Community Violence Intervention: Chicago CRED

Chicago is one of America’s greatest cities. Beautiful, storied, creative, and deeply loved by the people who call it home. It is a city shaped by migration, resilience, neighborhood pride, and cultural power. My own family’s story is tied to Chicago, like so many Black families who moved there during and after the great migration in search of possibility. But love for a city requires honesty about what some communities have been forced to endure within it. When streets feel unsafe, people move differently. They avoid parks, skip the bus stop, take the long way home, keep their children inside, and limit their own freedom just to make it through the day. Mobility is not only about whether a sidewalk or bus route exists. It is also about whether people feel safe enough to use it.

In neighborhoods shaped by segregation, disinvestment and the lasting trauma of violence, freedom of movement is constrained. Not because the people who live there are broken, and not because poverty makes people violent, but because structural racism has concentrated harm, narrowed opportunity, and too often left residents to navigate conditions they did not create. In 2021, Chicago recorded roughly 800 homicides, the city’s highest annual toll in about a quarter-century.

That loss was not evenly shared. Black and Latino communities, especially on the parts of the South and West Sides, carried a disproportionate burden. That burden did not emerge out of nowhere. It sits within a much larger history of segregation, disinvestment, criminalization, and economic exclusion. From the legacy of redlining to school inequalities, housing instability, and the erosion of community resources, violence in Chicago cannot be understood apart from structural racism.

For generations, the dominant public response to violence was punishment and enforcement, but another approach has continued to grow alongside that model: community violence intervention or CVI. CVI begins with a different assumption. The people best positioned to interrupt violence are often those with lived experience, deep relationships, and hard-earned credibility in the communities most affected. Sometimes they’re people who were previously in a gang or been in prison or lost their family to a shooting. Those folks have more credibility with their community and more influence to help young men facing elevated risk because of concentrated disinvestment, exclusion, trauma, and limited opportunity. CVI works. The violence has been fallen since that peak in 2021. Outreach from formerly incarcerated people is helping young men improve their social and financial mobility and escape the cycle of violence. My name is Charles T. Brown, and this is Arrested Mobility.

My guest today is Cedric Hawkins, Safety Manager with Chicago CRED, a CVI organization. Violence prevention is more than a job for Cedric. It’s his lifestyle. But before he worked in the world of CVI, he grew up in a world of gun violence.

I joined the gang at 12 years old. The same year I caught my first weapons charge. They actually gave me probation and sent me home. That was one of the first times in my life that made me start thinking that I can be untouched. I can do things and just get away with it. Not knowing that one thing about the system, they’re going to keep you on file for the rest of your life. And as a kid, you don’t know that. You just look at it like, “I just got caught with this gun. They let me right out. Oh my God, man. Give me another gun.” You know what I mean? So I went full-time with selling drugs.

Throughout my life, I went to state prison, what, twice. And they actually gave me a life sentence for 5.4 grams of crack cocaine when I was 25 years old. And the thing about it was they gave me 5.4 grams of ghost dope, meaning they had no drugs. They just went off a statement that my cousin and the other confidential informants put out there on me. But I was blessed. In 2016, President Obama commuted my sentence for me from life to 12 years and 10 months so I actually ended up doing 10 years straight. And I came home on March of 2017, got out the halfway house in October of 2017.

I started working for Schneider. It was a warehouse out in Joliet, Illinois. So I started working for Schneider, and I was working on the trucks. I worked there for 21 months and ended up getting fired because of my background, because I had assault and battery with a deadly weapon in my background, so they fired me. But this happened back in 2003 and they fired me in 2019. So they fired me for something that was 16 years old that I had already went to prison for. You know what I mean?

After being fired for the misdeeds he committed in another life, Cedric found his way to a program called FLIP or front line intervention professionals. He worked as a peacekeeper, connecting with young people and spreading the message of peace. That work eventually led him to Chicago CRED. CRED stands for Create Real Economic Destiny. The organization works with individuals who are at the highest risk of being involved in gun violence, either as a victim or a perpetrator, and connects them with a web of support. That could be trauma-informed mental health services, job training, or legal assistance.

