More than 100 people were shot in Chicago over a summer weekend in 2021. One resident, 52-year-old Rick, was among them, and his story might seem like just another shooting in a city wrestling with a gun violence epidemic. But Rick’s injury was distinctive: it stemmed from his everyday heroism as one of Chicago’s more than 200 community violence interventionists.
Street outreach practice dates back nearly 50 years, ebbing and flowing in its political popularity. Advancing outreach as an essential component of so-called community violence interventions has recently gained momentum as the U.S. seeks innovative ways to reduce gun violence without relying on intensive policing and incarceration. Private and public investments in CVI programs have skyrocketed in recent years.
In a unique collaboration between outreach professionals and researchers, we co-designed and conducted a first-of-its-kind survey of nearly all outreach workers in Chicago. As we described in our Science Advances paper, emerging results from this survey are revealing some of the hidden costs of violence prevention work. Frontline violence prevention workers are exposed to violence at alarmingly high levels.
If this rate of on-the-job violence seems high, it is—even for traditional first responders. In 2020 76 Chicago police officers were “shot or shot at” while doing their job—a record high that is still less than 1 percent of the city’s sworn police officers. In that same year about 12 percent of outreach workers in our survey reported being shot at on the job.
What Does It Mean? Now, more than ever, the country needs violence prevention infrastructure—a system of services, professionals and organizations that focus on holistically providing community safety and preventing gun violence. In our effort to “do something” about gun violence, however, we must prioritize the health and safety of workers on the front lines of the U.S.’s gun violence epidemic. Doing so requires two things.