#1664 2000 · Cure Violence Global (CeaseFire Chicago, founded by Gary Slutkin) · Violence prevention / public health
Treat shootings like a contagious disease; ex-gang members do the 'contact tracing'
the problem
Chicago's gun violence clustered and spiralled into retaliatory cycles that arrests and policing never stopped
background
Epidemiologist Gary Slutkin spent years fighting tuberculosis, a disease spread person-to-person, in Africa and the US. Back in Chicago in the late 1990s, watching the same few neighborhoods produce the same retaliatory shootings year after year, he noticed the pattern looked exactly like an epidemic on his charts and maps — a small cluster that grows, then spreads, then snowballs. Asking a question the criminal-justice world wasn't asking, he reasoned that if violence spreads like a contagion, it can be interrupted like one.
The standard response to urban gun violence was law enforcement: more patrols, more arrests, harsher sentences and gun buybacks, aimed at deterring the individual shooter. It treated each killing as an isolated crime to solve after the fact, and it wasn't working — shootings kept clustering and clapping back in cycles of retaliation, because the people most likely to shoot next, and most likely to be targeted in return, were a small, known, high-risk network nobody was reaching before the bullet fired.
what everyone would do
Deter violence with more and tougher policing: more patrols, more arrests, harsher sentencing and gun buybacks aimed at the individual shooter, treating each killing as an isolated crime to solve after the fact.
what they saw
Slutkin read killings like a disease: clusters spread and snowball. If violence is contagious, police can't stop it — only credible ex-gang members the shooter trusts can, so the cure becomes contact tracing.
the move
Slutkin's Cure Violence (launched 1999-2000 as CeaseFire Chicago) reframed gun violence as a contagious disease and applied epidemic-control methods instead of policing. It hired 'violence interrupters' — largely former gang members, credible to the shooters themselves — to detect a pending retaliatory shooting and talk it down street-level in the moment, just as an epidemic response would isolate an exposed contact. Outreach workers then 'treated' the highest-risk individuals by connecting them to jobs, education and counseling, and the whole program worked to change the neighborhood norm from 'snitching is weak' to 'shooting is weak' through post-shooting vigils, marches and the message 'the killing must stop.' The interrupters were explicitly not informants, so the workers the disease lived inside could trust and reach it.
why it works
The reframe changes the what gets done, not just the words. A law-enforcement frame produces arrests of the last shooter, which fails to reach the next one still simmering with a grudge; a disease frame produces an interrupter who is already in the room, who can reach the high-risk individual before they fire, in a language that person will actually hear because the messenger has lived the same story. Because the interrupter is credible (many were once in the same gang) and is explicitly not an informant, they get information a police officer cannot, and because the work includes changing the norm that punishes 'snitching', the behavior itself stops being status. It also recruits the highest-risk individuals as the very agents of the cure, so the people most exposed to the disease become its vaccine.
the payoff
Independent DOJ evaluation: shootings fell 16-28% in four of seven Chicago sites; the model spread to 20+ countries (2015)
where it breaks
It is a community-scale, deeply relational intervention, so it is slow, intimate and hard to scale, and it depends on finding genuinely credible messengers who can survive both the streets and the bureaucracy. Its results vary by site and by evaluator — some independent studies find solid declines in shootings, others are more qualified — and a respected, well-known critique was that 'treating' violence medically risks depoliticizing it by decoupling it from the poverty, inequality and disinvestment that drive it, so the model is a complement to, not a replacement for, the structural causes it cannot cure alone.
what came after
Cure Violence (CeaseFire until 2012) became the model for community violence intervention, taught to cities from Baltimore and New York to Honduras, Mexico, Trinidad and elsewhere, with independent evaluations attributing meaningful declines in shootings to the approach in several sites — and it seeded a US federal push, including the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, behind 'credible messenger' violence intervention programs
references
- [1]CeaseFire: A Public Health Approach to Reduce Shootings and KillingsNational Institute of Justice (US Department of Justice), 2009nij.ojp.gov
- [2]Cure Violence: A Public Health Model to Reduce Gun Violence (Annual Review of Public Health 36:39-53)Annual Review of Public Health (Butts, Roman, Bostwick & Porter), 2015doi.org