by Hurubie Meko
Kansas City Star
November 10, 2021

CeaseFire Chicago — now called Cure Violence — was founded by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin in the mid-1990s. Implemented as a violence reduction program in Chicago in 1999, the model saw early success in reducing gun violence and homicides.

… As cities choose to adopt Cure Violence, they’ve cited numerous studies and empirical reviews that have supported the model’s effectiveness.

A U.S. Department of Justice report of the original Chicago program in 2009 stated that “an examination of the impact of CeaseFire on shootings and killings found that violence was down by one measure or another in most of the areas that were examined in detail.”

A 2012 evaluation of Baltimore’s program by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that three of the four sites where the model was implemented saw reductions in homicides and in nonfatal shootings, among other shifts. Other regions saw mixed reductions, but the researchers concluded that the areas where the program was implemented did for the most part see an overall reduction in homicides.

Likewise, a 2017 review of two sites in New York City by John Jay College of Criminal Justice at The City University of New York found that gun violence rates decreased in the two catchment areas reviewed — gun injuries dropping about 50% in one neighborhood after the Cure Violence program was implemented.

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