HOW A 2016 GUN VIOLENCE SPIKE CREATED A MOVEMENT THAT IS STILL BUILDING
Combination of big money, political might has spurred unprecedented bet on former gang members to heal their own communities
In the summer of 2016, the White Sox were in the middle of their fourth losing season in a row. But their owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, had something more pressing on his mind: Chicago gun violence.
The city was experiencing a massive increase in shootings, up 50% compared to the year before.
“You just couldn’t get away from the headlines in the city and you know, ‘Chicago’s the homicide capital of the world’ and ‘What’s happening in Chicago?’ and I mean, the homicides were off the charts, and it was scary, and it was alarming,” said Christine O’Reilly, vice president of community relations for the team.
At Reinsdorf’s behest, O’Reilly organized a meeting with all of the owners of Chicago’s major sports teams, it led to the owners creating the Chicago Sports Alliance charity fund and deciding to invest in READI Chicago, a program that seeks to give jobs and therapy to the men most likely to shoot or be shot in the city.
Reinsdorf wasn’t alone in his thinking. People across the city were concerned about the violence spike, but Chicago’s outrage over the 2014 police killing of Laquan McDonald forced the conversations to go beyond police as the solution.
While Reinsdorf was shepherding money toward READI Chicago, the Emerson Collective, funded by the billionaire widow of Apple’s Steve Jobs, bankrolled a very similar program, Chicago CRED. At the same time, Metropolitan Family Services, a massive and long-running nonprofit, was organizing small anti-violence groups under one big umbrella called Communities Partnering 4 Peace, or CP4P.
The combination of big money and political might gave birth to a movement that would, in just five years, spur government investment, earn praise at the White House and provide a semi-permanent infrastructure allowing for an unprecedented bet on former gang members to heal their own communities.
‘Shocking and enormous’
All the efforts starting around 2016 and 2017 relied on street outreach workers, people from the community who are tasked with connecting with the people most likely to shoot or be shot.
Chris Patterson, the head of Illinois’ Firearm Violence Prevention Office, said the efforts were geared toward giving people “trapped in the cycle of violence” a reason to hope.
“I’m a victim of gun violence, I know people who, unfortunately, have committed crimes that they now regret. And you know, most people want to take that back, right?
They were acting out of an impulse, they were acting from a place of trauma … And there was never any help to help those individuals. Right. And so we want to reverse that,” Patterson said. “We want to have a conversation with people who are not only victims of violence, but drivers of violence. We think that if given the opportunity, we can turn that mindset around.”
Roseanna Ander, executive director of the Crime Lab, said the “really shocking and enormous spike in gun violence” in 2016 forced many in the city to search for new solutions.
In the years since the meeting of sports owners, philanthropy has invested $100 million in the efforts. CP4P has grown from eight organizations serving nine neighborhoods, to 14 groups in 27 neighborhoods.
Eddie Bocanegra, who was the first head of READI Chicago and now has a position in the U.S. Justice Department, said Chicago is lucky that private organizations were willing to step up.
“That is unheard of, over $100 million from philanthropy alone,” Bocanegra said. “I am super impressed by where Chicago stands right now.”
‘We have to do more’
The concept at the core of this community-based violence intervention has been around for a long time.
Northwestern University professor Andrew Papachristos traces it back to the Chicago Area Project in the 1930s, a “delinquency prevention
program” with “curbstone counseling” in which community street workers would meet with young gang members and try to help them avoid violence.
The idea got a refresh about two decades ago with CeaseFire, which later became Cure Violence. Cure Violence hired “credible messengers” in communities with high rates of violence, usually former gang members, and paid them to intervene in gang disputes.
READI, CRED and CP4P all rely on similar credible messengers to find and connect with highrisk people. Vaughn Bryant, who runs CP4P, said they took a lot of lessons from Cure Violence.
“I don’t think we would be where we are without the foundation that they laid,” Bryant said. The groups that are part of CP4P provide job training, therapy and legal aid to the people they serve.
“We have to do more than just stop shootings and killings, immediate conflicts, we have to have a way for people to move their lives forward. So that, you know, a week from now, a month from now, they’re not back in the same conflict, doing the same thing over again,” Bryant said of the services CP4P offers.
A religious moment
Three years ago, about 250 people packed into the South Shore Cultural Center’s solarium for what felt like a pep rally.
The city’s major anti-violence organizations were gathering to announce an ambitious goal: a 20% reduction in murders in 2020.
Papachristos remembers feeling like the event was the culmination of something, and the start of a new chapter.
“That was a religious moment, man,” Papachristos said.
Over the previous three years, community members, researchers and funders had been building the city’s violence prevention infrastructure. Now all the major players were gathered in one place. Duncan, from Chicago CRED, gave a speech about the need to think big. Bryant rallied the crowd.
The strength and influence of the movement was growing. The year before, CRED’s Susan Lee had been named Chicago’s deputy mayor of public safety. In the years to follow, Bocanegra would be plucked from READI to advise the U.S. attorney general on reducing urban gun violence and Patterson, a former outreach worker, would go to work for Ill. Gov. J.B. Pritzker, running the state’s violence prevention efforts.
In 2021, Pritzker announced he was routing a quarter-of-a-billion dollars in federal funds to community anti-violence groups. The city of Chicago and Cook County have also committed millions to the organizations.
‘Not investing enough’
Of course, the city did not achieve that 20% reduction in murders in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic hit two months after the South Shore rally. Chicago, like many American cities, suffered an increase in gun violence. Shootings and murders increased to levels even higher than that awful 2016 that started the movement. The fact that the increase happened across the country gave researchers in Chicago reason to believe it wasn’t a failure of the communitybased anti-violence efforts.
On a program-by-program basis, studies of the efforts have been promising.
A Northwestern University analysis of Chicago CRED found that people who finished the CRED program were less likely to be arrested or shot. Papachristos’s research found CP4P prevented nearly 400 shootings and murders between 2017 and 2021.
That’s meaningful for individuals, but not enough to make much of a dent in a city that sees more than 3,000 shootings a year.
Bocanegra said even with the surge of support in recent years, there still aren’t enough resources devoted to the anti-violence work to expect more of an impact.
The millions spent on this kind of work pales in comparison to the roughly $2 billion per year Chicago spends on police.
Bocanegra believes when evaluating the anti-violence programs, the focus should be on what the research says so far.
“These results suggest that we’re tapping into something with great potential. But we’re not investing enough.”