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Here's an extensive but worthwhile article in the NY Times magazine regarding the efforts of a Chicago-based organization called CeaseFire set up to address that city's violent crime - the model has since been adopted by other US cities.
The organization was set up by an epidemiologist who sees parallels between infectious diseases and endemic violence.
CeaseFire sounds somewhat akin to the PMI but with interesting and different approaches - maybe PMI could link with them for some technical help??
Anyone have any connections there?
Blocking the Transmission of Violence
By ALEX KOTLOWITZ
Published: May 4, 2008
LAST SUMMER, MARTIN TORRES WAS WORKING AS A COOK IN AUSTIN, Tex., when, on the morning of Aug. 23, he received a call from a relative. His 17-year-old nephew, Emilio, had been murdered. According to the police, Emilio was walking down a street on Chicago’s South Side when someone shot him in the chest, possibly the culmination of an ongoing dispute. Like many killings, Emilio’s received just a few sentences in the local newspapers. Torres, who was especially close to his nephew, got on the first Greyhound bus to Chicago. He was grieving and plotting retribution. “I thought, Man, I’m going to take care of business,” he told me recently. “That’s how I live. I was going hunting. This is my own blood, my nephew.”
THE VISIONARY: Gary Slutkin saw a connection between violence and disease.
Torres, who is 38, grew up in a dicey section of Chicago, and even by the standards of his neighborhood he was a rough character. His nickname was Packman, because he was known to always pack a gun. He was first shot when he was 12, in the legs with buckshot by members of a rival gang. He was shot five more times, including once through the jaw, another time in his right shoulder and the last time — seven years ago — in his right thigh, with a .38-caliber bullet that is still lodged there. On his chest, he has tattooed a tombstone with the name “Buff” at its center, a tribute to a friend who was killed on his 18th birthday. Torres was the head of a small Hispanic gang, and though he is no longer active, he still wears two silver studs in his left ear, a sign of his affiliation.
When he arrived in Chicago, he began to ask around, and within a day believed he had figured out who killed his nephew. He also began drinking a lot — mostly Hennessey cognac. He borrowed two guns, a .38 and a .380, from guys he knew. He would, he thought, wait until after the funeral to track down his nephew’s assailants.
Zale Hoddenbach looks like an ex-military man. He wears his hair cropped and has a trimmed goatee that highlights his angular jaw. He often wears T-shirts that fit tightly around his muscled arms, though he also carries a slight paunch. When he was younger, Hoddenbach, who is also 38, belonged to a gang that was under the same umbrella as Torres’s, and so when the two men first met 17 years ago at Pontiac Correctional Center, an Illinois maximum-security prison, they became friendly. Hoddenbach was serving time for armed violence; Torres for possession of a stolen car and a gun (he was, he says, on his way to make a hit). “Zale was always in segregation, in the hole for fights,” Torres told me. “He was aggressive.” In one scuffle, Hoddenbach lost the sight in his right eye after an inmate pierced it with a shank. Torres and Hoddenbach were at Pontiac together for about a year but quickly lost touch after they were both released.
Shortly after Torres arrived in Chicago last summer, Hoddenbach received a phone call from Torres’s brother, the father of the young man who was murdered. He was worried that Torres was preparing to seek revenge and hoped that Hoddenbach would speak with him. When Hoddenbach called, Torres was thrilled. He immediately thought that his old prison buddy was going to join him in his search for the killer. But instead Hoddenbach tried to talk him down, telling him retribution wasn’t what his brother wanted. “I didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about,” Torres told me when I talked to him six months later. “This didn’t seem like the person I knew.” The next day Hoddenbach appeared at the wake, which was held at New Life Community Church, housed in a low-slung former factory. He spent the day by Torres’s side, sitting with him, talking to him, urging him to respect his brother’s wishes. When Torres went to the parking lot for a smoke, his hands shaking from agitation, Hoddenbach would follow. “Because of our relationship, I thought there was a chance,” Hoddenbach told me. “We were both cut from the same cloth.” Hoddenbach knew from experience that the longer he could delay Torres from heading out, the more chance he’d have of keeping him from shooting someone. So he let him vent for a few hours. Then Hoddenbach started laying into him with every argument he could think of: Look around, do you see any old guys here? I never seen so many young kids at a funeral. Look at these kids, what does the future hold for them? Where do we fit in? Who are you to step on your brother’s wishes?
THE STUBBORN CORE of violence in American cities is troubling and perplexing. Even as homicide rates have declined across the country — in some places, like New York, by a remarkable amount — gunplay continues to plague economically struggling minority communities. For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland. Just two weekends ago in Chicago, with the first warm weather, 36 people were shot, 7 of them fatally. The Chicago Sun-Times called it the “weekend of rage.” Many killings are attributed to gang conflicts and are confined to particular neighborhoods. In Chicago, where on average five people were shot each day last year, 83 percent of the assaults were concentrated in half the police districts. So for people living outside those neighborhoods, the frequent outbursts of unrestrained anger have been easy to ignore. But each shooting, each murder, leaves a devastating legacy, and a growing school of thought suggests that there’s little we can do about the entrenched urban poverty if the relentless pattern of street violence isn’t somehow broken.
