Urban violence cure may be right under our noses

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

It was the weekend of Aug. 4-6 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 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.

Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued earnest pleas for members of the public to come forward with any information that could lead to arrests. “The offender in almost every situation ... is known by somebody,” Emanuel said. “They have a moral responsibility to speak up.”

Yes, they do. 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 black communities. Efforts to improve police-community relations, outlined in a proposed consent decree, are just beginning.

But I did find some good news from Gary Slutkin, a 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, including New York and Los Angeles.

Last year I wrote about how Slutkin had predicted a rise in violence when the program lost its state funding amid prolonged political gridlock. 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.”

Unlike more traditional programs, Cure Violence doesn’t focus on root causes of violence or saving one child at a time. Its “violence interrupters,” some of whom are ex-offenders themselves, focus on individuals who have a beef that can lead to the sort of retaliatory attacks that boil up behind most of the city’s homicide statistics.

Slutkin came up with the idea while working with the World Health Organization to fight AIDS, cholera and tuberculosis epidemics in Africa. Treat violence as if it were a virus? That’s the idea and it works, according to a 2008 Justice Department evaluation and various university studies.

Cure Violence certainly isn’t a onestop solution to violence in Chicago or any other city. But its violence interrupters show how knowledgeable civilians can remove fuel from the boiling 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. So do I. Politics should serve the public interest, not overlook solutions that may be right under our noses.