Are Violence Interrupters the Solution to Chicago Shootings?

Facing a 10 percent increase in shootings since 2020, and a 66 percent increase since 2019, Chicago has utilized violence interrupters with promising results, reports ABC News. A 2009 evaluation of Chicago’s CeaseFire program, which deploys former gang members into targeted communities to convince gang leaders to urge followers to stop shooting each other, found that CeaseFire had a significant positive impact on many of the neighborhoods in which the program was implemented, including a decline of 16 to 28 percent in the number of shootings in four of the seven sites studied.

However, Daniel Webster, director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University, believes that it has become “much more challenging” to work with the violence interruption model over the past decade because gangs “don’t have the same kind of influence” and many of the disputes are personal and taking place on social media, making them more difficult to track or mediate. In Baltimore, where the majority of shootings are motivated by personal disputes, the staff at Safe Streets — a program also modeled after CeaseFire — is facing similar challenges. In addition, despite the dangers and demands of the job, the salaries of violence interrupters are “abysmally low,” Webster said, and they often live in neighborhoods where poverty and gun violence are rampant. Dante Barksdale, a Safe Streets outreach coordinator, and Kenyell “Benny” Wilson, a Safe Streets violence interrupter, were shot and killed in separate incidents in January and July, 2021.