CHICAGO – There’s no escaping the horror of urban neighborhood violence – the thoughtless beatings and killings, codes of silence, bereaved and fear-stalked communities. Deep harm goes on in soaring costs for police, courts and prisons, shuttered food markets, unkempt housing.
Our visceral reaction is simple: Send in more cops, deal harshly with youthful offenders, pack as many as possible off to jail.
But it’s not working. Arrests surely help sideline some especially dangerous offenders. But incarceration won’t break the culture that keeps producing murderers, some even willing to kill at the funerals of their victims.
So how can we quell extreme youth violence?
Increasingly, say reformers, let’s recognize murder and mayhem as a deep public health challenge.
In Chicago, Gary Slutkin, the physician-founder of CeaseFire, an anti-violence and anti-gang operation, argues that “violence is an infectious disease” – a condition “transmitted” from one person to another socially, through peer-to-peer neighborhood social pressures, just as insidiously as contagious bacteria.
Slutkin’s cure is to interrupt transmission, to combat and alter the norms among youth who believe “if someone looks at my girl, or owes me money, or ‘disses’ me, I gotta shoot him.” Slutkin insists such “flocking behaviors” can be reduced dramatically, just as behaviors ranging from smoking to neglecting condom use in casual sexual encounters have been curbed by targeted messaging and interventions.
Concurrently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is intent on developing a national prevention strategy. It’s supporting a new group formed to help cities forge coherent long-term strategies – Urban Networks to Increase Thriving Youth, or UNITY, led by the California-based Prevention Institute.
The idea is to forge radically improved approaches to prevent violence up-front, to intervene “in the thick of it” for families and neighborhoods already at risk, and “repair the trauma” where it does occur.
The vital key is prevention, says Barbara Shaw, director of the Illinois Violence Prevention Authority (the first state agency of its kind in the country).
Shaw notes that for every one of the sensational homicides the media focus on, there are “literally thousands of youth violence incidents,” starting with kids “battered around” and traumatized by witnessing severe violence in their own homes.
Immediate help, she notes, is vital after incidents – including home visits by skilled social workers. But young single moms, in particular, need ongoing counsel to develop positive parenting skills, especially nonviolent discipline.
And kids, as they grow, need help to avoid injuring and being injured.
A recent U.S. Justice Department survey shows one in four Americans ages 14 to 17 was assaulted in the past year, and one in five suffered bruises, broken bones or worse.
The solution, says Shaw, must be a “continuum” of efforts and services – helping parents help children develop social and emotional skills, fewer hours watching violence-laden television, easily accessed after-school programs, direct adult-to-youth mentoring, substance abuse counseling, job opportunities and keeping guns out of youths’ hands.
Slutkin fears that such steps, however positive, won’t be enough to stem killings in the most violence-plagued neighborhoods? His CeaseFire organization is effectively cutting back on gun violence by hiring, training and deploying “violence interrupters,” respected youth who come from the same neighborhoods. Many were earlier gang members themselves.
They intervene directly in gang and personal feuds to anticipate retaliation shootings and to persuade likely perpetrators of the big downsides. Separately, CeaseFire hires outreach workers to work with highest-risk youth and engage entire neighborhoods, clergy included, seeking to shift norms permanently.
The first experiment, in Chicago’s West Garfield Park area in 2000, reduced shootings in a year from 43 to 13. Now, with foundation and state support, CeaseFire is working in 25 neighborhoods around Illinois and several other states. A National Institute of Justice evaluation showed 41 percent to 73 percent drops in shootings in eight communities over seven years.
“Our intervention is dose-dependent,” notes Slutkin, a veteran epidemiologist who earlier combated AIDS, tuberculosis, cholera and other diseases in Africa and elsewhere for the World Health Organization.
The more workers CeaseFire can field, he insists, the bigger the murder counts drop. He’s confident that shootings and killings can be reduced at least 50 percent with $15 million to $20 million yearly funding in large cities, fewer dollars in smaller cities.
Communities, he claims, would be safer, and billions saved by fewer hospitalized shooting victims, less outlays for prosecutors and judges, and fewer prison sentences.
CeaseFire would be necessary, Slutkin says, even if all the social prevention steps UNITY and its allies recommend were implemented. Families are the primary influence on children’s behavior up to age 8 or 10, he notes, “but after that, every kid cares more what peers think than what his parents think.”
Does that mean either-or on the reform front? I think not. We need it all. We chronically underfund preventive steps, spend lavishly on punishments. It’s time to invert that pyramid.
Neal Peirce’s e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.
