Chicago is at the forefront nationally of a highly promising method of reducing gun violence that doesn’t rely on arrests, prosecutions and incarcerations.
Community violence intervention is a multipronged anti-violence strategy. It employs “violence interrupters,” also referred to as “peacekeepers,” to defuse arguments that can turn quickly into shootings and killings in neighborhoods where many people are carrying guns. CVI also intervenes in the lives of young men otherwise on the road to lives of crime, helping them step by step into learning how to reorder their lives and become productive members of society.
This is labor-intensive and even dangerous work, but CVI in Chicago has demonstrated positive results to date. As Arne Duncan, former U.S. education secretary, founder of Chicago CRED and CVI’s most prominent advocate, writes today in the Tribune, there is a growing body of research attesting to the effectiveness of CVI in reducing shootings and homicides as well as arrests.
No one has had to convince Chicago’s business community.
Led by the late Jim Crown, that community stepped up with $100 million in collective donations to allow Duncan and a host of aligned organizations scale up efforts that previously had been confined to pilot-level size over several years. The state of Illinois and Cook County did their part as well, contributing $30 million and $20 million, respectively.
The laggard has been the city of Chicago itself, the municipal body with the most at stake in addressing the unacceptable level of violent crime in neighborhoods largely populated by Black and Hispanic residents. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration pledged to contribute $40 million to the effort this year and came up with about $19 million.
Johnson should have taken ownership of the city’s struggles to follow through. Instead, over this contentious budget season, the mayor has sought to deflect the blame to corporate Chicago, saying the business community hasn’t put enough “skin in the game” and thus should be taxed on each person they employ in the city in order to fund CVI (among other things). The stance is disingenuous and insulting, as we’ve written before. The business community has done more in this arena than any other player — and that’s on top of paying one of the highest state corporate income tax rates in the country and some of the nation’s highest property taxes as well.
An alternative budget framework put forward by aldermen opposed to Johnson’s corporate head tax includes $30 million for CVI. They have arrived at that figure without penalizing job creators and reinforcing the city’s worsening reputation for being business-unfriendly.
Readers may wonder why these CVI efforts require so much money given that they have well over $100 million at their disposal now as it stands. These programs are multi-year efforts, we’re told. To be effective, they must work at scale in neighborhoods over five years. The funding in hand bankrolls five-year campaigns in four city neighborhoods — Austin, North Lawndale, Humboldt Park and Little Village.
But there are plenty more neighborhoods plagued by violence that could use the help.
These programs are difficult to manage given the inevitability that participants — both workers and those getting the assistance — are intimately aware of street life in Chicago’s grittiest neighborhoods. Most don’t come by that knowledge without having been involved somehow or another in activities that are unsavory, whether criminal or otherwise.
Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, who met with the editorial board on Tuesday, recounted for us riding with one of the CVI groups and watching as an unarmed worker leaped out of their car to break up a heated face-off on the street in which at least one man was wielding a gun. “It definitely has utility,” she said of CVI.
She made the point at the same time that “some organizations do this (work) better than others.”
We agree and a few months ago called on the CVI sector, for lack of a better term, to strengthen its management controls.
That said, combating violent crime in Chicago, a scourge that has held the city back in multiple ways, is a complicated effort. The battle requires law-and-order measures, but it also entails making would-be criminals aware there are alternatives and there’s help available in pursuing them.
On making Chicago safer, it’s time for the city’s political class once again to link arms with the city’s business community — not with the threat of economically destructive new taxes — but as collaborators. If the city holds up its end of the bargain, we’re confident corporate Chicago will step up again.
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