While gun violence has steadily declined all across America over the last four years, Chicago has the second-largest drop among the 10 largest cities and will likely end this year with the fewest number of homicides since 1965. Since 2021, we have cut in half the number of homicides from around 800 to 400. Over the same period, the total number of shootings has dropped from more than 4,400 to under 2,000.
The decline in gun violence in our city is a great story we can all celebrate, but a related and important story is that arrests are also down compared to the previous decade. In fact, the annual number of arrests dropped from more than 90,000 in 2019 to about 53,000 today.
The logical conclusion to draw from these two trends is that many high-risk individuals for whom gun violence was an everyday fact of life are putting down their guns and choosing to live more safely. These changes in behavior point to the positive impact of the men and women working in the field of community violence intervention (CVI).
Today, a network of more than two dozen CVI organizations serve nearly half of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods. Collectively, we enroll or employ several thousand people, many of whom have been in jail or prison, representing one of the largest reentry programs in the entire country. Neighborhoods where CVI is most active, including Austin, North Lawndale, Little Village and Englewood, have some of the largest declines in gun violence in the city.
A large body of research from the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research and Science (Corners) at Northwestern University affirms the positive impact of our programs among our participants. One study found that those who complete our program are 73% less likely to be rearrested. Another study attributes a 41% drop in shootings at the city’s most dangerous locations to the state-funded Peacekeepers Program which is administered through CVI organizations and uses participants to mediate conflicts and deter gun violence. A third study estimates that a consortium of CVI organizations known as Communities Partnering 4 Peace prevented nearly 400 shootings and 600 arrests between 2018 and 2023. In 2016, several local foundations formed the Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities (PSPC) and began investing in CVI. Since then, the partnership has invested about $215 million for CVI and adjacent community-building initiatives.
The business community, through the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club, joined with PSPC and other donors to raise more than $100 million for a bold strategy called Scaling Community Violence for a Safer Chicago (SC2). Under SC2, we are testing the theory that CVI “at scale” can not only make individuals safer but can drive down violence in whole communities. The program is just getting started, but the progress, so far, is promising.
The public sector has also stepped up. The state of Illinois has invested several hundred million dollars in CVI and adopted our approach in other cities across the state. Cook County has been a reliable funding partner and has now expanded CVI into the suburbs. The city of Chicago has also invested in CVI, although we hope the city does more in the years ahead because the city has the most to gain. Every shooting avoided not only spares victims loss of life and extreme trauma, but also reduces policing, criminal justice and health care costs, while generating new economic activity as neighborhoods get safer . Over time, the return on investment in CVI will be billions of dollars.
We are also grateful to Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling, who has embraced CVI as a crucial piece of Chicago’s public safety strategy. There is growing awareness, in Snelling’s own words growing awareness, in Snelling’s own words, that police “can’t do it alone.” As another former police chief, Charlie Beck, said about CVI: “My job is the last homicide. Your job is stopping the next homicide.”
We still have a long way to go. Our per-capita homicide rate remains about four times higher than New York’s. Recent mass shootings downtown and in the neighborhoods are chilling reminders that, in a world with so many guns, none of us can ever be totally safe. To be on par with the safest cities in America, Chicago must further reduce the number of homicides and shootings by at least half the current levels. For that to happen, CVI must become a permanent, fully funded feature of Chicago’s public safety infrastructure.
As Chicago closes out the year , we are grateful to everyone contributing to the positive trends in our city, from police and elected officials to community, business, foundation and faith leaders. But we especially salute the thousands of CVI participants and employees who have put the street life behind them. They are the solution.