CHICAGO—Deputy Police Chief Eugene Williams had a tough week. Wednesday morning, a two-storey house in his jurisdiction on the South Side. Five people, shot dead. The following afternoon, two more shootings. Another that night, non-fatal, shot in the leg and back. And all of this following a hail of gunfire that had peppered the city's toughest neighbourhoods just a few days before: In less than a week, more than 40 shootings, at least a dozen of them fatal.

Williams, an affable 28-year veteran of the force, sat in his office in the blue-paneled bunker of the CPD's District 5 headquarters in South Chicago. As he managed his constantly pinging email and two BlackBerrys vibrating at regular intervals on his desk, he suggested a worrying paradox.

"The regular citizen in Chicago cannot go anywhere and buy firearms," says Williams, eyebrows raised. "And yet, in one year, in the 1990s, we had more than 19,000 weapons recovered. In one year. We've been averaging 10,000 weapons recovered every year for the last 10 or 12 or 14 years. And that's with a ban."

Toronto Mayor David Miller – who is aggressively pushing the federal government to institute a broad-ranging national handgun ban as gun violence in the city spikes upwards – please take note: The city of Chicago has a broad-ranging firearms ban in place. It has for a long time. It started with handguns in 1981, and then assault weapons in 1992. (It's worth noting that, as Williams explained the litany of recent weapons offences in his jurisdiction, one of them involved three officers being fired on by an AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifle.)

Chicago's gun laws are among the toughest in the country, making it and its anti-gun crusading mayor, Richard Daley, the target of gun advocates nationwide. Lobbyists like the National Rifle Association routinely campaign against what they call "Chicago-style" gun legislation; one of those campaigns, challenging the constitutionality of a gun ban in Washington, D.C., is now being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

And yet, in Chicago, gunfire is a routine feature of the city's dominant criminal dynamic, a deeply-entrenched, multi-generational gang system with, authorities estimate, close to 70,000 members citywide.

Bans? "That's what people do when they don't understand the problem," says Juan Johnson – or "Big Juan," as he's fairly known in the hardscrabble neighbourhoods on Chicago's gang-infested west side.

It's mid-afternoon, and for Johnson, a mountain of a man, over six feet tall and larger around, his work day is just beginning. In the basement of the neighbourhood's Alliance of Local Service Organizations, on a rough stretch of Armitage Avenue, Johnson and Melvin Santiago, both former gang members, trade war stories.

Johnson was a high-ranking member of the Cobras, one of the area's half dozen Latino gangs. He served 11 years in prison for a murder charge that was overturned. Santiago, wiry, chatty and quick to smile, did 19 years for a gun murder he committed when he was 17.

The two men used to patrol the neighbourhood, near the axis of Logan Square and Humboldt Park, for their respective gangs. Now, they do it as outreach workers for Ceasefire, a community-based attempt to stem the violence.

No easy task here, in a region known for at least a generation as one of the city's deadliest. In 2003, when Chicago retook the dubious title of the United States' murder capital with 599, it was here – in Johnson's territory, police beat 1413 – that held the distinction of being the most lethal, with 10 killings within its 28 square blocks. Eight of them were shootings.

Since then? "The next year, zero. The year after that, zero," Johnson, whose street cred still has currency, says with clear pride. He was able to broker a peace between the two strongest warring factions, the Latin Kings and the Maniac Latin Disciples.

"Most of the time, they don't even know what they're fighting about – just that they have to," Johnson says. "There's no such thing as a gun ban. Once you've got them, you can't get rid of them. There's military hardware on these streets. There's always a way."

Indeed, in modern crime prevention, where illegal weapons flow freely on long-established routes between states and nations in the hundreds or thousands, a gun ban seems, at best, naïve. It's the Hail Mary pass, a swing for the fences, a last-minute pull-the-goalie push: When you've already lost, what have you got to lose?

That's why, in America's most violent urban patches, better ways are constantly being pursued.

"We can't take all the guns away," Santiago says. "But what we can do is change the mindset: `If somebody calls me a bitch, I have the right to blow his head off.' They don't know they have a choice. They think that's what they have to do."

Santiago is touching on a relatively new way of addressing gun violence in America: Not with sterner laws, but social interventions. A generation of rampant violence has shown, says deputy chief Williams, "that we can't arrest ourselves out of this situation. We have to be open to different approaches."

The Chicago Police Department has been using its roughest neighbourhoods as a laboratory. In 2002, with federal backing, Chicago police embarked on a program called Project Safe Neighborhoods in two of its worst-afflicted districts. Working with academics like Tracey Meares, now a professor of law at Yale on the city's west side, Williams' force embraced a novel approach: Try talking to them.

