It was an impressive result, but homicide rates were falling all over the country, and other models of violence reduction were also seeing success. One was the “focussed deterrence” model, pioneered by David Kennedy, in Boston, which included group interventions, wherein teams of prosecutors, police officers, and respected community figures met with young men deemed most likely to commit violent crimes and offered them social services , coupled with the threat of consequences if they are involved in further violence.
But Slutkin’s model—eventually called Cure Violence—got enough credit for reduced shootings that other cities began deploying interrupters, often hiring Cure Violence to train and guide them. Many city governments were concerned with hiring people with serious criminal records, and programs were often run by non-profit groups that had looser restrictions.
When Baltimore launched Safe Streets, in 2007, its homicide rate was among the highest in the country. Dante Barksdale, a charismatic native of East Baltimore in his early thirties, helped lead the effort almost from the start. “I was tired of getting locked up, of getting robbed by the police, of having to keep an eye out at all times,” Barksdale later wrote of his attraction to the program. “I wanted a regular job. And it seemed the universe had one in mind for me. My reputation as a hustler would help the Safe Streets mission more than any amount of training could.”
Safe Streets put its first team in McElderry Park, on the east side. Barksdale, who was better known by his nickname, Tater, became a champion for the program as it expanded into three more neighborhoods in the next few years, a period during which homicides began falling sharply in Baltimore for the first time in decades. He joined Cure Violence staff from Chicago for training sessions around the country. Cobe Williams, Cure Violence’s training director, would drive around the Chicago housing projects with Barksdale. “That’s my guy,” Williams told people. “He is so committed to stopping the violence.”
Like many interrupters, Corey Winfield found it hard to avoid sliding back into illegal activity. By 2011, he was selling drugs on the side to supplement his Safe Streets wage, thirteen dollars an hour, with which he was supporting two daughters. His aunt Ruth chided him. Winfield told me, “She said, ‘Listen, you’re doing God’s work. You can’t do God’s work and still do the Devil’s work. God’s going to punish you.’ ” Two months later, he was arrested after giving a ride to a friend who was on the way to a robbery, and sentenced to five years’ probation.
Winfield found it challenging to strike the balance demanded of a “credible messenger”—using the reputation gained from past brushes with the law to earn the trust of those who were still entrenched in the streets while avoiding such behavior himself. Sometimes, he told me, he was ostracized by friends who saw him wearing an orange Safe Streets T-shirt. “When I first put this shirt on, the whole city knew, and it was hard, but I didn’t take it off,” he said. “I would go up, like, ‘Yo, what’s up,’ and you walk away. I’m usually in, but now you all walk away, you leave. It’s hard on me.”
Since the death of Freddie Gray, in 2015, the murder in Baltimore has been soared.
Winfield left the program for a few years, and worked with an organization that served runaway youths. Then, in April, 2015, a twenty-five-year-old man from West Baltimore named Freddie Gray died from sustained injuries while in police custody. Protests and rioting ensued, and gun violence in the city increased dramatically. The circumstances foreshadowed those in 2020: a surge in homicides that followed a death at police hands and a collapse in police-community trust, which led to changes in police behavior, and calls for non-police approaches to public safety. Amid the spike in violence, Corey Winfield decided to rejoin Safe Streets.
In his absence, Safe Streets had continued to struggle with the problem of workers falling back into crime: a site in West Baltimore had been suspended in 2013 after two of its workers were arrested, and in July, 2015, an East Baltimore office closed after police found drugs and seven guns there and arrested two workers. But the program retained enough support that, in 2018, the major at the time, Catherine Pugh, who had moved control of the program from the health department to city hall’s public-safety office, expanded it from four sites to ten.
On Martin Luther King Day in 2018, I was in an East Baltimore church as Winfield told an audience drawn from several local congregations how violence interruption worked. Big Corey, as he is known, is six feet three inches tall and weighs two hundred and eighty pounds, and his size is matched by a bright-eyed, magnetic charm. He sketched out a typical scenario: “Anita calls me and says, ‘Corey, my brother, I heard him talking, and they’re going to kill Lisa’s brother. Him and his buddies. ‘Cause Lisa’s brother got out of work at three in the morning and they’re going to get him.’ So I say, ‘OK,’ so I’m gonna get up at two-thirty and I’m gonna be out there so that when Anita’s brother jumps out on Lisa’s brother they’re going to see me. ‘Oh, it’s three in the morning. We ain’t doing this, right?’ ”
Winfield continued, “Now, we know for a fact that three o’clock in the morning the police won’t be around. The police don’t mean a damn thing when somebody is coming to get killed. But somebody coming with guns, if they see methat level of respect is high.
“But once that respect leaves,” he added, alluding to his perceived independence from the police, “I’ll be lying beside Lisa’s brother. We cannot lose that, because that’s all we have. That makes us, the effectiveness we have.”
That year, a different model of community violence intervention emerged. In Massachusetts, an organization called Roca, which had worked for years with high-risk young adults in gritty places like Chelsea, Lynn, and Springfield, was trying a new approach, using behavioral-theory techniques to help participants control their emotions.
The approach tapped into a new neuroscientific understanding of how trauma and harsh circumstances can keep people operating in survival mode—in their “bottom brain.” Roca believed that participants needed to acquire basic emotional self-regulation before they could advance to job training and other forms of support. “What we know is changing behavior is people feeling safe, being able to manage their emotions and start to heal their trauma,” Molly Baldwin, Roca’s founder, said. Instead of mediating conflicts, as Cure Violence does, Roca was seeking to make young people less likely to be drawn into conflict in the first place.
The approach gained traction in Chicago, under the leadership of Eddie Bocanegra. Like Corey Winfield, Bocanegra had committed a murder; in 1994, at the age of eighteen, he had avenged the shooting of two members of a gang he belonged to. He served nearly fifteen years in prison; after his release, he joined Cure Violence. In 2011, he was among a handful of workers featured in “The Interrupters,” a documentary film about the organization. Bocanegra, a slightly built man with a goatee, stands out in the film for his soft-spoken, cerebral bearing. One scene shows him doing good deeds, like delivering flowers, on the anniversary of the murder he’d committed. “I’ve thought of hopefully one day going to my victim’s family and really just expressing to them how deeply sorry I am,” he said. “It’s just that, right now, I don’t think it’s still right.”