Reducing Gun Violence in Chicago

In 2000, an epidemiologist named Gary Slutkin, who spent his career fighting epidemics in Africa, began to apply the science-based strategies of disease control to urban violence. Slutkin recognized that homicides in U.S. cities occurred in clusters in particular neighborhoods, just like infectious disease outbreaks. The violence came and went in particular seasons and occurred in response to other violence, just as the flu or other diseases that are spread from one person to another.

“We see violence, in a way, behaving like a contagious process,” Gary explained in a TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) Talk in 2013, occurring because of fights, gang wars, or mere disagreements. The key, he found, was to adapt the well-established process that doctors and global health experts use for reversing a health epidemic—interrupting transmission, preventing future spread, and changing group norms.

The program works like this: Say a macho guy is insulted at a party. He may plan to retaliate with a gun. His friends and associates react to slights with violence, and he has learned this behavior from them. A violent reply is simply an expected and familiar norm.

This is where Slutkin’s violence interrupters come in. They are themselves community members; they may be friends with the angry man or people he spends time with. The trained interrupters hang around the neighborhood. They hear about the planned retaliation and approach the hothead. Initially, he may show little interest in discussing the problem, but the trained interrupters persist. They work to cool him down, keep him occupied, and validate his complaints. They are there to buy time, to shift his perspective, and help him to feel good about himself outside of a violent context. The interrupters may spend weeks or months with the guy, working to shift his perspective so he doesn’t relapse into violence the next time a disagreement arises. The program’s ultimate goal is to shift the norms of the community as those whose violence is interrupted begin to set a new standard of behavior for their peers. Next time Macho Man hears a friend threaten to kill someone, he himself may interfere and work to calm his friend down, thus helping to slowly shift the expected community reply from assault to more peaceful conflict resolution strategies.

Slutkin first applied his technique to West Garfield, Chicago, one of the most violent neighborhoods in Chicago at the turn of the century. This first experiment resulted in a 67 percent drop in homicides, and the program has achieved similar results throughout the country. The initiative, known as Cure Violence, is now active in more than fifty cities all around the world, where it has led to 41 to 73 percent drops in shootings and killings, transforming whole neighborhoods. Slutkin and his team have since worked to stop cartel violence in South America and tribe and militia violence in Iraq, and they are piloting an initiative to reduce violent recruitment in North Africa.

Efforts to build peaceful environments with fewer guns operate on the principle that the entire community, not just law enforcement, must play a role in stopping gun crime. They are rooted in reality. Because guns are ubiquitous and are not going away any time soon, we must change individual and community standards of behavior.

Some violence intervention programs feature meetings between, on the one hand, groups of people most likely to perpetrate gun violence and, on the other, religious and business leaders, police officers, and community elders. At these meetings, the peaceable people urge the actual and potential shooters to end the attacks. They’re told that if they don’t, the entire community will cooperate with law enforcement to address the problem and impose swift and certain consequences on the entire group. Research has found that individuals are more likely to recognize authority when they see it as acting on behalf of (or even at the request of) the community, rather than as an external force void of community buy-in and participation.

Other successful intervention programs are aimed at teaching young people how to make better decisions and avoid ever picking up the gun in the first place. In Chicago, the Becoming a Man (BAM) program trains ninth- and tenth-grade boys to pause and think before they act. “Sometimes people make decisions based on automatic thinking in situations where that automatic response is not appropriate, particularly if you live in an environment where the situations are changing quickly and where the consequences for making the wrong decision are very large,” says economist Jonathan Guryan, who assessed the program’s effectiveness.

BAM starts with an exercise in which participants are divided into pairs. One holds a ball in his hand, and the other has one minute to take it from him. Most young men try to wrestle the ball out of the other’s hand or otherwise use physical force to get it. The program leader then asks them all a simple question. Did anybody just ask for the ball? Few, if any, students raise their hands. Usually, each claims his partner wouldn’t have given up the ball or would have viewed him as weak if he had merely asked for it. The student originally holding the ball usually disagrees, saying he would have handed it over. This simple exercise teaches students the danger of making assumptions about others and the value of pausing to assess a situation before acting. Guryan and his colleagues have found that students who participate in the initiative are 50 percent less likely to be involved in violent crime than those who don’t and have better grades and graduation rates.

Programs like these can work in tandem with those that connect gun violence victims in hospitals with social workers and case managers who provide them with social services in their hour of need and help them overcome the desire for revenge after they recover. These models have already reduced homicide rates by 30 to 60 percent and would likely show even more success if they became a government priority and received a steady stream of federal funding. The funds could be administrated by state or city governments and invested in health departments and community-based organizations that specialize in coordinating such initiatives. Slutkin estimates that 50 to 80 percent of the gun violence problem would be resolved by an investment of a few billion dollars, a drop in the bucket when compared to the hundreds of billions our nation loses each year to incarceration, policing, lawyers and court costs, economic disruption, medical treatment of traumatic wounds, and the downstream problems of families torn asunder by gun violence.

As part of these efforts, the government, working with the community, nonprofits, and private entities, must invest in at-risk individuals by providing social, educational, and economic assistance. Most urban gun violence is perpetrated by small groups from the poorest, most underserved communities. There, guns are essential for protection in an underground economy. These people need help—transportation support, tutoring, and access to health care, housing, and GED classes. Thriving schools and strong families are some of the most important tools for fighting and reducing crime. Directly investing in underserved communities on the federal, state, and local levels is absolutely essential to address the root causes of urban gun violence. Conservatives who object to spending tax dollars on the poor fail to understand that the potential social and economic benefits for all of us far outweigh the expenditures.

All of these programs would be even more effective if implemented alongside the other policies included in the Compact. We should be investing in underserved communities while instituting reforms that tightly regulate firearm dealers and impose a federal licensing and registration system to prevent guns from flowing into their neighborhoods. About 60 percent of crime guns recovered in Chicago come from states like Indiana, where gun regulations are incredibly lax and firearms are easy to come by.¹ In 2014, over 90 percent of crime guns recovered in New York came from out of state, and half came from the ten states with the weakest gun laws.² Tough federal standards would end this deadly traffic.