The program focused on trying to get ahead of the problem: As a condition of parole, gun offenders had to sign a form stating they understood their next firearms offence would be pushed to the federal level, where sentences are sterner and parole nearly non-existent, to say nothing of where they're incarcerated. "You wake up on Idaho," Williams says. "That means your homies aren't driving 10 miles down the road to visit."

Signing the form also obligates them to attend a forum, where they're told in no uncertain terms what can happen on their next gun conviction. Once they establish consequences, they throw them a rope: Education, emergency housing, medical attention for drug rehabilitation. The program also puts forward employers willing to give jobs to ex-offenders if they're sincere about wanting out.

"We tell them they have a choice to make," Williams says. "`You can go back to doing what you've been doing, slinging dope and get arrested with a gun and face the consequences, or you can step out of that life, and we'll help you do it.'"

In the two police districts where the program was applied, homicide rates were cut by almost half – numbers, Williams says, the districts have been able to maintain or better since. From the initial two, the model is now being applied in six of the city's 25 districts. Results are encouraging: The events of the past week notwithstanding, gun violence in Chicago has been declining steadily over the past 10 years.

With the south side now the reigning gun violence district, Williams' transfer there, from the west side, is no coincidence.

"We put a lot resources into (the west side), and we had a major impact," says Williams. Behind him, maps of the various south side districts line the walls, divided and colour-coded in gang-claimed swaths: The Black Disciples, the Four Corner Hustlers, the Vice Lords.

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"Now, this is where the most difficult challenge lies," Williams says. Outside his office, a boy no older than 13 is led by an officer, his hands cuffed behind his back.

"We need to do here what we did there: Reduce the desire of young people to pick up a gun."

David Kennedy, an anthropologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, is the godfather of this approach. In 1996, when he was a professor at Harvard, Kennedy launched the Boston Gun Project, the first intervention of its kind. It reduced gun crime in the city by 60 per cent. Since then, it has blossomed to a number of cities across the U.nited States.

Kennedy views bans, like the one Miller is pushing for, as a symptom of the problem, not a cure. "For people desperately searching for a solution, it seems like it makes sense," says Kennedy. "What they don't understand is that there are better tools that don't require law to implement, and are practically cookbook and off-the-shelf."

Chicago's Project Safe Neighbourhoods is close to Kennedy's prescription (he helped advise on the project); Cincinnati's Initiative to Reduce Violence is its full manifestation. In Cincinnati, gun-related homicides spiked in 2006 to 89, more than double the annual average, since 1991, of 43.

Kennedy's research team unpacked what he calls typical trends: They identified 69 distinct street groups, comprising about 1,000 people. Of the 89 homicides, these 1,000 people – less than half a per cent of the city's population – were connected to more than 75 per cent of them.

Identifying the problem makes the solution relatively simple, Kennedy says. "If we change the behaviour of these people, we solve the problem."

Simple, but not easy. Still, Kennedy's methods have had impact: In Boston, in Chicago, and in Cincinnati, where homicides were cut in half the first year.

The solution lies not with trying to remove guns from the equation – the proverbial impossible task – but communicating to their users both consequences and options. In Cincinnati, any offender who asked for help back to a crime-free life was welcomed. In a year, 20 per cent of the 1,000 took the offer.

In Logan Square, Johnson – officially, a "violence interrupter – has a task at hand. A teenage gang member – a high school student – had been shot in the chest the night before, the victim of a rival gang member. "Now, it's my job to stop the retaliation," says Johnson, matter-of-fact.

As he slips into the street on foot, bound for some tough negotiations ("Usually, you've just got to talk them into taking a day, two days," Johnson says; "by then, they realize they don't really want to do it") Santiago cruises in his Jeep, pointing out gang borders. "That's Cobra territiory, over there is Disciples," he says, rolling slowly past modest bungalows and well-kept lawns. "You've got to know the borders, or you could be in a lot of trouble."

He rolls to a stop near an alleyway, where the boy was shot the night before. A broken box spring, the alley strewn with trash. The Eagles, an upstart faction, did the shooting here, in Cobra territory, Santiago explains. It makes the job more complicated, but not impossible.

Ceasefire, with its street-bred outreach workers, may lack the scientific basis that Project Safe Neighborhoods can claim. But still, it can claim results: In the worst police beat in America, a reduction in gun violence over four years of more than 80 per cent.

Minus the data, the message rings clear. "We're the little breath they need to rethink their actions," Santiago says. "They think they need to do this. They don't. I had a choice not to pull the trigger. I was looking to make a name for myself, I ended up killing somebody and I paid the price.

"We let them know: This is not what you want to become."