easier to track budgets and spending, Gatewood said.

Kass, the DePaul University professor researching how federal COVID-19 aid is being spent on violence prevention efforts, said officials should permanently enshrine funding for those programs in city and state budgets if they want to see them take root and flourish.

“The budget for CPD is what it is, every year,” Kass said. “But with community violence interruption, it starts at zero every year.”

It is also much easier to cancel a contract with an outside organization, as most violence prevention efforts are funded, than it is to lay off employees protected by labor organizations, Kass said.

While there is widespread agreement that Chicago asks its police department to do too much, it is still unclear how to make the necessary changes to the blueprint that has been in place for decades – or how to pay for it.

“We’re going to have to adapt, we’re going to have to collaborate,” Gatewood said. “None of us can do it alone.”