Mediating Inner-City Chicago’s Violence

Mediating Inner-City Chicago’s Violence

L. Quart: Gang Intervention

CHICAGO MAY be the city of Barack Obama, the Magnificent Mile, the Chicago Art Institute, and Lake Michigan, but it’s also a city riven by gang violence. In 2009, among the nation’s ten largest cities, only Philadelphia had higher rates of murder and violent crime than Chicago. Much of the violence either is gang related or, perhaps more frequently, is motivated by revenge, with young men killing others based on real or imagined insults to themselves, family members, and girlfriends.

The Interrupters takes up the theme of street violence in Chicago. Director Steve James’ and producer/journalist Alex Kotlowitz’s new documentary is a lengthy, thorough, interview-based documentary, shot over fourteen months. Though it displays few signs of stylistic virtuosity, the movie feels authentic and solid. The Interrupters centers on the members of Ceasefire, an activist organization composed mostly of black and Latino ex-cons and ex-gang members. These activists are shaped by the street, and their goals aren’t grand ones. Ceasefire’s members make no attempt to take apart the city’s entire gang culture or interrupt the drug trade. Instead, they try to physically insert themselves in street fights and angry arguments, before that decisive moment when someone reaches for a gun. They try to do this without denying that some of the anger they encounter may be justified.

Ceasefire was founded by an epidemiologist, Gary Slutkin, who holds that violence mimics infections like AIDS. To deal with it, you must go after the most infected and stop the disease at the source. Slutkin is, of course, aware of the long-term social problems that face inner-city communities—poverty, family breakdown, drugs, inadequate education—but believes that one must deal with a present in which violence permeates the streets, and change the behavior that is its immediate cause.

The film’s prime focus in not on the dynamics of the organization, but on three of the interrupters—all of them with violent pasts and a profound commitment to their new vocation. The anomie of the world they enter will be familiar to anybody who has seen The Wire, Fred Wiseman’s documentaries like Public Housing, and countless television specials and second-rate genre films dealing with the inner city. The young men and women who appear in the film are usually without fathers, and a number of them deal drugs, carry guns, and are obsessed with being “respected.” It’s a “rough journey,” dominated by physical and emotional abuse, for anyone growing up in neighborhoods where violence is unending, and death—and the tearful funeral services that always follow—seems to be the only possible conclusion.

The three interrupters are all complicated, articulate, self-aware individuals, who demonstrate yet again that people can rise from a murderously fragmented environment to lead coherent and socially dedicated lives. The most arresting of the three and, in the words of the group’s director Tio Hardiman, Ceasfire’s “golden girl,” is Ameena Matthews. She is a one-time enforcer for a city drug ring and the daughter of notorious 1970s Chicago gang leader Jeff Fort, who is in prison. Ameena is now a Muslim and married to an imam, and she is charismatic, relentless, seeing, and empathetic, a woman who stirs the heart of both the movie audience and the people she deals with, such as gangbangers at a funeral home. People instantly take to her warmth and hard-won maternal wisdom. For Ameena, being soft is never the same as being weak.

The second is Cobe Williams, a man whose father was murdered and who has had three stints in prison for drug related charges and attempted murder. He is also married, and has escaped the inner city to live in a suburb. Cobe is shrewd, sweet, and good-humored, and has the credibility of someone who has been through the same crucible as those he is trying to help. He is also a strong male role model, successfully connecting to the boys and men he encounters.

The third, Eddie Bocanegra, spent fourteen years in prison for a murder he committed at age seventeen. He’s somber, thoughtful, and deeply caring. He teaches art to children, after picking up painting as a form of expression while in prison. In the film we see him offer emotional support to a sixteen-year-old girl whose brother died in her arms, and can sense that Eddie is struggling to redeem himself for his own violent past.

This trio of interrupters tries to prevent violence from breaking out and to help wayward individuals get back on the right track. Memorable scenes create a sense of hope amid the general bleakness. In one, Cobe brings seventeen-year-old Li’l Mikey, just out of prison, to the barbershop he robbed at gunpoint three years before. He wants to apologize to the barbers, and to a female customer who was there during the robbery. At first, she recoils from him, recalling the sheer terror she felt, but his willingness to apologize moves her to embrace him. In a subsequent scene, we see Li’L Mikey working at his first job at a daycare center, gently settling young children down for their naps.

Of course, the interrupters’ interventions don’t always work out this well. One murder they couldn’t prevent, caught on a horrific video in the film, shows the killing of an innocent bystander, Derrion Albert, in a high-school brawl between rival groups. In another scene, Ameena befriends Caprecha, a sullen, self-destructive eighteen-year-old who has just spent two years in jail. Ameena sees some of her younger self in Caprecha, and offers her motherly affection and direction. But Caprecha is hard to reach—she lies, manipulates, and has little self-control. Ameena is deeply pained by Capecha’s rejection, but she doggedly keeps on trying to get to her. At the film’s conclusion, Capecha is back in jail for breaking parole, but she and Ameena have reconciled. But it’s clear that the road ahead for Caprecha still looks extremely difficult.

The Interrupters captures an ethos of the inner city that we’ve seen before. But Steve James has made the film with consummate honesty; one senses nothing theatrical or artificial on screen. James has a gift for getting his trio of interrupters, and (more astonishingly) the people they are helping, to talk intimately about their lives. He clearly is at ease in the milieu he depicts.

We know that Ceasefire has had an impact in the neighborhoods that its members work in. But the film doesn’t promote the group as a panacea for the violence of the inner city. It is an organization with limited goals that can make life more bearable for people who inhabit this virulent environment. The Interrupters never flees from the fact that these are hard places in which to grow up, and which ultimately need much more than courageous people trying to stem the violent tide.

Leonard Quart is the coauthor of the fourth edition of American Film and Society Since 1945 and is a contributing editor of Cineaste.