Professor Papachristos discusses how street outreach helps stem gun violence in Chicago Tribune essay

Professor Andrew Papachristos, of the Department of Sociology, explores how street outreach has helped stem gun violence in a new guest essay for the Chicago Tribune.

Papachristos explains how 250 unarmed people walk the streets of Chicago each day to calm disputes and reach out to those impacted by gun violence. He has been studying these outreach efforts as part of the Northwestern Neighborhood & Network Initiative, or N3, which is partnered with several organizations across the city to design research projects aimed at understanding street outreach’s impact on participants and their communities.

“Street outreach workers find the right people without relying on the criminal justice system,” Papachristos writes. “Outreach participants are largely young Black and Latino men with extensive histories of victimization who have been locked out of schools, parks, and the health care system or locked up by the criminal justice system. Most of these young men are involved in street gangs and cliques whose neighborhood disputes are ground zero for a great many of Chicago’s shootings.”

Papachristos has found that outreach efforts identify high-risk populations, and early results suggest that outreach-related efforts are associated with lower levels of involvement in gun violence. Additionally, these efforts also connect individuals to life-saving services for housing, mental health, education, and justice.

“Now is the time to invest in promising neighborhood-based violence prevention programs,” Papachristos writes. “While they are in no way the cure for all of the gun violence, efforts like street outreach are an essential part of the solution that reaches and connects people to lifesaving resources.”

Read the full essay here.