I n the impoverished neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West sides, violence has come to define the landscape. At the end of the last school year, a marquee at Manley High School read: Have a Peaceful Summer.

Signs for neighborhood block clubs, ordinarily a mark of celebration, detail all that’s prohibited. One warns: No Drug Selling . Another cautions: No Gambling. A city sign declares: Warning Safe School Zone; Increased penalties for: gang activities and the use, sale or possession of drugs or weapons in this area . On street corners and on stoops, in front of stores and in gangways, makeshift shrines appear – candles, empty liquor bottles, stuffed animals, poster board with scrawled remembrances – monuments to the fallen, victims of the epidemic of shootings in our central cities.

Politicians have called for the National Guard. Chicago’s police superintendent conceded that his officers can’t respond to every call of a gun fired because there are so many gunshots. So many children have been murdered that a few years back, the Chicago Tribune began to keep a tally of public school students killed.

Chicago is not alone. Thirteen cities have higher murder rates, including four – New Orleans, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit – where the rate is more than twice that of Chicago. For the past 10 years, homicide has been the leading cause of death for African American men between the ages of 15 and 24. The response traditionally has been more rigorous policing and longer prison sentences, the notion being that the threat of getting locked up for a long stretch would be a deterrent to anyone even thinking about picking up a gun. But with over 1.5 million people in America’s prisons, that feels like a lost argument. Moreover, lock people up, and most come back to their communities one day. (In Chicago alone, an estimated 20,000 to 27,000 men return from prison each year, and most of them to seven neighborhoods.) It’s enough to make even the most committed and persistent among us throw up our hands.

Yet time and again I have met people in these communities who haven’t given up, who see promise where others see despair.

Case study

Consider Cobe Williams. Now 37, Cobe grew up on Chicago’s South Side, in a neighborhood marked by abandoned homes and struggling families. His father was in prison for much of Cobe’s youth and, shortly after getting released, when Cobe was 12, was beaten to death by a group of men. Despite his dad’s shortcomings, Cobe looked up to him, so he spent much of his teen years trying to emulate his father’s life: running with a gang, selling drugs, shooting at others and getting shot at. Cobe served three stints in prison for a total of 12 years. In his last appearance in court, he had an epiphany of sorts. His four-year-old son ran up to him in tears, and at that moment, Cobe realized he wanted to do better than his dad. He wanted to be a real father to his son. It would perhaps be too glib to suggest that he’s changed. Rather, he’s figured out who he always was – and who he wants to be.

Cobe is trying to return what he has taken from his community. He works for CeaseFire, a violence prevention program that views shootings through a public health lens. Organizers believe the spread of violence mimics the spread of an infectious disease, so they have hired individuals like Cobe, men and women formerly of the street, to intervene in disputes before they escalate – to interrupt the next shooting. Hence the job title: violence interrupter. Given their pasts, these people have credibility on the streets. And because they’ve been there themselves, they can empathize with someone intent on revenge. For a year, film director Steve James and I followed Cobe and two of his colleagues, recording them as they went about their work for our documentary, The Interrupters.

One day, Cobe received a call from a young man, Flamo, whom he’d met in the county jail some years earlier and who has a reputation on the streets for, as Cobe says, “taking care of business.” Someone had called the police on Flamo, reporting that he had guns in his house. When the police came, Flamo wasn’t home, but they found some guns and arrested his brother, who was in a wheelchair as a result of having been shot, and handcuffed his mother. By the time Cobe got to Flamo’s house – with us in tow – Flamo had been downing vodka, was packing a pistol, and waiting for a friend to bring him a stolen car so he could “take care of business.“ He knew who had called the police, and was looking for payback. Boiling with rage, at one point he violently kicked a wall in his house: “You ain’t just crossed me, you crossed my mama. For my mama ... I come in your crib and kill every ... body.”

Cobe told us later he had thought this was a lost cause, a failed interruption. But about 10 minutes into his rant, Flamo turned to Cobe and asked, “How can you help me? Right now. How can you help me?”

Organizers have hired men and women formerly of the street to intervene in disputes before they escalate.

