A New Solution to a New Kind of Gang Violence

On January 24, 2017, just four days after taking office, President Donald Trump tweeted, “if Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!” His rash instinct to resolve violence in Chicago with federal troops represents a dangerous misunderstanding of violence in Chicago. Trump’s tweet embodies a view of Chicago that sees the streets as a battleground for large and hierarchical rival gang factions to wage bloody wars over drug money and territory. Much of the contemporary discourse on violence in Chicago remains focused on solving the gang problem of the ’90s, and not the problem of today.

[pullquote]Much of the contemporary discourse on violence in Chicago remains focused on solving the gang problem of the 90’s, and not the problem of today.[/pullquote]

Most people think of gangs as empires operated by kingpins rolling in drug money and commanding their subordinates. Entertainment media depictions of organized crime feed our presumption that gangs operate as illegal quasi-corporations managed through violence. This understanding of gang organization largely describes Chicago in the 1990s, but not the modern streets. Police efforts effectively took down the leadership of those drug enterprises, fragmenting gangs and leaving hundreds of disorganized cliques in their place. Today’s gang
members control only a few blocks, or in some cases, only a single street corner. These cliques still sell drugs, but there’s no longer any signs of anyone making money behind the scenes. Instead, gangs consist of young men with no other means of supporting themselves, struggling to scrape by on meager drug profits. Rather than fighting over business disagreements, gangs today get caught up in interpersonal complications that escalate to violence. These shootings create a cycle of violence in which family members or friends of victims engage in retaliatory shootings for revenge, setting off a wave of back-and-forth violence.

Understanding the cause of this new violence requires a careful look at the economic situation in which these young men live. In most poor neighborhoods on the South Side, businesses have packed up and left, creating a dearth of services and employment opportunities. With no means to travel far from home to work, men living in these neighborhoods often have no ability to find employment. This lack of employment opportunity along with cycles of incarceration and little help from the government or the police breeds a profound sense hopelessness. People in these neighborhoods can find it difficult to comprehend a life outside of their plight of poverty. The convergence of economics and hopelessness draws these men to gangs. In neighborhoods where there exists almost no legal economy, the drug dealer on the corner represents the only chance for some men to support themselves and their families. Gangs provide protection and community for people who have been traumatized and denied emotional support.

[pullquote]In neighborhoods where there exists almost no legal economy, the drug dealer on the corner represents the only chance for some men to support themselves and their families.[/pullquote]

The men of Chicago do not lack morality. Men make a rational choice to join gangs, at which point their situation and psychological abuse pushes many of them toward violence. If the young black men involved in gang shootings had been born into affluent white families in wealthy neighborhoods, how many of them would still wind up in shootings? Conversely, how many affluent children would have avoided the fate of these violent offenders if born into their situation? To answer either question with anything but “very few” would be inevitably rely on a tacit acceptance of racism. Confronting this conclusion forces us to realize our responsibility to give these men another option.

Even the most violent offenders almost universally express a desire to end the cycles of violence and escape gang life. Providing these men with a job opens the door to a brighter future. Legal employment eliminates the choice between gangs and an empty table, and instead offers a third option. Still, jobs cannot effectively reduce violence without a community support system outside of the gang structure to help young men deal with emotional trauma. Without care and support, these men won’t be able to handle the difficulties of new employment and will inevitably be drawn back into gang life. On the other hand, support won’t be effective if the drug dealer on the corner is still the only way to make a living. Jobs and emotional support must work hand in hand.

I propose the consolidation of many existing nonprofit and government programs to create a unified support network that isolates at risk individuals and intervenes before violence erupts. The core of this network would utilize the empirically supported CeaseFire model. CeaseFire violence interrupters and outreach workers would identify individuals for intervention, with the help of the Strategic Subject List (SSL). These outreach workers would connect at risk individuals to a government-funded jobs program and a variety of social work services.

