Last week I watched The Interrupters,on BBC4. This is a film about the Ceasefire movement in Chicago which treats violence in the same way as an infectious disease. I referenced it in this blog that reflected on the London riots last summer, and quoted its epidemiologist founder Gary Slutkin. Slutkin appears in the movie where, to paraphrase him, with this kind of street violence, you condemn the behaviour not the person. This echos health interventions and attempts to isolate the infection at the start to prevent violence overflowing and cascading. The means of interrupting violence is by using community workers with street credibility. This is where the film brought the process graphically to life. It followed the story of three interrupters, Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams and Eddie Bocanegra. Ameena is a gangleader's daughter ands ex-drug ring enforcer. Turning back on this life and drawing on her Muslim faith, Ameena is a formidable woman who intervenes in street confrontations. Cobe and Eddie are shown mentoring individuals and working with children, and seeing them at work, it hard to believe their previous criminal pasts, including in Bocanegra's case, fourteen years for murder.
The film brings the difficulties of this approach home. It is hard to see public agencies funding something that puts these individuals at risk. For instance another of the Ceasefire people gets stabbed and in hospital. Yet Slutkin is surely on to something. Reading much of the recent study of the riots conducted by the LSE, a constant theme is how participants in the riots used a grievance to justify violent responses. This shows how important it is to address a potential flashpoint quickly and seal it off, as manifestly did not happen in Tottenham, and to stop the sense of grievance leapfrogging off into altercations that have nothing to do with the original grievance.
What the film also showed was the mess these communities in Chicago were in when the film was made. Prison time seems a normal part of life, and there seems little chance of a positive way out. There are places in London that look alarmingly similar. Inequalities plus increasing worklessness can diminish life opportunities to such as extent that violence and crime become endemic. The Interrupters is an impressive story of how to mimimise and isolate violence, but you really want to avoid the problem that needs this intervention. Definitely worth catching the film if you can.
Secretary to the Professor of Psychiatry
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