Cure for urban violence may be right under our noses

Cities have multiple personalities. I am reminded of that by what some Chicagoans are calling the “weekend from hell.”

It was the weekend in which the mammoth Lollapalooza festival drew tens of thousands of music fans to downtown Chicago while some of the city’s lowest-income and highest-crime neighborhoods endured the worst weekendlong surge in shootings in at least two years. Why?

Just when things were looking up for the city’s efforts to shed its Dodge City-meets-Mogadishu image, after more than two years of enduring more homicides than New York and Los Angeles combined, the violence felt like a soul-crushing setback.

Through Aug. 5, Chicago police had recorded 327 homicides, a 20 percent decline from 411 homicides a year earlier and exactly 300 fewer shooting incidents than the 1,426 at this time last year. But that weekend, in which 74 people were shot, 12 fatally, marked the worst violence of any single weekend in the city, according to Chicago Tribune data, since 2016 when homicides reached their highest mark in two decades.

Most of the weekend’s violence occurred in familiar zones, just four of the city’s 22 police districts, on the West and South sides, police said. Many were the result of random shots fired indiscriminately into crowds. One victim was shot while riding his bicycle. Another was waiting for a bus. Others were shot while attending a funeral repast, at block parties or just standing outside.

Compounding the tragedy was the sluggishness of law enforcement. As of Friday, only one arrest had been reported in connection with the weekend violence. Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued pleas for members of the public to come forward with any information that could lead to arrests.

Unfortunately the clearance rate of crimes in Chicago — cases in which a suspect is identified, regardless of whether the person is ever charged — fell to about 17 percent last year, according to data collected by the Tribune, partly because of the lack of cooperating witnesses.

Issues of trust get in the way. A U.S. Department of Justice report last year found long-simmering resentment of police, largely as a result of widespread civil rights violations particularly in African-American communities.

But I did find some good news from Gary Slutkin, the University of Illinois at Chicago epidemiologist who founded Cure Violence, formerly known as CeaseFire, an anti-violence program that has been adopted by more than 20 other cities.

Last year I wrote how Slutkin predicted a rise in violence when the program lost its state funding. Unfortunately, Slutkin turned out to be right. The only districts that didn’t experience a surge were two that found funding elsewhere.

But after funding was restored this year, Slutkin told me, gun-related violence in the affected districts “dropped by 30 percent in the first six months of this year.” Cure Violence isn’t a one-stop solution to violence. But its violence interrupters show how knowledgeable civilians can remove fuel from the rage that leads to more violence.

Even so, Chicago’s program has produced less impressive results than its New York and Los Angeles operations, in part because of funding interruptions like the Springfield budget gridlock, Slutkin said. He hopes such political nightmares are behind us. Politics should serve the public interest, not overlook solutions that may be right under our noses.