Most importantly, CRED provides consistent relationships with people they can trust. CRED’s outreach workers are not social workers in the traditional sense. They’re credible messengers, people who have direct experience with the streets, with incarceration, and with loss of family, friends, and others in their community. They speak the language. They’ve earned the right to be heard, and that credibility is the foundation of everything. The work is not just difficult, it is dangerous. Outreach workers place themselves between active conflicts, shuttling between feuding individuals and groups, sometimes in the hours after a shooting, when retaliation is most likely. They show up at hospitals, they sit with grieving mothers, they answer the phone at 2:00 AM.

So Cedric, what are the young men you work with facing when it comes to economic and social mobility? What are the barriers they’re running into?

A lot of these young men, they are stuck. Fresh out the wound. So if the family is in poverty, most likely you going to be in poverty and you going to move exactly how your family move. Most of these individuals, they tend to not even understand how to get away. You don’t hear a lot of them saying that they want to move away. You know what I mean? Because they don’t even understand what’s moving away. They never been off their block. You know what I mean? If you take these guys downtown, it’s like taking them out of town. They’re stuck financially. They’re stuck mentally from the wound. Like I say, it’s just trauma. They’re stuck because no one is there to be able to show them better. You have us enlightening these individuals about the financial mobility, being able to do something financially or being able to help them mentally.

But the thing about it is these individuals feel like they can’t leave off their block because if they go from 115th to 117th, by the time they get to the 117th, their oppositions is there and it’s a problem. These individuals that we are working with, if they would really give it a chance, man, brother, ain’t no limit to how far they can go. But it’s all about that mobility that you talking about. They stuck, and they stuck as far as mental. Their mental is telling them, “This my hood, I protect this hood. I don’t mess with none of them over there. I don’t mess with none of them over there. And I know I can’t be in they hood.”

Even when we’re enrolling individuals in programming, we asking individuals, what’s their affiliation? Who do they click with? Are any of your family members affiliated? And if they are, will you ride with them? Will you help them if they have some conflict going on? All these things need to be asked because you have to know who you dealing with, just knowing what you dealing with. So like you just asked, mobility-wise, guys are stuck financially, they’re stuck mentally.

A lot of them are stuck housing-wise. Individuals, it’s, oh my God, man, you do some home visits and it’ll break you down. You know what I mean? It’s not no laughing matter or none of that. It’ll hurt you. It’ll make you feel like you want to let this individual come live with you. It’s sad. And the thing is, it’s only getting worse. It’s only getting worse. I think that it’s beneficial that organizations continue to try to bring all the resources they can to the community because, man, it’s really messed up right now.

What is the role of police in this work? Where does law enforcement fit into the picture and where does it fall short?

When it comes down to law enforcement, we all know they human beings. So you’re going to have some bad, you’re going to have some good. Today, I’m able to actually say that with just real truth behind it because I am one of the individuals that collab with law enforcement for the 5th District where we’re at, making sure that our professional understanding is there. Just them knowing that when we are out and when we are outreaching, please let us outreach and don’t put us in a situation where individuals won’t trust us because a lot of times when certain individuals see you around CPD or see you conversating with CPD, that can cause conflict with your license to operate in the community. Just being able to coordinate with them and just keep that professional understanding going.

As far as in the community with CPD at this time, I would probably say it’s probably 50/50. I do believe it’s getting a little better. I do see CPD out trying, at times, trying to give back to the community, have little events, something I haven’t saw when I was a kid, but I see it now more. And I still see law enforcement doing wrong though. So like I say, so it’s good and bad on that, but it’s also going to be good and bad in the CVI world. Also, it’s really no difference. Like I say, you’re dealing with humans. So as far as the kids, that trend is still there. F the police, that trend is there. F-12, F the police, whatever it is. I don’t know one kid today is saying that they want to grow up and be a police officer. But I will say that just from my engagement in the community, that as far as CPD, I would say that they are getting better as far as how they are moving in a neighborhood. I would say that they are getting better, they are trying to get better.

What are your most meaningful accomplishments with CRED? And zooming out, what does success look like for this movement as a whole?

First and foremost, in my three years of outreaching, I had over 20 graduates, 20 high school graduates, people to graduate, participants to graduate. That’s just one big accomplishment. Just being able to just help so many people and save so many lives, you know what I mean? I’m just, I’m grateful.

