Steve Gates has spent the last two years making the Roseland community safer through his nonprofit street outreach group.
He worries the progress could be lost after a grant runs out in January.
“It’s like an inflection point,” he says of his clients. “They are attentive and usually they want change. If we’re not able to do that, then I fear retaliatory shootings. I fear regression. I fear hopelessness resurfacing.”
Gates’ nonprofit, Reimagining Roseland Community Collective, is one of several small violence prevention groups funded by federal grants issued during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As that grant money dries up, Gates and other nonprofit leaders worry about how they will continue their work amid signs of progress.
The city may end this year with less than 600 homicides for the first time since 2019. The city is now over a COVID-induced spike in violence that peaked in 2021.
Murders in Chicago have decreased 29% compared with 2021, and most types of other violent crime also continue to fall.
“We’ve now had two once-in-a-lifetime homicides spikes in Chicago” in 2016 and 2021, says Kim Smith, a director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “We can’t take for granted we’ll continue to experience decreases, especially after we had two historical increases.”
That’s why it’s important violence prevention funding continues, she says. “I just think we should not be defunding success. I think we need to understand what is successful a bit better,” Smith says. “We’re not in the clear by any means.”
‘No one-size-fits-all strategy’
Shootings and murders are down 7% compared to 2023, according to data from the Chicago Police Department. That’s less than the national average murder decrease of between 10% and 15% over the past year.
Riverdale on the Far South Side hasn’t logged a murder all year, a significant improvement in an area targeted by violence prevention outreach.
But not all neighborhoods are seeing progress.
Little Village and some North Side neighborhoods have seen a dramatic increase in violent crime, which Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling attributes to an increase in gang conflict and shifting crime patterns.
Snelling, wrapping up his first full year as superintendent, says he hopes to spread the downward trend by giving more autonomy to district commanders to fight crime specific to their neighborhoods — where many outreach groups are already active.
“There is no one-size-fits-all strategy in the city of Chicago,” Snelling told the Sun-Times. “Our commanders have been stepping up and coming up with these strategies to deal with these problems, and they’ve been effective.”
Snelling wants to forge deeper partnerships with the community in hopes of improving trust of the police department and continuing the downward trend. “If we can get to that point,” Snelling says, “we will see a greater decrease in violent crime.”
That decline continued during the first full year after Illinois did away with cash bail.
The biggest takeaway, so far, is that the “sky did not fall” as some critics of the Pretrial Fairness Act predicted, according to Loyola University professor David Olson, who is still studying the effects of the law.
His research has shown the law increased the time judges are taking to consider whether to hold someone in jail pending the outcome of their criminal court case.
The Cook County Jail population has risen slightly after bottoming out at the beginning of 2024, and the number of people being held on home electronic monitoring has fallen since the law was implemented.
‘Hopeful signs’
It’s difficult to name direct causes for any short-term crime trend. Many factors are at play.
But there is now a general consensus that the COVID-19 pandemic played a direct role in rising rates of violence in 2020 and 2021 across the country, according to Craig Futterman, professor of law at the University of Chicago.
We’re only just now getting over that bump and returning to the decades-long gradual decrease in violence that’s been happening since the 1990s, Futterman says.
Several factors during the pandemic contributed to rising crime. Besides economic ones, there was also rising tension with police stemming from riots in many cities, including Chicago, after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“As we have emerged in the aftermath of COVID, we see that pre-COVID trend continue,” Futterman says. “As those stressors and conditions have softened, we’re seeing far more hopeful signs.”
Other patterns have emerged in the last year of crime data.
The city’s deadliest neighborhoods have gotten less so, according to the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab’s year-end report.
People living in the most violent neighborhoods are still more than 60 times more likely to be killed. But the gap between them and the city’s safest communities is closing, according Smith, from the Crime Lab.
That could show violence prevention efforts and extra resources sent to the most violent neighborhoods are working.
“It’s still very much a tale of two cities,” Smith says. “But the gaps are closing.”
The Crime Lab also found shootings have gotten more deadly over the last 25 years. A person’s chances of dying after being shot has increased to 18% this year, up from 13% in 2010.
That’s likely due to the increasing use of high capacity magazines and switches, Smith says.
Police are picking up more shell casings at crime scenes (an average of about 5 per scene in 2010, versus 11 in 2023), which shows the trend of more bullets being fired.
“That’s pretty troubling,” Smith says. “And we’re seeing it in other cities.”
‘More work to be done’
Research has shown the effectiveness of community violence interventions, but the future of funding for it is precarious.
Some groups are hoping to scale up their work to reach more people at risk of participating in violence.
The Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, a West Side outreach group, was part of a $100 million initiative announced earlier in 2024 called SC2, short for Scaling Community Violence Intervention for a Safer Chicago.
That group reaches about 20% of the people identified in their service area as being at risk of shooting or being shot. To make a larger impact, the group hopes to reach 75% of those at risk. But that would require much more funding, and it’s not entirely clear where the money will come from now that local governments are running out of federal pandemic grants.
“There’s a lot more work to be done,” says Shunda Collins, vice president of development and communication for the Institute. “We can only scale if we have a foundation.”
Darryca Brim is co-founder and executive director of Focus Fairies Mentoring, a group that mentors young women in and around North Lawndale.
Brim says she’s not very concerned about future funding since some of her money comes from private partners. Three years ago, she began doing street outreach work, in addition to youth mentoring, after securing a grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services.
The nonprofit has a staff of eight. Brim says the nonprofit’s smaller size means she is left out of some of the larger funding opportunities.
Brim says she started the nonprofit in 2017 to provide support for girls and women who are sometimes left out of Chicago’s violence prevention initiatives.
The city’s crime rate may be falling. But that’s not obvious to Brim, who consistently learns about people dying in her community.
“Numbers tell a story,” Brim says. “But when my employees tell me every other week that one of our clients has been killed, we’re still seeing it happen.”