Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (written by Northwestern faculty member Alex Kotlowitz) profiled the work of CeaseFire and Gary Slutkin, who I mentioned in an earlier blog post last week. The article goes in-depth to cover Slutkin and the outreach workers of CeaseFire; many of whom are ex-offenders and ganger members who Slutkin believes are the best antidote in preventing shootings in their communities.
THE STUBBORN CORE of violence in American cities is troubling and perplexing. Even as homicide rates have declined across the country — in some places, like New York, by a remarkable amount — gunplay continues to plague economically struggling minority communities. For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland. Just two weekends ago in Chicago, with the first warm weather, 36 people were shot, 7 of them fatally. The Chicago Sun-Times called it the “weekend of rage.” Many killings are attributed to gang conflicts and are confined to particular neighborhoods. In Chicago, where on average five people were shot each day last year, 83 percent of the assaults were concentrated in half the police districts. So for people living outside those neighborhoods, the frequent outbursts of unrestrained anger have been easy to ignore. But each shooting, each murder, leaves a devastating legacy, and a growing school of thought suggests that there’s little we can do about the entrenched urban poverty if the relentless pattern of street violence isn’t somehow broken.
Given more attention is Slutkin’s alternative model to fighting violence, a public health method that uses the outreach works as to fight what Slutkin calls going after the most infected, and stopping the infection at its source.
Despite a cut in funding and disputes over its methods, CeaseFire can claim concrete results in the work it has been doing. A soon to be released report by researchers hired by the Justice Department found the following:
But the study found that in six of the seven neighborhoods examined, CeaseFire’s efforts reduced the number of shootings or attempted shootings by 16 percent to 27 percent more than it had declined in comparable neighborhoods. The report also noted — with approbation — that CeaseFire, unlike most programs, manages by outcomes, which means that it doesn’t measure its success by gauging the amount of activity (like the number of interrupters on the street or the number of interruptions — 1,200 over four years) but rather by whether shootings are going up or down.
In March, two classmates and I spent a day with a CeaseFire branch on Chicago’s West Side. Here is a video from that story.
An American Nightmare
Ishma Stewart (Family photo from the Chicago Tribune)