The view on the England riots by American epidemiologist Dr Gary Slutkin, who has studied tropical medicine and urban violence for more than a decade

By now most of the details of the riots in England have become familiar. A peaceful demonstration over the shooting of a resident in Tottenham was the spark in the tinderbox. Desperate, unemployed, angry, hooded, young residents hurled bricks, set cars ablaze, and shattered storefront windows. This chaos moved south into bustling Clapham Junction, Woolwich and Ealing. As with the fires being set, the anger and violence spread, moving beyond the capital, first to Birmingham and then outward.

As an epidemiologist, I spent a lot of my time studying the spread of diseases. If we could place these events beneath a microscope, patterns would certainly emerge. We would see issues of ethnicity and race and class. We could lay blame for the events on gangs, immigration, joblessness, economics, oppression and orchestrated street activity.

Yet, what is clearly demonstrated by these events is something I have spent the last 16 years arguing: that violence is an epidemic – one that behaves with the characteristics of an infectious disease.

I spent more than a decade with the World Health Organisation reversing TB, cholera, and Aids epidemics throughout Africa and Asia. In 1994, when I returned to the United States, I began to focus my attention on urban violence. The CeaseFire campaign, a public health approach to violence prevention, emerged from this. Informed by my training and experience at the WHO, CeaseFire uses disease control methods to stop the transmission of violence from person to person.

Based at the University of Illinois at Chicago and working in partnership with community organisations, CeaseFire has been replicated nearly 20 times in the US, and explored in five countries.

In my presentations I often show several graphs side by side. One shows a cholera outbreak in Somalia, where I worked for three years trying to curb this terrible epidemic as it devastated refugee camps. Beside it, another graph shows a curve of a better-known tragedy – the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda, which claimed nearly 800,000 lives. A third graph shows killings in US cities, which appear like outbreaks of tuberculosis in Europe centuries ago. Side by side, they demonstrate how violence behaves like outbreaks of disease.

That violence is an epidemic is not a metaphor; it is a scientific fact. To review the events of the past week in London through this lens, we see a grievance (citizens upset that a civilian has been shot by law enforcement officials) that occurs within in the context of frustration and general dissatisfaction (poverty, unemployment) serving as the precipitating cause for an outbreak of violence. These conditions set the stage for an outbreak in the same way that poor sanitation, overcrowding, and contaminated water set the stage for cholera.

Once the event is triggered, it moves from person to person, block to block, town to town. This pattern is not unique to London: it is evident in past riots throughout the US, from Cincinnati to Crown Heights in New York to the Los Angeles riots ignited by the Rodney King beating.

Cognitive psychologist Aaron Beck, in his book Prisoners of Hate, describes this phenomenon as "groupness": a collective, communal, group-think-motivated violence. At its most innocuous we see it play out in the boos, cheers and movements of a crowd at a sporting event; at its most devastating we see it in "a parade of jackbooted stormtroopers goose-stepping in unison". Beck describes the synchrony of the group reaction as an "emotional contagion" that ripples throughout a crowd driving them toward (often violent) action. "In group actions… people are moved by collective biases and the 'contagious' swap of feelings. An individual substitutes his group's values and restrictions for his own as the group establishes boundaries between 'us' and 'them'."

The key to CeaseFire's success lies in using credible messengers as our street-level staff – whether they are "violence interrupters" or "outreach workers", and whether they are in Baltimore, Brooklyn or Englewood in Chicago, they are recruited from the community they represent. They are actually recognised as part of the "us" that Beck is describing.

Approaches to urban violence, especially in the aftermath of such events, can take two directions. One path is conventional law enforcement – the path that much of the debate seems to be following. It emphasises community crackdowns, arrests and harsher penalties, heavy-handed suppression techniques. But a study by the Justice Policy Institute shows not only that these tactics often do little to reduce violent crime, but that they also create deeper divisions between the police and the community. Moreover, these aggressive and violent actions are frequently copied by the community itself.

The second path leads to longer-range solutions without considering the immediate present. Focusing on social services, job programmes, community resources and so on are vital longer-term investments, but, as with cholera, addressing sanitation and overcrowding will do little for those already infected.

CeaseFire represents a third way – an immediate, middle-ground, public health solution. It works by interrupting the transmission of conflict: by using credible messengers trained in violence prevention to defuse or de-escalate it.

The statewide programme in New York has mediated in more than 400 conflicts in less than a year. In Chicago, violence interrupters have intervened in more than 200 conflicts in the first half of 2011 – incidents that could have ended in bloodshed, escalated into homicide, or even ignited our own Chicago riots.

In fact, only two weeks ago, an incident closely paralleling the events in London occurred on Chicago's west side. A 13-year-old was shot by the police and more than 100 residents poured out into the street in protest. Tensions reached boiling point and it took several CeaseFire staff working almost around the clock to come to a peaceful resolution.

Last October, several London-based social workers and community activists visited Chicago to learn more about the CeaseFire model. While the group collectively represented and had worked with a number of conflict mediation programmes, they had never experienced programmes that could do immediate, street-level gang interventions that worked. Shortly after that initial visit they formed The Chaos Theory, a fledgling CeaseFire replication that seeks to fill this gap.

As David Cameron considers his next move, he is right to seek advice from former Los Angeles police chief Bill Bratton, but his efforts to "deal with the rising gang issue" would benefit from a broader-minded approach than solely a more focused police strategy. Bratton is an excellent resource, not only for his obvious experience and success in dealing with racial tensions, riots and gang violence, but also for his progressive approach to law enforcement.

Los Angeles, one of the cities CeaseFire works closely with, uses this public-health-style strategy with some variations. Los Angeles also focuses on communities disproportionately affected by trouble – neighbourhoods with, in some cases, 400 times the level of violence seen in other parts of the city. In LA, the intervention team responded to 1,130 incidents from April 2009 to December 2010. The number of killings in Los Angeles dropped to a 40-year low last year. The city has also introduced its Summer Night Lights programme, keeping selected city parks open after dark and putting on a range of events in them, which helped produce a 12% drop in violence in targeted areas.

Britain can move forward too, if it adopts Bratton's progressive attitude – and a violence prevention strategy that operates alongside law enforcement.

Dr Gary Slutkin is the founder and executive director of CeaseFire