Community Peacekeepers say reducing shootings means confronting poverty, trauma and instability in the neighborhoods most impacted by violence.
Fifteen miles south of the Magnificent Mile, Roseland’s stretch of Michigan Avenue resembles a ghost town. Shuttered businesses line the sidewalks, their windows boarded up, weeds springing from cracks in the pavement at their doorsteps. Their faded storefront signs are the last remaining vestiges of the former South Side shopping district.
Until about 50 years ago, the area rivaled its northern stretch with theaters, department stores and restaurants. Known colloquially as “The Jewel of the South Side,” the street represented economic and cultural prosperity.
The area comes to life on an early April evening as a parade of about two dozen people march down the avenue. Their vests identify them as “Peacekeepers,” though they need no introduction. They’re greeted by community members on the sidewalk and outside homes who shake their hands and strike up conversations. Every few minutes, they chant: “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!”
“This is a way to get in tune with the community, show them you have resources,” said one of the canvassers, Gerald Sprattlin, who goes by Gerald G The Mentor.
Like many others in the group, Sprattlin had a history of street violence, and he’d lost people because of it. Now he wants to play a part in ending it.
An evolving mission
Canvassing walks like this are part of a Community Violence Intervention (CVI) initiative called the Peacekeepers Program that aims to reshape Chicago’s most disinvested areas. Coming from “hotspots” of gun violence themselves, Peacekeepers have been recruited to monitor their neighborhoods, mediate conflict and promote peace.
The program has been heralded by lawmakers including Gov. J.B. Pritzker for the substantial reductions in shootings seen across its focus areas in recent years.
According to program administrators, however, the true aim of the Peacekeepers goes far beyond reducing gun violence.
“This is not about violence anymore,” said Teny Gross, CEO of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago (INVC), a non-profit organization that deploys Peacekeepers on the West Side. “This is about poverty, extreme poverty.”
For Gross and other CVI leaders, this starts with investing in Peacekeepers themselves. By pairing participants with life skills training, mental health supports, and workforce development opportunities, the program attempts to address the instability and poverty that often surround violent crime.
The Peacekeepers Program began in 2018 under the name “Flatlining Violence Inspires Peace” (FLIP). It has since expanded to operate year-round in 27 Chicago community areas under the Reimagine Public Safety Act, an Ill. law passed in 2021 to address gun violence through a public health and community-based approach.
The program built off an intervention model called CureViolence that pioneered the use of “violence interrupters” and community antiviolence outreach in the late 1990s. The idea was to treat gun violence like a public health issue, creating safer streets by interrupting cycles of retaliation.
To do that, organizations recruited people who already understood the conflicts, relationships and pressures driving violence in their neighborhoods.
“Any individual that has been in the street life at one point in time, when it comes down to CVI the truth is they’ve already been to college,” said Cedric Hawkins, who works with the CVI organization Chicago CRED, which stands for “create real economic destiny.”
“The only way we can create real economic destinies—you’ve gotta have real credibility in the streets,” Hawkins said.
Turning negative credibility into change
At 25, Hawkins thought he’d never see life outside prison.
In 2007, he was dealt a life sentence under mandatory minimum laws for drug distribution. Hawkins entered a federal penitentiary just three days after his first daughter was born.
A decade later, he received unexpected news – his sentence had been commuted by President Obama. He was going home.
Still, returning to the community was not easy.
“When I first came home, I was so grateful, but so lost,” Hawkins said. “I was like, ‘What am I gonna do?’”
He worked briefly at a warehouse making $13 per hour, but was later fired because of his criminal record. With few opportunities and little support, the pull of returning to the drug trade was strong.
“I was sitting on the porch everyday just trying to figure out what I was gonna do,” he said, “and Chicago CRED pulled up on me.”
At first, Hawkins turned them away. He didn’t want to compromise what he called his “negative credibility.”
But while Hawkins was behind bars, two of his cousins had been killed in street violence, adding to a long list of family members who had died by the age of 21.
“I knew if I ever did come home I wanted to do something different,” Hawkins said.
When CRED outreach workers returned a few months later, he decided to give the program a chance.
Hawkins quickly found that many of the skills he had developed navigating gang conflicts translated directly into violence intervention work.
”I was already trying to put together peace agreements and non-aggression agreements, not realizing that I’m de-escalating situations, not realizing that I’m helping individuals to be able to regulate themselves,” he said. “Slowly but surely the work helped me to understand what I was doing.”
As a Peacekeeper, Hawkins helped twelve people earn their high school diplomas and directly saved two lives.
“If you can stop two mothers and fathers from crying, I think you did pretty good,” he said.
Hawkins now works a full-time role at Chicago CRED. Among his outreach duties, Hawkins leads canvassing walks like the one in Roseland.
The program may have saved his own life as well.
Without CRED, Hawkins said he likely would have returned to dealing drugs. He believes he’d be dead.
Addressing violence’s root cause cause
Over the past eight years, the Peacekeeper Program has evolved to invest more in its participants so they can echo Hawkins’s success story.
“We went from ‘can you help us with the masses’ to realizing, you’re a participant as well and you have opportunities as well,” said Shunda Collins, vice president of communications for INVC.
“Doing peacekeeping alone ultimately becomes a band-aid because you’re not really addressing the root cause part,” said Vaughn Byrant, executive director of Metropolitan Peace Initiatives (MPI), a nonprofit that oversees ten Peacekeeper implementing partners across 16 Chicago community areas.
According to Bryant, the Peacekeeper Program can help participants build routines and work experience that can translate into long-term employment.
