On the Scene: The McCormick Foundation Blog

Amidst the continual backdrop of COVID-19, Chicago’s plague of gun violence has raged on, and over several weekends spiked higher than previous years. Almost no other group is seeing the broad effects of these events more than the outreach workers of Communities Partnering 4 Peace, or CP4P, a city-wide collaborative of community-based organizations whose outreach teams are trained to prevent and intervene in violence using restorative de-escalation tactics. Coordinated by Metropolitan Family Services, the teams are in communities most impacted by violence. “When COVID-19 was on the rise in Chicago in early March, we saw our situation go from bad to worse,” said Vaughn Bryant, CP4P’s executive director. “Our teams were beginning to experience additional sadness, frustration, and anger as they themselves were having to deal with the virus while still managing to do their jobs to help curb shootings.” The outreach teams acted quickly and were prepared with the necessary PPE to maint...

Opened in August 2017 in the North Lawndale community, the first ever Restorative Justice Community Court (RJCC) is an innovative collaboration between community-based service providers and the Circuit Court of Cook County. It aims to address the vicious cycle of mutually reinforcing problems: mass incarceration, crime and community violence, mistrust between the community and the criminal justice system, and the mismatch between the adult justice system and the developmental capacities and needs of emerging adults. Research has shown that this population is less future oriented, more susceptible to peer influence and risk-taking and more volatile in emotionally charged settings especially if they suffered childhood trauma. The Court takes this distinct stage of life into account by applying restorative practices to address root causes of behavior while also focusing on accountability for wrong doing through open dialogue between the victim, perpetrator and the community through peac...

by Anna LauBach, Director of Special Initiatives Patrick Sharkey, in his book An Uneasy Peace argues that Stop and Frisk policies did much to damage if not ruin any trusting relationship between police and the communities most impacted by violence. Stop and Frisk is the practice by which an individual can be stopped by the police if the officer has reason to suspect a crime has been or is about to be committed, and then frisked if there is suspicion he/she is carrying a weapon. Before it was ruled unconstitutional in 2013, Stop and Frisk was disproportionately carried out in black and brown neighborhoods where citizens, especially young men, suffered dire consequences. Data from New York City show that at the height of Stop and Frisk in 2011, over 685,000 people were stopped by the police, 88 percent of whom were completely innocent, 53 percent were African American, 34 percent were Latinx, and 9 percent were white. As is becoming more widely acknowledged, violent crime in the c...