October 11, 2011 | The Rev. Tim White once ruled the drug-ravaged streets of his west Chicago neighborhood as the chief of one of the city’s most notorious gangs. Today, he spreads a message of peace at the funerals of people caught in the crossfire.

“There are a lot of mixed emotions at a funeral,” said White, who was serving a 10-year drug conspiracy sentence when he accepted Christ. Now, he’s often called to officiate at funerals of young people who have been killed in gang warfare. The soft-spoken junior pastor said, “It’s a good time for them to hear a different perspective. They usually just can’t believe it’s from me.”

White is one of more than 350 street-savvy ex-offenders hired as “violence interrupters” by CeaseFire,  an organization that uses a public health approach to stopping the spread of violence.

CeaseFire, housed in the University of Illinois-Chicago’s School of Public Health and funded by $5.7 million in government and private grants, is successfully reducing gun-related deaths in Chicago by employing ex-offenders like White to “interrupt” violence and prevent it before it happens rather than punishing perpetrators after the fact.

CeaseFire gained recognition in the critically acclaimed documentary “The Interrupters,” released during the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and was cited by social scientists Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe in their 2010 book, “Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing.”

But the greatest measure of success is in the numbers. In 2010, Chicago’s homicide rate was lower than it had been in 40 years. A Department of Justice-funded report by Northwestern University Professor Wes Skogan credits CeaseFire for helping turn the tide.

CeaseFire founder Dr. Gary Slutkin believes that violence can be eliminated not just in his hometown of Chicago but around the world within two generations.

“We have to first stop the thought that violence is an appropriate response. Then we have a chance to help people change their behavior,” Slutkin said, adding that America’s punitive approach is clearly not effecting change, nor is the message from the pulpit that people who do bad things are bad people.

“We put [people] in a category,” Slutkin said, “and we can’t think of it differently.”

An epidemic of violence

Slutkin is thinking about violence differently. To him, it has all the characteristics of an epidemic.

From the days of Al Capone and John Dillinger, Chicago has always been notorious as a violent city. In 2008, Chicago had 506 homicides, and an estimated 80 percent of those were gun-related deaths. This was a higher death toll than the 314 Americans killed that year in the war in Iraq. In 2010, there were more than 430 homicides in Chicago.

But violence is not inevitable. The key is to look at the problem in a new way and to employ new solutions, Slutkin said.

Instead of framing the conversation around moral notions of good and bad, Slutkin views violence as a disease, to be combated through a scientific approach. He is an epidemiologist who has spent most of his career working to address epidemics like cholera and AIDS for the World Health Organization in the developing world.

He points out that major infectious diseases and violence -- including war -- are the two mass killers of humankind. He sees many parallels between the major disease epidemics of the past and the “epidemic” of violence, and he is determined to apply the tools that were successful in combating the first category to conquering the second one.

When he began to see violence as a disease -- a public health problem -- he created a response based on the idea that violence can be isolated and treated.

The key components of this infectious-disease approach are stopping transmission from individuals who are infected, identifying others who have the potential to spread the disease, and changing group norms so that dangerous behavior is no longer accepted.

Having used sex workers in Africa to help end the spread of AIDS, Slutkin saw the wisdom in employing street-savvy advocates to help stop the transmission of violence. Just as sex workers taught customers and friends about the benefits of using condoms and the consequences of unprotected sex, streetwise peer-mediators could help people with violent tendencies adopt healthier behaviors and safer lifestyles.

Slutkin established CeaseFire as a community-based outreach program in Chicago’s most dangerous neighborhoods in 2000, and since then the model has been refined and then replicated in 18 urban areas around the country.

Back on the street

Violence interrupters such as White are used in the first step of the process. As a medicine or vaccine might be employed to stop the transmission of an infectious disease, violence interrupters intervene to stop violent or potentially violent events from spreading.

Not long after White began working as a violence interrupter, for example, a man dropped $70 at a carwash. Another man was seen picking up the money, and a third called White, knowing that a dispute about even that small amount of money could turn deadly. The man who had dropped his money was spreading the word that he was going to get it back, “whatever it took.”