“They get used to showing up for something on a regular basis, they start to learn time management and responsibility,” Bryant said. “Hopefully they see that doing this work can give them some purpose and some contribution to their neighborhood and society and they will take that home with them.”
By 2025, 171 Peacekeepers had transitioned to full time jobs in violence intervention work. Others moved to careers outside CVI with support from organizations like MPI, INVC and CRED, which help participants connect to educational and professional certification opportunities.
DeAndre Durner worked as a Peacekeeper with CRED for roughly a year and a half. During that time he was able to earn his high school diploma—fifteen years after he was originally supposed to graduate. He now works at a nursing home.
Durner said that without CRED he’d likely be “still out here, doing the wrong sh*t.” Now, he hopes to see a positive change in other young people so they can avoid the same path.
“I know I can probably try to help more people,” Durner said. “It starts home first.”
Many Peacekeeper organizations have also incorporated mental health programming into their work. INVC places Peacekeepers in a 12-week Cognitive Behavioral Intervention (CBI) course designed to help Peacekeepers better understand and regulate their thoughts and actions.
“It’s about really assessing what damage has been done on this community,” said Gross, adding that he had seen Peacekeepers leave earlier versions of the program still struggling with trauma and feelings of guilt.
“They [participants] grew up in a certain context,” he said. “Their behavior is a totally perfect adaptation to the environment they are in. Now we give them tools to start understanding their context.”
“We came up broke”
For Hawkins, the roots of violence are inseparable from poverty.
“We come up in poverty, we come up broke,” he said. “We don’t have no housing, we don’t have food, we come up from eating sugar sandwiches or syrup sandwiches. When you grow up like that, you are now a person that only knows survival.”
In Chicago, economic disparities along race remain stark. According to a 2024 study by the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, the average net wealth of white families in Chicago was roughly $210,000. The average wealth of Black families: $0.
Violence has also remained heavily concentrated in many of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Peacekeepers hope safer streets can create conditions for broader stability and reinvestment.
“We’ve had a 35 percent drop in homicide in a single year,” said Andrew Papachristos, a Professor of Sociology at Northwestern and Faculty Director of Northwestern’s Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research and Science (CORNERS). “We don’t talk about it everyday, and we should.”
Papachristos led a 2025 CORNERS report that found Peacekeeper hotspots saw a 31 percent reduction in shootings over a two year period, while surrounding areas experienced a 41 percent reduction.
Hawkins said he has seen those changes firsthand.
He believes violence has shifted away from large scale conflicts between groups and increasingly toward more personal disputes, which he said Peacekeepers are often able to mediate before they escalate.
Debate over Community Intervention Programs
Despite those reductions, critics argue the program has failed to deliver on its promises.
A critical piece by The Free Press pointed to the growing public cost of CVI programs, which reached $140.5 million in 2026, and argued spending on CVI increased at a rate far exceeding that of the Chicago Police Department (CPD).
In real terms, however, CPD’s budget increase over that same time frame outpaced CVI spending by almost half a billion dollars. The city’s police budget now exceeds $2 billion.
Reducing violence can also produce major cost savings.
Research from the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform shows that a single non-fatal gunshot victim can cost taxpayers more than $300,000 when accounting for medical and judicial expenses. A single homicide can cost up to $1.26 million.
Based on these estimates, decreases in shootings in Peacekeeper Program areas between 2023 and 2024 versus the previous two year period (prior to year-round implementation and program expansion) could have saved the city of Chicago between $600 million to $1.2 billion in public spending.
Critics have also questioned the program’s core strategy of recruiting participants with histories of involvement with street violence and gang affiliation.
Several Peacekeeper arrests generated headlines in recent years, including a 2025 Michigan Avenue robbery that led to the death of a bystander.
The Free Press highlighted this case along with 28 other arrests of Peacekeepers since 2023, arguing that the program was effectively funding a “revolving door” of gang violence.
Gross told TCR that the negative press of a single Peacekeeper arrest can have wide reaching effects on public perception of the program. “For one bad video you need 10 good ones,” he said.
Weighing perceived risks against measurable outcomes
Program administrators argue that risk is unavoidable if they are going to work with the people most vulnerable to becoming involved in violence.
“Society gives us money to take a risk on the highest risk people,” said Gross. “We’re not gonna save everyone. But I also don’t let my team say, ‘this person is not ready.’ ‘This person is not ready’ can produce tonight the 11 o’clock victim.”
According to data from the City of Chicago Data Portal, Peacekeepers actually have relatively low arrest rates. With more than 2,000 Peacekeepers deployed since 2023, those 28 arrests represent an arrest rate of less than 15 per 1,000. This is roughly one fourth the arrest rate of the broader community areas where they work.
Some CVI leaders think the program should take even greater risks by recruiting younger people who are already involved in violence.
“I took all the chances when I was doing negative,” Hawkins said. “When I was out here using weapons and doing stuff like that, I took chances. So I can take the positive chances.”
Recently, the city expanded CVI efforts to reach younger participants. In April, Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order creating a youth Peacekeeper initiative aimed at engaging people aged 18 to 24. According to a press release, the program is intended to give young people “the tools they need to become agents of change within their communities.”
For Hawkins, that work represents the future of violence intervention.
“We look at things and we say, the kids, the youth, they’re the problem,” said Hawkins. “No, the kids and the youth are the solution.”
At 29, Keon Martin is among the youngest members of the Roseland canvassing group.
After being shot himself, he said he wants younger people to see that another future is possible.
“They see what we’re doing and they look at us like, ‘Okay, well you can do it. I’m gonna put my son into it so that he sees somebody who’s trying to make a better way.’ It works.”