Globe Newspapers

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Volume 6
Issue 15
June 24 - 30, 2009

Breaking News

What’s working: CeaseFire

By Globe Staff

The CeaseFire model developed in Chicago and Boston has been implemented in several jurisdictions, with some variations to the program but based on the same original design. When the violence prevention program was instituted initially in the two cities, the results were near miraculous.

CeaseFire works with community-based organizations and focuses on street-level outreach, conflict mediation and the changing of community norms to reduce violence, particularly shootings. CeaseFire relies on highly trained outreach workers and violence interrupters, faith leaders and other community leaders to intervene in conflicts, or potential conflicts, and to promote alternatives to violence. CeaseFire also involves cooperation with police and it depends heavily on a strong public education campaign to instill in people the message that shootings and violence are not acceptable. Finally, it calls for the strengthening of communities so they have the capacity to exercise informal social control and to mobilize forces — from businesses to faith leaders, residents and others — so they all work in concert to reverse the epidemic of violence that has been with us for too long.

These activities are organized into CeaseFire’s five core components, which address both the community and those individuals who are most at risk of involvement in a shooting or killing. The five components are: street-level outreach, public education, community mobilization, faith leader involvement and police participation

In Chicago, the CeaseFire program is managed by the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention. Formed in 1995, the Chicago Project takes a strategic public health approach to violence prevention. This approach has been employed to address and reduce other serious health threats, such as child mortality, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, smallpox and polio. It includes a full commitment to a specific objective (in this case stopping shootings); the setting of long-term and short-term goals; strategy development based on best practices and adapted to the local situation by local practitioners; and a management structure that works at both the community and city/county levels. The public health approach relies heavily on public education to change attitudes and behaviors toward violence, outreach using individuals recruited from the target population, community involvement to change norms, and evaluation methods to monitor strategy.

The Chicago Project has formed partnerships with community-based organizations to develop comprehensive strategic plans for reducing violence. An advisory board and steering committee, comprised of criminal justice, health, religious and civic leaders, provide support for strategy development and leverage city and county resources for the project and its partners.

To accomplish its mission of preventing violence, the Chicago Project initially developed a plan and built an organizational structure to provide technical assistance and support for a comprehensive and community-based effort to reduce and prevent violence.

Eventually, through discussions with community partners, crime experts and representatives from a cross-section of government agencies, the project’s steering committee developed an eight-point plan for reducing violence. CeaseFire, which emerged after five years of development and field testing of various pieces of a violence reduction strategy, brings to life key elements of the plan. Its focus is street violence, particularly shootings and killings.

CeaseFire was adapted from the best violence reduction work of several cities — notably Boston, which had extraordinary successes in the 1990s — and the best research of public health of the last several decades. After reviewing gang violence reduction projects initiated and evaluated by the U.S. Department of Justice and lessons emerging from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, the Chicago Project added the community and public education components to its violence reduction initiative.

After a year of needs assessment, planning and building collaborative relationships at the local level, CeaseFire was formally launched in early 2000. Shootings in the police beat CeaseFire focused on dropped by 67 percent during the first year.

By the beginning of 2006, CeaseFire was either established or in the process of being implemented in 15 neighborhoods in Chicago and at sites in five other cities in Illinois.