For more than 30 years, each of us has worked on the front lines of gun violence. One works in the streets mediating conflicts and comforting victims. The other works in hospitals dealing with the human carnage that has resulted from our nation’s failure to reduce gun violence.
We have witnessed overwhelming despair, suffering and death. We see the hopelessness and frustration that seems to be tightening its grip on our city, scaring away individuals and businesses.
How to effectively address Chicago’s violence problem emerged as the deciding issue in Tuesday’s mayoral election. It behooves runoff candidates Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas to pay special attention to organizations already at work in our communities.
We firmly believe Chicago is better positioned today to address gun violence than it has been historically. Why? Because a large number of courageous people from across Chicago have been building a civilian architecture — a deep network of community violence intervention organizations, or CVIs, and social service providers that complements law enforcement by introducing a humanist framework to public safety.
CVIs have been critical to reducing violence in other cities. What many Chicagoans do not know is that in the early 1990s, Los Angeles and New York City had homicide rates similar to Chicago’s. Yet, over the past 30 years, both cities reduced their homicide rates by around 70%. Chicago now has a homicide rate almost six times that of New York City and 10 times that of Los Angeles. The number of our police officers per capita is greater than both cities, so more policing will not fix Chicago’s problem.
So how did New York and Los Angeles do it? Research points to a number of important factors, including strong leadership from the mayor’s office and reforms within the police department. (Both cities were under consent decrees like Chicago is now, which require changes to ensure policing is conducted in a constitutional manner.) Equally important was the nurturing and scaling of CVIs.
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What makes CVIs different from other community-based organizations is their relentless, hyperlocalized focus on connecting with the small network of people — often less than 1% of the city’s population — who account for the majority of violence and are typically concentrated on specific blocks. Unlike programs in the 1980s and ’90s strictly centered on violence interruption, CVIs not only work to mediate, deescalate and prevent violence, but they also offer pathways to peace for this 1%, including trauma-informed care, educational opportunities and job training.
Since 2016, due to the foresight of many local foundations, Chicago has been carefully investing in a network of CVIs working with government, the police and academic institutions to seed our civilian architecture. This civilian architecture, which started in 15 of the most violent neighborhoods, now covers 27 neighborhoods that account for 80% of the city’s homicides. In addition, our civilian architecture has been professionalizing the field of outreach and victim services by offering training programs and competitive compensation and benefits.
Moreover, this network includes robust partnerships with leading academics at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago who evaluate the work and provide valuable insight into what is working and what is not. Just as we demand that the Chicago Police Department improve its performance, including complying with the consent decree more expeditiously and improving homicide clearance and felony case initiation rates, CVIs must continually learn and adapt to increase their impact.
We have witnessed too many senseless killings, but the work of our city’s civilian architecture fuels and sustains us. It reminds us daily of the beauty and transformational power that emerges when we accompany those who are born into violence and demonstrate the courage to choose pathways to peace.
It is a wonderful manifestation of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words of all of us being tied in “a single garment of destiny.” Now, we as a city must ensure our elected officials increase our investments in CVIs to strengthen this garment, rather than letting fear continue to tear it apart.
Teny Gross is founder and executive director of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago. Dr. Selwyn Rogers Jr. is the section chief of trauma and acute care surgery at University of Chicago Medicine.
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