It was a plea, really. If Cobe were the police, he might have arrested Flamo at that point, but instead, Cobe did something so simple it seems almost laughable: He asked Flamo to lunch. They headed to a nearby chicken shack, where Flamo, still agitated, called a friend to get some bullets. But Cobe asked Flamo who would take care of his kids if he got locked up. He reminded Flamo that his mother needed him. He bought some time. Cobe then lured Flamo down to CeaseFire’s office and invited him to attend the weekly meeting of the Interrupters – men and women with résumés similar to Cobe’s whose job, like his, is to suss out simmering disputes in their neighborhoods and try to defuse them. By the time the meeting was over, Flamo had calmed down enough that he no longer was intent – at least at the moment – on exacting revenge.

I suppose the story could end here, but what’s so striking is how Cobe stayed with Flamo, calling him, taking him out for meals, cajoling him to get a job. In the end, I came to realize that all Flamo had needed was someone to listen, someone to acknowledge his grievance, someone to believe in him. Cobe knew this instinctively. In his own life, Cobe had a grandmother who refused to give up on him. Despite all the trouble he had gotten into, Cobe told me, “She never turned her back on me.”

Over the course of the 14 months of filming, it became apparent that the one constant for those like Cobe and Flamo, for those who were able to emerge from the wreckage of their lives and their neighborhoods, for those who were able to walk away from a potentially violent encounter, was to have someone in their lives with high expectations for them, someone who treated them with a sense of dignity and decency, someone who wasn’t afraid to slap them across the head when they did something wrong (when Cobe was a teenager, his grandmother had refused to bond him out of jail) but who never viewed them as inherently bad. Someone who saw something in them that others didn’t.

Cobe and the others around the CeaseFire Interrupters table practice old-fashioned conflict mediation, which is used by a handful of community organizations across the United States, including some that have directly replicated CeaseFire’s public health approach. But what Cobe and his colleagues have come to realize is that keeping someone from shooting someone one day is no guarantee that person won’t shoot someone the next week – so they stay with that person. They don’t let go.

This is not to discount all the forces working against those who are growing up in the profound poverty of our cities. If we are serious about addressing violence, people – especially young people – must believe in their own futures. And believe they have a future. These are neighborhoods where the schools are still lousy, where blocks are littered with foreclosed homes, where jobs are hard to come by. These are neighborhoods physically and spiritually isolated from the rest of us. These are neighborhoods where young people can look at the city’s glittering skyline and realize their place in the world. These are neighborhoods where the American dream is a fiction.

Self-respect

Cobe and his colleagues know that, but they plow ahead, trying to intercept the next potential shooting, trying to pull people off the ledge. But mediating conflicts is more than just persuading people to go their separate ways. The Interrupters look to give people a way to walk away while maintaining their self-respect. At one point while we were filming, Ameena Matthews, another of the Interrupters, persuaded a young man who’d just been hit in the mouth with a rock, not to retaliate. “I saw that you was walking away, to defend you and your family,” Ameena told him. “Man, I thank you. I mean for real. For real, that’s what gangster is about right there.” She’s telling him that it was really “gangster” of him to walk away, that that was the best way he could defend his family. Now that’s turning things on their head.

It may seem self-evident, but it’s worth contemplating nonetheless: Once people stop believing in you, you stop believing in yourself. The Interrupters recognize that. It’s not enough simply to step between two people and push them apart. You need to persist, to listen, and to give them something to hold on to, something that gives them a sense of possibility, whether it’s a job, a decent place to live, an education, or just a helping hand.

At one point, Flamo told Cobe, “I was really plottin’ on how to get them. But you was just in my ear. ... You constantly in my ear. You buggin’ me for a minute. ... You know how that be – like I’m sleepin’, the fly keep landin’ on you, you know what I’m sayin’? You’s buggin’ me till eventually I had to get up and attend to that fly.”

At a screening of the film in Chicago, a teenage girl from the South Side got up to ask a question. She was near tears. She talked about how hard her life was, how she was getting into fights, how she was doing all she could not to give up. She turned to Flamo, who was in attendance, and asked him: “What do I do? What do I do, now ?” Flamo pointed to Cobe and told her: “Take my fly.”