Stopping the Violence Before it Starts

CeaseFire Workers Use Experience from Violent Past to End Violence

After he was severely beaten by a 35-year-old man while on the way to the store for his mother, Tio Hardiman, then 16, saw his enraged step-father shoot and kill the man in revenge.

At the time, Hardiman, now 45 and the director of mediation services for CeaseFire, an initiative of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, had recently moved in with his mother and drug addicted step-father at the Henry Horner Homes public housing development on Chicago’s Near West Side, after the death of the grandparents who raised him.

Hardiman, one of 12 children, said he turned to alcohol to numb the pain of his childhood and as a way to avoid joining a gang.

“There were two choices in the projects – hang out in a gang or hang out with the winos,” Hardiman said.

Clean for over 20 years, Hardiman, who has since obtained a master’s degree in inner-city studies, now works to help end the kind of needless violence he said he saw as a child, before it starts.

CeaseFire’s violence prevention strategy combines community mobilization, outreach, faith leader involvement and police participation to reduce violence in the same way that other serious health threats - such as AIDS and tuberculosis - have been addressed.

The innovative program relies on clergy and community leaders - including some former gang members with strong ties to high-risk individuals, titled “violence interrupters” - who work together to interrupt conflicts and to change behavioral norms in the community.

Tim White, 42, a Baptist minister who also works as a violence interrupter for CeaseFire, is a former high-ranking gang member who spent years in and out of prison.

White, unlike many of the youth he counsels today, came from a strong, stable family with a mother and father who were present and active in his life. But even White’s father, who was also a Baptist minister, couldn’t keep his son away from the gang members who threatened him when he walked to and from school.

“I started by hanging out with the guys for protection and it escalated from there,” White said. “I began partying, drugging and hustling and found that selling drugs was a quick way to make money. And I was very good at it.”

White quickly made his way up the ranks of his gang. With the money he was making selling drugs, White was able to afford expensive cars, jewelry, designer clothes, and the company of women.

“People thought I was untouchable,” he said. “At that point, violence was a way of life.”

In 1986, White was shot in the chest during a shoot-out with a man he says was trying to rob him. White survived, but the man he shot died.

Although he had already been imprisoned various times for drug related offenses, White beat a murder charge when a jury determined that he shot the man in self defense. It wasn’t until he was jailed at the Federal Correctional Institution in Pekin, Illinois on charges of extortion, robbery and selling over a kilogram of cocaine, that White finally began to see the err of his ways.

“I got to see people bigger than me,” he said. “I was in there with lawyers, businessmen and real estate developers who had embezzled billions. I was just another dope dealer trapped in a cycle of a moment’s pleasure for a lifetime of pain.”

White realized that all of the money and power he thought he had as a gang leader was useless in prison, where he spent 23 hours of the day in lock-down.

“You can’t drive a Rolls Royce down the halls of the prison,” he said. “You can’t spend millions in the commissary.”

The turning point for White came after he attended a prison church service and heard an ex-gang member from a rival gang speak about how he changed his ways through a relationship with God.

“In my heart, it seemed like he was speaking directly to me,” White said.

Now White, who went on to get his G.E.D. and attend a seminary college, hopes that he will have that same kind of influence on the gang members he counsels.

White and the other violence interrupters use their influence as former gang leaders to mediate non-violent resolutions to gang problems. When a dispute arises, White brings both sides to a neutral territory and explains the consequences of violent actions.

“I tell them to look where I landed,” he said. “All of that power and money I had didn’t mean anything when I was sitting in that cell. I tell them that if they keep it up, I know I will be getting a collect call from them from prison, or I will be preaching at their funeral.”

White said he knows that he and his fellow violence interrupters are able to reach gang members in ways that no one else can.

“Police can’t get into the inner circles, but I can walk right in because I was a part of that,” he said.

While the work can be dangerous at times, White said he is not afraid for his own safety.

“People understand that we are there for nothing else but peace,” he said.

After five years of research and development, CeaseFire was formally launched in 2000 in the West Garfield Park neighborhood in Chicago. In the first year, shootings in that community dropped by 67 percent.

A three-year study of CeaseFire-Chicago commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice, which was recently released by the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, concluded that gun violence dropped 17 percent to 24 percent in six of seven neighborhoods where CeaseFire mediators were in place.

“This is one of the most effective ways there is to stop violence,” White said. For more information about CeaseFire, visit http://www.ceasefirechicago.org.

Tio Hardiman and Tim White