On a scorching Saturday in late July, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy joined a march against violence in Austin, partly to publicize the City Council’s new and more stringent curfews for children 16 and younger. Channel 5 led its 5 PM newscast with the march and even found time to report on a rally held that same day by CeaseFire, a local organization dedicated to halting the cycle of killing in high-risk communities. But Tio Hardiman, director of the organization’s “violence interrupters” program, wasn’t even identified onscreen, nor did the reporter mention the victims of area shootings that occurred before and after the mayor’s march. By the time of the 10 PM newscast, any mention of CeaseFire had been dropped altogether.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
CeaseFire’s relative anonymity may end with The Interrupters, a stirring new documentary that opens Friday for a two-week run at Gene Siskel Film Center. Producers Steve James (director of Hoop Dreams) and Alex Kotlowitz (author of the 1991 best seller There Are No Children Here) are longtime friends, but this is their first professional collaboration, inspired by a May 2008 story on CeaseFire that Kotlowitz published in the New York Times Magazine. Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois-Chicago, spent a decade in Africa fighting cholera, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS before returning to the U.S. and founding the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention, the parent organization of CeaseFire. Slutkin’s central insight has been to approach street violence like an infectious disease, one that can be treated by identifying the source of outbreak and intervening before the infection spreads. For him there are no good or bad people, just healthy or unhealthy people; violence is unhealthy behavior, but behavior can be changed.
Prior to his work for CeaseFire, Williams served 12 years for drug trafficking and attempted murder. Gregarious and seemingly unflappable, he enjoys a high success rate with his clients, partly because of his work ethic; he’s so dedicated that when CeaseFire was forced to lay him off during one of its periodic funding droughts, he put in the hours anyway. The level of trust he inspires pays off for James and Kotlowitz. At one point a 32-year-old man, aptly nicknamed Flamo, informs Williams, whom he met in jail, that he intends to gun down a police informant who instigated a raid on his home. When Williams and fellow violence interrupter Rodney “Hot Rod” Phillips arrive on Flamo’s doorstep, he’s in no mood to be pacified, but they manage to avert a confrontation through the simple expedient of taking him out to lunch so he can blow off steam.
Directed by Steve James
