Interrupters work to stop violence before it gets started

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Ameena Matthews, violence interrupter, producer/director Steve James, producer Alex Kotlowitzand co-producer/Sound recordist Zak Piper filming "The Interrupters."| Courtesy of Kartemquin Films

Roger Ebert reviews 'The Interrupters'

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Updated: October 3, 2011 12:25PM

Flamo’s not happy.

Standing on the porch of his Englewood home, chilly winter air streaming in through an open front door, the furious and pistol-packing ex-con (by his own admission he’s spent nearly half his 32 years in prison) is vowing revenge.

After getting tipped off about guns in the house, Flamo explains, cops arrested his mother and brother and carted them off to lockup. Firearms allegedly were confiscated, too.

“I know these punk-ass police still want me,” he says. “Mutha------ gonna have to kill me.”

In the meantime, he’s got some killing of his own to do. If not for a couple of newly arrived peacemakers on his doorstep, he’d almost certainly be back inside spewing vitriol into his Motorola flip-phone and plotting payback against those who ratted him out. Because he knows who they are.

“You didn’t just cross me, you crossed my f---in’ mama,” he says, venting as his visitors look on. “For my mama, ni---, I’ll come to your crib and kill every mutha------ by it.”

Known as “violence interrupters,” Flamo’s surprise guests are here for one reason only: to prevent a murder — maybe several — by talking their riled-up subject down off the proverbial ledge. Eventually he chills out, stows his firearm and joins them for lunch. Crisis averted. For the time being, anyway.

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As part of a University of Illinois at Chicago-based violence prevention program called CeaseFire, which is itself an initiative of UIC epidemiology and international health professor Gary Slutkin’s 16-year-old Chicago Project for Violence Prevention (CPVP), the interrupters don’t break up gangs or squelch drug deals. Stopping shootings and other attacks, whether spontaneous or retaliatory, before they happen is the group’s sole mission. As with the recent slayings of 6-year-old Englewood resident Arianna Gibson and 13-year-old South Sider Darius Brown, they’re not always successful.

Thanks in part to the interrupters’ varying degrees of street cred — almost all are convicted offenders of one sort or another who grew up in the neighborhoods they patrol — they’re able to mediate beefs from an insider vantage point and in a parlance that cops, social workers and politicians typically can’t or don’t employ.

“It’s all about personalities, having the right people working with the right people,” says Tio Hardiman, who founded the interrupters in 2004 and serves as director of CeaseFire Illinois.

Now, seven years after its inception, his brainchild has gone Hollywood. Over the course of 14 months, award-winning filmmaker Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”) and journalist Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here) shot roughly 300 hours of footage for their Kartemquin Films documentary “The Interrupters.” So far reviews have been good to dazzling across the board, and there’s already Oscar buzz. It premieres Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center and will screen toward the end of this month in Chatham and Lawndale.

The Flamo scene, which James captured on camera (uncharacteristically, he did all the filming himself so as to be less obtrusive), is one of numerous illuminating and emotionally charged peeks into a world where “death before dishonor” is a tragically common mantra and suffering of one form or another is widespread.

Hardiman, 48, experienced it first-hand. Raised in the Henry Horner projects and Chicago’s Avalon Park community, he says his family members were gangbangers and drug addicts. He, too, spiraled into coke and alcohol addiction before entering rehab in 1989. After cleaning up he adjusted his priorities and altered the trajectory of his life. Hardiman joined the CPVP in 1999 and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees thereafter.

“I was seen more as a street promoter, street hustler type of guy,” he says of his past in the fast lane. “I’m the guy that you can come to for some strong advice, but I’m the guy that’ll hurt you also. Don’t get that wrong. I’m not no guy that’s gonna just turn the other cheek. Back then.”

As a promoter, he says, ideas are his stock-in-trade. The interrupters “is one of the best ideas in the world that God blessed me with because it actually is making a difference out here.”

With the help of three especially charismatic interrupters — Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams and Eddie Bocanegra — James and Kotlowitz were able to witness meetings and clashes, funerals and familial strife from which they otherwise might have been barred.

“We didn’t want to make a film about CeaseFire, per se,” says Kotlowitz, whose 2008 New York Times Magazine story on the organization spawned this documentary and facilitated access to subjects. “What interested us was [making] a film that took a probing, really questioning look at the violence. That’s what was important. And for us, the interrupters who work for CeaseFire are kind of our prism into their communities.”

Former lawbreakers and rabble-rousers all, they’re also some of the film’s most colorful and powerful characters, and it’s clear that Kotlowitz and James think highly of them and their noble work.

Says James, “I think what’s really great about what you see the interrupters doing in these neighborhoods is that even when there’s not all these resources brought to bear to do real fundamental change, these guys and women can have a profound impact on an individual level.”

Not only can the interrupters have a profound impact, Hardiman declares, they do. He’s got stats and charts to prove it.