And another thing with the work, I’m African American and a lot of times it’s hard to be able to work with other races in the streets when it comes to gang violence. African American gang violence is different from Latino gang violence. And it’s just been a blessing that also in the last three years, I was the main individual to be able to help us to gain a relationship with the Latinos that’s in our neighborhood, to be able to stop the conflict with them and the group that’s up the hill from them. It was so important and so beneficial for us to be able to stop this conflict because at one point in time, it was 37 shootings between them in one summer.

And now today, since we’ve been working with them the last three years, we’ve may have had six or seven shootings all together in the last three years. The violence is down, and actually that just don’t have nothing to do with organizations, that has to do with community as a whole. Everybody’s pitching in, so I wouldn’t just give that credit to any one person. But another thing that we’re seeing in Chicago, today Chicago, we don’t have a lot of group on group. A lot of things in Chicago today is internal. We have a lot of internal things going on. And if it’s not internal, it’s domestic. And if it’s not domestic, a lot of times it’s something that an individual may be getting killed because it’s extended from a robbery or something. And they never show that. If an individual get killed from a robbery, it’s still pinpointed as a homicide, but they never say that it was a robbery that went bad.

You know what I mean? It’s just a homicide. They just still recorded as a homicide. I just wish it was things to be able to break all that stuff down because that’s what we’re seeing. And even CPD, they seeing the same thing. You know what I’m saying? We’re not seeing a lot of group on group. We see a lot of more individuals inside of the group getting into it with each other and then on the internal side. As far as the gun situation, that gun situation is mostly a youth situation and it’s like a trend. You know what I mean? It’s like a trend to be known, a trend to have that clout. And you only… The thing about it is everybody is carrying a gun today for real. Everybody carrying a gun.

The thing about it is, what are you doing with it? It’s kind of like everybody got feelings, but what are you doing with these feelings? You know what I mean? And you got multiple, 90% of individuals carrying guns in Chicago. But the thing about it is that 90%, not even half of them is looking for trouble. They just want to have the gun for protection. Out of that 90% that’s having guns, you probably got 15% that’s looking for trouble. So like I say, to me, it’s not a gun problem. It’s not.

The thing about it is, yeah, everybody is using the gun because growing up today, who’s teaching their kids how to box today? Who’s teaching their kids how to fight? When I was coming up, they teach us how to box. We had karate school. They teach us how to wrestle. I was on the wrestling team. You know what I mean? Today, you have none of that. And we tend to mess up our kids’ life because we put a phone in their hand when they two, three years old. So when they turn five or six, they already have a narrative about you that you don’t even know about.

I have a daughter, she was three days old or something when I went to prison. I come home, she was 10. She’s a joy of my life. She take me through it, but I love my baby to death. Her name is Envy, and she just everything so I do want to always just thank my baby because actually, to be honest with you, if I didn’t have a child, I probably would have kept going the wrong way because prison is no correction. You know what I mean? It’s only if you want to correct yourself and you around so much negativity who want to correct they self. They just want to make sure that they survive. That was my thing, just survival.

I survived. President Obama gave me a chance, another chance at life in the streets, and now I’m back out here with my child, and I was able to send her to college this year. And real talk, I’m looking to take my degree from experience in life and teach others the life that I come up from and try to help them to see things differently or help them to strategize to help another individual to see things differently.

Arrested mobility is often thought about as infrastructure. That is highways built through Black neighborhoods, transit systems that bypass the people who need the most. But infrastructure isn’t the only thing that determines whether people can move freely. Fear does too. When a neighborhood is defined by the threat of violence, the sidewalks empty out. Parents don’t let their kids walk to school alone. Seniors stop going to the park. The corner store two blocks away might as well be two miles. Community violence intervention is, in this sense, a form of transportation policy. When it works, it gives people their neighborhood back. The work of community violence intervention is not a silver bullet. It requires resources, sustained commitment, political will, and a drive to center the voices of those most impacted by violence, but it is working, and it can improve the mobility of people who might otherwise be stuck in poverty, at risk of violence, and with no means of escaping. I want to thank my guest, Cedric Hawkins. I appreciate everything you shared with us.

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