CeaseFire is an anti-violence initiative operating under the theory that violence acts as a contagion that spreads through social norms and retaliatory violence. CeaseFire employs violence interrupters, primarily ex-felons and ex-gang members, who patrol the streets and use their street cred to diffuse conflicts. Unfortunately, CeaseFire’s tense relationship with the police force, due to the identities of the interrupters, cost it most of its government funding in March 2015, resulting in dramatic program cuts. These cuts correlated down to the month with the spike in violence that has plagued the city for the past two and half years. Even leaving aside this powerful anecdotal evidence, strong statistical evidence supports CeaseFire’s effectiveness. A comprehensive 2009 Department of Justice study found that CeaseFire had a significant link to reductions in violence: “In four sites it appears that the introduction of CeaseFire was associated with distinct and statistically significant declines in the broadest measure of actual and attempted shootings, declines that ranged from 17 to 24 percent.” A separate 2014 study by the McCormick Foundation concluded that “compared to districts that had not received intervention, CeaseFire intervention in the targeted districts was associated with a 38% greater decrease in homicides, 1% greater decrease in total violent crimes, and a 15% greater decrease in shootings.” Similar studies in other cities that use CeaseFire’s model have reported comparably positive results. The city of Chicago must overcome its discomfort with ex-felons, and should even acknowledge that these interrupters are on the whole more effective than the police. The city should increase funding to sufficient levels to allow CeaseFire program offices to operate in most or all violent Chicago neighborhoods.

The CeaseFire model also employs outreach workers in conjunction with violence interrupters. According to the Department of Justice study, outreach workers “engaged likely-looking candidates on a one-to-one basis in order to gauge their situation, and asked around to find out what was known about them … 82 percent of clients had been arrested … 45 percent reported having been arrested five times or more.” These outreach workers should continue to operate in harmony with the violence interrupters to identify at risk individuals, but the city should do far more to aid these workers.

The Chicago Police Department has developed an algorithm known as the Strategic Subject List to assess the risk of over 400,000 individuals in Chicago. In the hands of a community organization like CeaseFire, the SSL could be quite useful in helping outreach workers locate at risk individuals. The SSL could be used as a confirmation of on-street reporting or could help outreach workers find individuals predicted to be at especially high risk. Because CeaseFire would have no ties to law enforcement, most criticisms of the algorithm carry much less weight.

The most important component of the network that I propose is connecting outreach workers with the resources needed to help at risk individuals. Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has suggested public resources be used to employ the top 2,000 most at risk individuals on the SSL. Rather, I propose that the government should develop programs to employ and educate individuals contacted and deemed high risk by CeaseFire operatives. Chicago could adopt WPA-style community development programs that employ any individuals referred to them by CeaseFire.

Surprisingly, the city could accomplish tremendous amounts of good at a low cost. Using data from the New York Times, I calculated that individuals with a score above a 380 on the SSL account for 42 percent of the total gun violence in the entire city. There are approximately 7,400 people who score above 380. For the government to employ every single one of these individuals at minimum wage (about $17,000 per year) would cost it about $127 million, only 10.17 percent of the Chicago Police Department’s annual budget. Would providing these individuals with a job really reduce gun violence by the whole 42 percent? It’s highly unlikely, but the payoffs would clearly be massive in comparison to the costs.

In addition to providing CeaseFire referents with employment, the government should use the network to connect these individuals with support organizations. Chicago has many programs designed to psychologically aid violent offenders, but these programs often fail in recruiting efforts. Chicago should commit to pairing every job offered to an at risk individual with some type of emotional support structure.

[pullquote]The city needs to stop worrying about feeding the ego of its police department and start caring about the lives of its citizens.[/pullquote]

Working in conjunction, the many anti-violence initiatives in Chicago can succeed. The city needs to stop worrying about feeding the ego of its police department and start caring about the lives of its citizens. That means recognizing the effectiveness of the CeaseFire model and giving it the funds to work effectively throughout the city. Using CeaseFire, equipped with SSL data as the identification method for at risk individuals, the city should commit to finding employment and support for each individual. There are not tens of thousands of people out there in need of help. A small proportion of individuals perpetrate most of the violence, and a unified support network could have a tremendous impact on those individuals.

Connor Warshauer ‘21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at cwarshauer@wustl.edu.