Stopping the spread of violence

Yesterday, on the same day when a Providence streetworker was seriously injured during an assault, the New York Times Magazine carried a compelling story about the evolution of efforts to treat urban violence like a disease.

This is basically what the streetworkers based at the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence do locally, as I wrote about in 2003.

And while the injuries suffered by Sareth "Tony" Kim point to the risks of the work, there is little doubt that the streetworkers and their counterparts in Chicago and other American cities are making a difference. This is particularly important since, as Alex Kotlowitz noted in his NYTM article, gunplay continues to plague poor communities, even with significant decreases in homicides in some communities.

The traditional response has been more focused policing and longer prison sentences, but law enforcement does little to disrupt a street code that allows, if not encourages, the settling of squabbles with deadly force. Zale Hoddenbach, who works for an organization called CeaseFire, is part of an unusual effort to apply the principles of public health to the brutality of the streets. CeaseFire tries to deal with these quarrels on the front end. Hoddenbach’s job is to suss out smoldering disputes and to intervene before matters get out of hand. His job title is violence interrupter, a term that while not artful seems bluntly self-explanatory. Newspaper accounts usually refer to the organization as a gang-intervention program, and Hoddenbach and most of his colleagues are indeed former gang leaders. But CeaseFire doesn’t necessarily aim to get people out of gangs — nor interrupt the drug trade. It’s almost blindly focused on one thing: preventing shootings.

CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.” Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).

As this article makes clear, street workers and violence interrrupters can't singlehandedly resolve the problems in communities gripped by poverty and joblessness. Yet they play a vital role -- and one worthy of broader support.