I hope I don't lose the note I just made to watch this ~ we know it's just a matter of time until we see some "bad-actor peer pressure" with some of our middle school kidlets ~  ~ Sooz

When she interrupts
Clarence Page
February 11, 2012

As a fan of Stephen Colbert's satirical skills on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," I didn't know what to expect when he sat down to interview the daughter of Jeff Fort, one of Chicago's most notorious gang leaders since Al Capone.

From the late 1960s until he was convicted in the 1980s, Fort ran the supersized Black P Stone Nation and the later El Rukn faction. His daughter Ameena Matthews, after some gang-affiliated years of her own, went straight. She became a Muslim and now works with other former gang members as a "violence interrupter" for a Chicago-based organization called CeaseFire.

That's not much of a laughing matter. Murder is second only to accidental injuries as the biggest killer of youths age 15 to 24, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But it also is the subject of a riveting documentary, "The Interrupters," which Matthews came to talk about on Colbert's show. After a successful run in theaters and film festivals, the documentary has its television premiere on PBS' "Frontline" — on Valentine's Day.

Could Colbert maintain his usual seamless goofy right-wing character? Would Matthews get the joke? Would Colbert's studio audience even have a clue what kind of world Matthews was talking about?

No problem. She proved to be as quick in her seat as she is on Chicago streets.

"Violence interrupter?" Colbert asks. "I'm an interrupter myself. That sounds like a very dangerous thing to do to."

"Yes, you're an interrupter in a rude way," she says, flashing a smile. "I'm a violence interrupter in saving lives." So there, Colbert.

In fact, being a violence interrupter is a dangerous thing to do, as illustrated in the film by one whom we meet in a hospital, where he is recovering from bullet wounds. Fortunately, we are told, he is the first to be so injured on the job.

If you haven't seen the film yet, I recommend it as a rare, courageously close-up look at the people and situations behind some of today's most tragic headlines. The documentary captures a year in the lives of Matthews and two other interrupters, Cobe Williams and Eddie Bocanegra, who have served enough time in prison and on the streets to have credibility with the young hard-core offenders they're trying to reach.

Producer-director Steve James, who also made the award-winning film "Hoop Dreams," learned about CeaseFire from a 2008 New York Times magazine article by Alex Kotlowitz, who became the film's co-producer. Like "Hoop Dreams," which follows the long-shot quest of two low-income Chicago high school basketball players for the brass ring of professional stardom, "The Interrupters" tells a larger story about the struggle to survive amid limited choices and often-dangerous conditions.

Think of violence as a virus, and you'll understand the theory behind CeaseFire, the creation of Dr. Gary Slutkin, a University of Illinois at Chicago epidemiologist. Ten years of battling the spread of cholera and AIDS in Africa gave Slutkin the idea that maybe violence erupts and spreads like an infectious disease too. If so, he reasoned, why not apply a disease-fighting strategy to stop the contagion at its source before the violence feeds more violence?

"Violence is a two-step process," he says in the film. "The first step is: I've got a grievance. He looked at my girl. … He disrespected me. … He owes me money. … He's Sunni. … He's a Palestinian. … He's an Israeli." The second step is to violence. That's where the interrupters, most of whom have been involved in gang leadership, step in, Slutkin says, "to interrupt the initial transmission."

CeaseFire works. Two U.S. Department of Justice studies found a significant reduction in violent episodes in communities where the organization operates in Chicago and Baltimore. CeaseFire also has similar projects in five other states.

Colbert caught on. "You're like an antibody," he said. "You're like, if you'll pardon the expression, like a white blood cell."

As the audience chuckled, the African-American woman responded proudly, "You know what? I'm like a paper-sack-brown blood cell."

Either way, she offers something that our cities need.

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/pagespage.[/i]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-0212-page-20120211,0,1270316.story

"Murder is second only to accidental injuries as the biggest killer of youths age 15 to 24, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

Yet violent crime stats show declines for over a decade. Perhaps that's one reason why the 35-45 year-olds delayed having kids. It could be they didn't want to give their offspring the kind of life they had - or - they couldn't procreate because most of them were already dead or too busy killing each other. Whichever - the end result is that even though that demographic is possibly experiencing the most violence - there's probably far fewer of them, so the overall murder rate goes down accordingly.