A cure for urban violence right under our noses
Last year I wrote about how Slutkin had predicted a rise in violence when the program lost its state funding amid prolonged political gridlock. Unfortunately, Slutkin turned out to be right. The only districts that didn't experience a surge were two that found funding elsewhere.
But after funding was restored this year, Slutkin told me in a telephone interview, gun-related violence in the affected districts "dropped by 30 percent in the first six months of this year."
Unlike more traditional programs, Cure Violence doesn't focus on root causes of violence or saving one child at a time. Its "violence interrupters," some of whom are ex-offenders themselves, focus on individuals who have a beef that can lead to the sort of retaliatory attacks that boil up behind most of the city's homicide statistics.
Slutkin came up with the idea while working with the World Health Organization to fight AIDS, cholera and tuberculosis epidemics in Africa. Treat violence as if it were a virus? That's the idea and it works, according to a 2008 Justice Department evaluation and various university studies.
Cure Violence certainly isn't a one-stop solution to violence in Chicago or any other city. But its violence interrupters show how knowledgeable civilians can remove fuel from the boiling rage that leads to more violence.
Even so, Chicago's program has produced less impressive results than its New York and Los Angeles operations, in part because of funding interruptions like the Springfield budget gridlock, Slutkin said. He hopes such political nightmares are behind us. So do I. Politics should serve the public interest, not overlook solutions that may be right under our noses.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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