Collection 4: "Blocking the Transmission of Violence" by Alex Kotlowitz

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.

He was grieving and plotting retribution. “I thought, Man, I’m going to take care of business,” he told me recently.

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.

Torres was the head of a small Hispanic gang, and though he is no longer active, he still wears two silver studs in his left ear, a sign of his affiliation.

Hoddenbach’s job is to suss out smoldering disputes and to intervene before matters get out of hand.

Every Wednesday afternoon, in a Spartan room on the 10th floor of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s public-health building, 15 to 25 men—and two women—all violence interrupters, sit around tables arranged in a circle and ruminate on the rage percolating in the city.

Every Wednesday afternoon, in a Spartan room on the 10th floor of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s public-health building, 15 to 25 men—and two women—all violence interrupters, sit around tables arranged in a circle and ruminate on the rage percolating in the city.

Every Wednesday afternoon, in a Spartan room on the 10th floor of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s public-health building, 15 to 25 men—and two women—all violence interrupters, sit around tables arranged in a circle and ruminate on the rage percolating in the city.

All of them are black or Hispanic and in one manner or another have themselves been privy to, if not participants in, the brutality of the streets.

In each of them, the interrupters had stepped in to try to keep one act of enmity from spiraling into another.

With an influx of new refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, the number of cases in the city had nearly doubled.

One of Slutkin’s colleagues, Tio Hardiman, brought up an uncomfortable truth: the program wasn’t reaching the most bellicose, those most likely to pull a trigger.

But he was also active in a Hispanic street gang and was known for his unmitigated aggression.

CeaseFire training material has been made available to the provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq.

Could the same be true in our inner cities, where the ubiquity of guns and gunplay pushes businesses and residents out and leaves behind those who can’t leave, the most impoverished?