While he waited for Sen. Dick Durbin to show up at a recent downtown luncheon, Hardiman also provided several pages of convoluted notes — typed-up from handwritten field reports — that briefly describe the circumstances of various interruptions.

“Because the female is very controlling in the relationship with the boy,” one reads. “She is the one always beating on her guy …”

Or this: “My youth is currently in probation for gun possession and his state of mind was wanting to shoot one of them.”

Hardiman is passionate and persuasive when making his case that CeaseFire and the interrupters are doing measurable good in the communities they serve.

“I’m not saying CeaseFire is a solve-all type of program,” Hardiman says of his group, which gets millions of dollars in state and foundation funding each year. Hardiman himself draws a $110,000 salary. Executive director Slutkin pulls in $187,000 and change.

“But the difference between CeaseFire and all the other community groups is that we work with the known shooters in the community and get them to put their guns down.”

“And,” he adds, “our numbers back themselves up.”

Numbers such as 351 conflicts mediated by interrupters and 251 by other outreach staffers from October to June, or a homicide reduction of up to 100 percent in sites where CeaseFire and the interrupters are active, from Englewood and Roseland to Austin and Little Village and 14 other violence-torn areas throughout the city.

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Not everyone believes the computer-crunched data or spoken claims. Though CeaseFire and the interrupters have garnered lots of glowing press coverage over the years, it isn’t hard to find critics. And they don’t pull their punches.

Tracy Siska’s four-part blog series, for the Chicago Justice Project (www.chicagojustice.org), is roundly condemning.

Lance Williams, an associate professor at Northeastern Illinois University’s Jacob H. Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies and a self-proclaimed “street organization historian,” is similarly censorious. He’s adamant, for instance, that CeaseFire cannot quantify the number of violent instances it prevents because there may well be other contributing factors.

“What you don’t see in ‘the “Interrupters’ piece,” Williams says, “is that sometimes when the violence interrupters go out in the community and they begin to talk to people about these violence cases, there have already been indigenous folks who have attempted to resolve the conflict. And when the interrupters come in, they interrupt that process. And when they interrupt the natural mediation, then they get people riled up again.”

Not only that, Williams notes, the interruption model is highly inefficient. Her obvious passion aside, someone such as Matthews is “just going to run around trying to put out fires for the rest of her life. And then at a certain point she’s going to burn out.”

Matthews, a former gang soldier and the daughter of imprisoned former Black P. Stones/El Rukn gang honcho Jeff Fort, strongly disagrees.

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In addition to his verbal lambasting of CeaseFire, Williams and a colleague published an in-depth study of the organization in 2007. Underwritten by a grant from the Black United Fund of Illinois, it is rife with damning assessments from the authors, former CeaseFire workers and residents of the neighborhoods where CeaseFire operates.

One blast comes from a Chicago gang intervention director and short-lived CeaseFire employee, who slams the interrupters for their lack of formal training. “It’s really a sham,” he says. “They’re fronting when it comes down to that part of it.” (Hardiman calls the training “rigorous.”)

Four years later, Williams says, his conclusions are relevant “even to a greater degree.”

State Sen. Donne E. Trotter (D-Chicago) is none too impressed, either. On the subject of CeaseFire’s impact via the interrupters and other means, he’s dismissive and intensely skeptical. Just because there’s no gunplay on a particular corner the day after CeaseFire showed up at the site of a shootout means nothing.

“I mean, only a fool is going to go out on the same corner and start shooting again,” Trotter says. “But they use that as a statistic: ‘See how we interrupted crime?’”

“I believe that they serve a function,” Trotter allows. “They’re just not the end-all.”

The Chicago Police Department was unresponsive to e-mailed questions about its relationship with CeaseFire and the effect of interrupters, but Matthews has some thoughts on the matter.

“The police are against us,” she says. “They won’t give us a chance.”

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Another academic examination of CeaseFire — this one significantly more upbeat than Williams’ and costing $1 million as opposed to $25,000 — was published in May 2008. Helmed by Northwestern University political science professor Wesley Skogan, it was bankrolled by a grant from the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs.

In one section, it attributes “decreases in the size and intensity of shooting hot spots” in several areas to CeaseFire’s presence.

Skogan was unavailable for comment. Hardiman, though, insists the study was “an independent evaluation” and not meant to counter Williams’ findings.

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Despite the haters and no doubt bolstered by CeaseFire’s many supporters, Hardiman is unwavering in his belief that CeaseFire truly is making a difference. “The Interrupters,” he’s hopeful, could take it to the next level.

“We delivered a masterpiece for the world to recognize,” Hardiman says, fully conscious of his immodesty.

“I’m not humble because you know why? I been putting in work, bro. I’m talking about for years. We been up and down, we go through changes. Some people believe and some people don’t believe us, and we struggle with different administrations every now and then. But with the movie, I’m hoping we can put all that to rest and let’s make Chicago a better place for all the residents.”

Flamo included.