In just a few months, President Trump has managed to put at risk years of hard work underway in cities across America to bring down crime, restore trust in the police and expand proven approaches to public safety that can save lives and money. High on Mr. Trump’s list of target cities is my hometown, Chicago, which is currently on track for the lowest number of homicides in any year since 1965.
One factor contributing to the positive trends in Chicago is the growth of community violence intervention programs, or C.V.I. I help lead one of them.
Here’s how it works. With our research partners at Northwestern University, we identify the highest-risk individuals by looking at arrest data and their history of being victimized by gun violence. We also conduct a network analysis of their friends and associates for similar characteristics, and cross-check that with information gathered by our outreach workers on the ground.
Next we hire trusted and respected community members, many with criminal backgrounds, to recruit these individuals into our program. We offer participants stipends, a life coach, trauma treatment, education and job training. Their coaches and therapists teach them strategies to regulate their emotions and handle conflict without escalating. We help them live safely and make better choices. Since 2016, we have served over 2,000 people. Other C.V.I. organizations in Chicago have served thousands more.
To Mr. Trump, a felon who talks tough on crime even as he abuses his pardon power and oversees what seems to be the most corrupt administration in American history, our approach may sound simplistic or naïve. But a growing body of research — including data from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago Crime Lab — supports addressing gun violence as largely a public health issue rather than strictly a matter of crime and punishment. In fact, the most promising trend in Chicago today is that both crimes and arrests are way down since the pandemic.
For participants, our organization’s work leads to a 73 percent drop in rearrests when compared with at-risk individuals who did not complete our program, according to a study by Northwestern University researchers. That’s primarily because they stop carrying guns and start making safer, de-escalatory choices. It’s hard to demonstrate a direct cause for any given drop in shootings, but one study linked CVI to 383 prevented shootings and 605 prevented arrests over five years.
Of course, a robust police presence is still a vital part of a comprehensive public safety strategy. In addition to arrest and incarceration, we need to provide at-risk people with offramps from the criminal justice system.
Today our organization gets referrals from the police, prosecutors, public defenders and judges. They all recognize that C.V.I. is proactive while traditional law enforcement is largely reactive. The former L.A. police chief Charlie Beck said as much in distinguishing the role of police versus C.V.I. workers when he was acting police superintendent in Chicago: “My job is the last homicide. Your job is stopping the next homicide.”
C.V.I. workers in Chicago, including more than a thousand who work in the state-funded Peacekeepers Program, can help to prevent thousands of shootings each year by mediating active disputes among street gang members and negotiating truces among factions. Because we have a strong professional understanding with police, they give our outreach workers the leeway to intervene before shootings happen, saving both lives and money.
Today, thanks to an extraordinary partnership of philanthropy, business, government and local communities, Chicago has built one of the most extensive C.V.I. sectors in the country. We’re focusing on taking C.V.I. to scale in several of our most violent neighborhoods; our goal is to make C.V.I. a permanent feature of our public safety strategy and put Chicago on par with the safest cities in America.
In 2022 we were thrilled to have the federal government as a partner in this work when Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Among other things, the law provided grants to scores of C.V.I. organizations around the country. My organization secured one of the grants and was planning to use the money to help smaller groups we work with build the capacity to serve more people. Unfortunately, the Trump administration canceled almost half of all C.V.I. grants in April, before we even saw a dime.
A month later Mr. Trump canceled more than 20 federally enforced consent decrees meant to curb police abuses and rebuild trust with communities. Now the president is needlessly deploying National Guard troops to patrol the nation’s capital — and he has threatened to expand the intervention to other cities. This deployment is a flagrant violation of well-established law and flies in the face of nationwide declines in gun violence. According to the Real Time Crime Index, murders across America are down almost 20 percent in 2025, following double-digit declines in the previous two years. Violent crime rates in Washington, D.C., were at a 30-year low before Mr. Trump was even sworn in.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump wants to use the National Guard only in blue states, even though red states have higher murder rates. He knows Republican governors don’t want troops on their streets. In fact, they are sending their troops to Washington.
If Mr. Trump were serious about reducing crime, he would restore C.V.I. grants and maintain consent decrees driving needed police reforms. He would support common-sense gun safety laws that even gun owners support. Maybe he’d even try to address the economic inequality at the root of so much crime and disorder.
We’re not holding our breath. Instead we keep doing our innovative work of reducing gun violence by giving young people at risk a chance to heal from trauma, live safely, work legally, support their families and share fully in the joys and blessings of life in America.
Arne Duncan is the founder of Chicago CRED, a managing partner at Emerson Collective and a former U.S. Secretary of Education.
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