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Article link:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/ma...4health-t.html
CeaseFire: http://www.ceasefirechicago.org/
The organization was set up by an epidemiologist who sees parallels between infectious diseases and endemic violence.
CeaseFire sounds somewhat akin to the PMI but with interesting and different approaches - maybe PMI could link with them for some technical help??
Anyone have any connections there?
Blocking the Transmission of Violence
By ALEX KOTLOWITZ
Published: May 4, 2008
LAST SUMMER, MARTIN TORRES WAS WORKING AS A COOK IN AUSTIN, Tex., when, on the morning of Aug. 23, he received a call from a relative. His 17-year-old nephew, Emilio, had been murdered. According to the police, Emilio was walking down a street on Chicago’s South Side when someone shot him in the chest, possibly the culmination of an ongoing dispute. Like many killings, Emilio’s received just a few sentences in the local newspapers. Torres, who was especially close to his nephew, got on the first Greyhound bus to Chicago. He was grieving and plotting retribution. “I thought, Man, I’m going to take care of business,” he told me recently. “That’s how I live. I was going hunting. This is my own blood, my nephew.”
THE VISIONARY: Gary Slutkin saw a connection between violence and disease.
Torres, who is 38, grew up in a dicey section of Chicago, and even by the standards of his neighborhood he was a rough character. His nickname was Packman, because he was known to always pack a gun. He was first shot when he was 12, in the legs with buckshot by members of a rival gang. He was shot five more times, including once through the jaw, another time in his right shoulder and the last time — seven years ago — in his right thigh, with a .38-caliber bullet that is still lodged there. On his chest, he has tattooed a tombstone with the name “Buff” at its center, a tribute to a friend who was killed on his 18th birthday. Torres was the head of a small Hispanic gang, and though he is no longer active, he still wears two silver studs in his left ear, a sign of his affiliation.
When he arrived in Chicago, he began to ask around, and within a day believed he had figured out who killed his nephew. He also began drinking a lot — mostly Hennessey cognac. He borrowed two guns, a .38 and a .380, from guys he knew. He would, he thought, wait until after the funeral to track down his nephew’s assailants.
Zale Hoddenbach looks like an ex-military man. He wears his hair cropped and has a trimmed goatee that highlights his angular jaw. He often wears T-shirts that fit tightly around his muscled arms, though he also carries a slight paunch. When he was younger, Hoddenbach, who is also 38, belonged to a gang that was under the same umbrella as Torres’s, and so when the two men first met 17 years ago at Pontiac Correctional Center, an Illinois maximum-security prison, they became friendly. Hoddenbach was serving time for armed violence; Torres for possession of a stolen car and a gun (he was, he says, on his way to make a hit). “Zale was always in segregation, in the hole for fights,” Torres told me. “He was aggressive.” In one scuffle, Hoddenbach lost the sight in his right eye after an inmate pierced it with a shank. Torres and Hoddenbach were at Pontiac together for about a year but quickly lost touch after they were both released.
Shortly after Torres arrived in Chicago last summer, Hoddenbach received a phone call from Torres’s brother, the father of the young man who was murdered. He was worried that Torres was preparing to seek revenge and hoped that Hoddenbach would speak with him. When Hoddenbach called, Torres was thrilled. He immediately thought that his old prison buddy was going to join him in his search for the killer. But instead Hoddenbach tried to talk him down, telling him retribution wasn’t what his brother wanted. “I didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about,” Torres told me when I talked to him six months later. “This didn’t seem like the person I knew.” The next day Hoddenbach appeared at the wake, which was held at New Life Community Church, housed in a low-slung former factory. He spent the day by Torres’s side, sitting with him, talking to him, urging him to respect his brother’s wishes. When Torres went to the parking lot for a smoke, his hands shaking from agitation, Hoddenbach would follow. “Because of our relationship, I thought there was a chance,” Hoddenbach told me. “We were both cut from the same cloth.” Hoddenbach knew from experience that the longer he could delay Torres from heading out, the more chance he’d have of keeping him from shooting someone. So he let him vent for a few hours. Then Hoddenbach started laying into him with every argument he could think of: Look around, do you see any old guys here? I never seen so many young kids at a funeral. Look at these kids, what does the future hold for them? Where do we fit in? Who are you to step on your brother’s wishes?
THE STUBBORN CORE of violence in American cities is troubling and perplexing. Even as homicide rates have declined across the country — in some places, like New York, by a remarkable amount — gunplay continues to plague economically struggling minority communities. For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland. Just two weekends ago in Chicago, with the first warm weather, 36 people were shot, 7 of them fatally. The Chicago Sun-Times called it the “weekend of rage.” Many killings are attributed to gang conflicts and are confined to particular neighborhoods. In Chicago, where on average five people were shot each day last year, 83 percent of the assaults were concentrated in half the police districts. So for people living outside those neighborhoods, the frequent outbursts of unrestrained anger have been easy to ignore. But each shooting, each murder, leaves a devastating legacy, and a growing school of thought suggests that there’s little we can do about the entrenched urban poverty if the relentless pattern of street violence isn’t somehow broken.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NEXT PAGE »
Article link:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/ma...4health-t.html
CeaseFire: http://www.ceasefirechicago.org/
