As Chicago’s homicide rate soared to over 700 during 2016, returning to a level unseen in the past two decades, police, politicians, social service providers, and local residents search for ways reduce it. Not so long ago, the battle was being won. After peaking in the 900s per year in the 1970s, the number of homicides had fallen to between 400 and 450 per year recently.
The reasons for the long-term decline, which was shared with most other large American cities beginning in the 1990s, are complex. No doubt the reason for the recent resurgence of violence is too. But we do know a few things.
The vast majority of homicides are committed in only a few neighborhoods: Austin, Garfield Park, Englewood, Lawndale, New City, and other south west side neighborhoods. We don’t know as much as we should about the shooters because as of 2016, the “clearance” rate on homicide, the percentage of these crimes that have been solved, had fallen to only 20%. However, earlier data developed when the clearance rate was higher indicated that approximately 70% of the shooters had had previous contact with the criminal justice system, as had a like percentage of their victims. The age of shooters typically ranged from the teens, to the mid-thirties. Recent research by professors at Stanford and Yale universities suggests that most homicide offenders and victims come from common communities of people where people know one another, and in many cases have already offended. So while it is impossible to know who will eventually pull a trigger, and who will one day be hit, we have an idea of the wider pool from which those people will likely emerge.
The vast majority of anti-violence programming is aimed at the youngest corner of the offender pool and focuses on youth who are either in school, or recently dropped out. Unfortunately, the vast majority of offenders and victims are older than that and are not attached to schools. Programs like the highly acclaimed Becoming a Man program operated by Youth Guidance and evaluated by scholars at the University of Chicago reduce incidence of violence among their participants, but the problem is that it works with kids who are in school. This is true of most restorative justice programs, and any number of other out-of-school time programs that provide alternatives to gang-related activities and other dysfunctional occupations.
The challenge for reducing most homicidal offending is to reach young adults who are no longer attached to school communities, and in many cases any institutional community at all. The closest thing to an institution that many future offenders are connected to is their parole officer, but for the most part, parole officers are not well-equipped or have the time to provide the intensive contact needed to turn around the lives of people who have already gotten into trouble. Organizations like the Safer Foundation, North Lawndale Employment Network and others focus on helping ex-offenders find employment, reducing the likelihood of future offending but they lack the capacity to by themselves reach sufficient persons to turn the tide.
As a senior grant-maker in this field at the Chicago Community Trust, I had the opportunity to see many of Chicago’s anti-violence programs up-close and evaluate their performances. They youth programs aimed at preventing violence hold promise for changing crime trends in the future but are not the solution for reducing homicide in the present. The most promising strategy is the Chicago CeaseFire program operated by the national anti-violence organization, Cure Violence. Unlike most other programs, CeaseFire focuses on working directly with individuals known in communities to be most at-risk of committing deadly crimes, and maintains a cadre of street workers, many of whom, regrettably, have committed crimes themselves and therefore have the local credibility and knowledge to intervene in potentially escalating conflicts so as to deflect participants from deadly violence. The strategy doesn’t always work, but there is significant evidence from studies conducted by scholars at Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins and University of Illinois at Chicago that CeaseFire’s street-level interventions reduce homicides in neighborhoods where it operates.
Whether it is CeaseFire or other organizations, the challenge is to reach the people who are most likely to become perpetrators and, sadly, most are not to be found in schools. Massive infusions of policing and aggressive stop-and-frisk policies can make a difference, but at the cost of police-resident tension and sometimes civil rights violations. An alternative that could be effective would be to ramp-up numbers of CeaseFire style street workers and deflect potential offenders from decisions that irrevocably alter their lives, and end the lives of others.