© Nathalie Lees for Mosaic

Demetrius Cole is 43, a gentle, softly-spoken man who spent 12 years in prison. He grew up in an area of Chicago afflicted by violence and, at the age of 15, saw his best friend die in a shooting. Nonetheless, he had a stable home life and stayed out of gangs. He planned to join the Marines.

When he was 19, a close friend bought a new car. Some other boys from the neighbourhood tried to steal the car, and they shot Cole’s friend. Cole didn’t stop to think. He retaliated. In those few minutes, his life changed entirely. While his friend was left paralysed, unable to work again, Cole was sent to prison for his response.

“I reacted off emotion like you see out here today,” he says. Since October 2017, he has been working for Cure Violence in West Englewood, a South Side district of Chicago. He finds people in the same situation he was once in, and tries to persuade them to pause. “We try to show them this is a dead end. I tell them, there’s only two ways this thing is going to end. You’re going to go to jail or you’re going to die.”

Cole works as a “violence interrupter”, employed by Cure Violence to intervene in the aftermath of a shooting to prevent retaliations, and to calm people down before a dispute escalates to violence.

“My job is to interrupt transmissions,” Cole tells me. “We try to come up with different kinds of ways to deter these kids from the ways they’re used to thinking, and give them a different outlook.”

Violence interrupters use numerous techniques, some borrowed from cognitive behavioural therapy. Cole reels them off. “Constructive shadowing”, which means echoing people’s words back to them; “babysitting”, which is simply staying with someone until they have cooled down; and emphasising consequences. “A lot of kids don’t know where their next meal is coming from, their mother’s getting high,” says Cole. “People say everything is common sense. No. Sense is not common to a lot of people.”

Interrupters’ ability to be effective depends on their credibility. Many, like Cole, have served long prison sentences and can speak from experience. Most also have a close relationship with the local community. They can respond when a shooting takes place, for instance by convincing loved ones not to retaliate. But they are also aware if conflict is brewing between two individuals or rival groups, and can move to defuse the tension or suggest peaceful alternatives.

“We may not be able to reach everybody, but for the few people we do reach, it’s a beautiful thing,” says Cole. He laughs as he talks about a young man he’s been working with. “He was a mess. All the other little guys looked up to him. He was the man over there, always fighting. His transformation was just – now all the other guys see him working, and they want to come into the centre to get a job.”

Grand Crossing, another South Side area, is the site of one of Cure Violence’s newest centres. Opened in December 2017, it sits on a busy street, a nondescript shop front deliberately chosen as a neutral space for different rival groups.

When I visit one spring afternoon, a boy in his late teens with a visible facial scar sits in the reception. In the office, staff are playing dominoes, the baseball game on the TV in the background. Young men from the area pass in and out to speak to their outreach workers and use the computers.

Demeatreas Whatley, the site supervisor, is catching up on paperwork in the back office. Whatley has been working for Cure Violence on and off since 2008, when he got out of prison after 17 years and decided he needed to do something different with his life. His first assignment was in Woodlawn, the area he grew up in.

Ignoring the protestations of his family, he moved onto the block worst afflicted by gang tension, and worked day and night to build up “peace treaties” between the feuding groups of young people. This entailed initially convincing the two groups to stay out of each other’s way, and then gradually working on individuals to shift their views about violence and help them to find work or get back into education. “I knew I was making a difference when I saw the old folks back out on the porch again drinking their coffees,” he says.

Although it must always be adapted for each location, Cure Violence follows roughly the same steps when establishing itself in a new place.

First, map the violence to see where it clusters. Whatley shows me an A4 photocopy of a map of Grand Crossing, with specks indicating where homicides were taking place. The streets and blocks where the specks cluster are the main focus. Next, hire credible workers with a local connection. “The type of guys we look for are respected in the community, and might already be stopping fights, trying to help guys calm down their nonsense,” he says.

These interrupters patrol the streets on their beat, getting to know shopkeepers, neighbours – and building links with the young men and women deemed to be the highest risk. “They’re able to know if it’s been a fight or if there’s a fight brewing,” says Whatley. “That’s what makes violence interrupters successful. You have to be there.”

The centre employs 11 interrupters, who typically spend at least six of the eight hours in a shift out in their neighbourhoods, as well as four outreach workers, who interact with participants on a more long-term basis. Over a period of six months to two years, outreach workers try to change attitudes to violence, as well as connecting people with job opportunities, counselling or education.

“You have to have a few tricks up your sleeve,” says Jermaine Peace, an outreach worker at Grand Crossing. Sometimes, he might hook someone’s interest by telling them he can help them get photo ID, like a driving licence. “Some of these boys and girls think no one cares,” he says.

“Once you start showing you care and you call them, they may call one day and say, ‘Man, I ain’t ate in two days.’ You go over there and buy them something to eat, you get more chance to talk to them.” Peace uses these openings to try to change their outlook on violence. Outreach workers assist with whatever their clients need – referring them to addiction treatment, finding jobs, or even buying new clothes to wear to interviews.

The work is challenging, particularly in the younger age bracket where peer pressure is strong. One young man Peace was working with was recently shot dead, just as he was starting to engage with the process.

While Slutkin emphasises how quickly this model can be effective in reducing homicides, and how it costs less than mass incarceration, there is no escaping the fact that it takes a lot of workers to get results. Some of Chicago’s gang territories are very small, just a few blocks. A violence interrupter respected in one area may be unknown, or even mistrusted, in another. To work, there must be at least one interrupter with strong connections in each district, so that if a conflict erupts, someone with the trust of the group can mediate.

Cole uses local connections in West Englewood, building up relationships with people who can then help him reach others. “I’ve been there. It’s hard coming back from prison and back into society,” says Cole.

“If people know of you and know your history, you’re able to stop a lot of things when it comes to shootings and killings. I’m able to show people: you can do this, you can change."