Chiraq ain't Chicago

Spike Lee's new movie is NOT about Chicago.  'Chiraq' is a metaphor for senseless violence and the desperation of the public to stop it.  Chiraq is also Hollywood entertainment and if success is measured in dollars, it's a likely loser.

Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata, the model for this movie, as one of a series of plays about the futility of the Peloponnesian wars.  Those wars devastated and exhausted Athens and Sparta between 431-404 BC.   Lee's comparison of the war-weary Athenian public to inner city African Americans works on a general level.

The message of both Aristophanes and Lee is the same: most wars are about power and masculine pride.  The true cost of such wars are measured in the lives of innocents. These wars can get out of control and the movie is a plea for peace. 

Okay, I buy that. And I liked the idea that a mass movement — in this case of women — is the way to force the warriors to put down their arms. This is also my argument in The In$ane Chicago Way, A World of Gangs, and People & Folks, my books on gangs. 

But there are many problems in the movie that alienated me.  First, as with Aristophanes, the characters in Chiraq are reduced to stereotypes, even cartoons. The gang leaders, for example, have no depth and seem only concerned with sex until Chiraq (the gang leader) is overwhelmed at the end of the movie with images of victims and repents.  The women are nearly all one-dimensional as well,  crude stereotypes of sex-obsessed black women wearing alluring attire. Such shallowness may have been all right in the Athenian theater, but we should expect more in a two-hour movie. What the shorthand of this movie does is reinforce racial stereotypes, not undermine them. 

Second, Lee's location of the movie prompts us to look for insights into Chicago's gangland. Don't. In the very first scenes of the movie,  comparing the deaths in Chicago in 2000-2015 to those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the movie veers away from reality.  The years since 2004 have marked the lowest level of homicide in Chicago since 1967. The violent years — the organized gang wars — were in the years 1989-1999 when Chicago's homicide rate was twice as high as now. Lee's nostalgic references to "back in the day when children weren't shot" forget the gang ordered murder of 11-year-old Yummy Sandifer in 1994, who was featured on the cover of Time and memorialized by Tupac.  We forget how much worse violence was during the gang wars. Once again, Lee reinforces media stereotypes. 

The climax of the movie is the signing of a peace treaty between gang leaders and with the mayor and police chief.  That's not happening today, even if women withhold sex.  There are no Chicago African American gang leaders anymore with the authority to negotiate any broader truce.  Young people don't know their laws and prayers but instead memorize sexist and violent "drill-style rap" lyrics. Today's gang-bangers are not directed from above, but are stimulated to violence by local incidents,  neighborhood feuds, episodic humiliations, petty drug deals, and social media provocations.  An early scene in the movie where a rapper is shot in a concert with provocative rap lyrics tweeted in text on the screen is intended to recall the 2012 Chief Keefe and Li'l Jo Jo beef.  But gang homicide today has dropped dramatically from the 1990s,  not getting worse as Chiraq would have us believe.

The hard reality masked by Lee's stereotypes is that no gang leaders or magic bullets can stop the kind of spontaneous gang violence we are witnessing today. The gang peace conference in 1999 described in In$ane ended in the assassination of a gang leader by his own gang homies as he tried to negotiate peace. The futile tactics of the Chicago Police and CureViolence to threaten or cajole gang leaders don't work because gang leaders aren't in control of any armies.  Rep. Bobby Rush's trip to the federal prison in Florence, Colorado  to meet with Jeff Fort and Larry Hoover was 20 years too late and out of touch with reality. The 1990s gang wars ended for many reasons spelled out in my book. But the principle outcome was the undermining of established gang leaders and fracturing of African American gangs. 

Don't forget I said Lee's movie was NOT about Chicago. But that made one aspect of the movie maddening. One of the lead characters in Chiraq,  who contextualizes the violence and leads the protest march is a white priest played by John Cusack.  He is supposed to represent the real-life Father Michael Pfleger of St. Sabinas parish. In a Spike Lee movie, bewilderingly, a white person is the moral leader.  There are many views of Pfleger, but why are there no serious African American community leaders in the movie who talk to gang youth and work for peace?  Why didn't Spike Lee feature Minister Farrakhan or the active NOI gang outreach of Minister Michael D Muhammed?  If the movie is only loosely tied to present day Chicago, why feature a white priest?

I think this is the Hollywood angle of the movie. Chiraq seeks to be a cross-over and such movies need white heroes. I'm not sure it's going to work. My wife and I went to the movie at prime time in an upscale theater near our home.  There were only about two dozen people in the audience and we were the only whites.  What message did placing a white priest as the voice of reason and empathy send?  In Chicago's ghetto,  as well as in other cities,  it is African American community leaders who do the lion's share of the work for peace.   Shame on you, Spike Lee.

I was also unsatisfied with the film's minimizing of the impact of police violence. The movie invoked BlackLivesMatter with a familiar list of names of victims.  The idea that police violence, like the horrific police execution of Laquan McDonald,  has played a major role in stoking the hostility of black youth is totally absent.  As I said in the last line of In$ane, "In Chicago and elsewhere, history shows the gang problem is broader than just a problem of gang members."   This movie lets the cops off the hook.

Spike Lee's movie is about stereotypes. Unfortunately, instead of undermining them, he promotes them. 

The Interruptors: Why I don't like this movie.

I can’t join the parade for the recent movie The Interrupters.  I admire the former gang members, many of whom I know, working to stop the cycle of violence.  So what’s wrong?

You can see my problem by viewing this brief video clip from CeaseFire’s founder, David Kennedy. 

This is certainly an incredible tale with the emphasis on incredible.  To put it frankly, David Kennedy is lying.  Their own evaluations demonstrate that for all the millions of dollars in CeaseFire funding, there is little or no effect from their program. What we have with The Interrupters is the creation of a myth:  CeaseFire as a magic bullet to reduce violence. Send your money now. 1

Now, I admire the former gang members who work in CeaseFire. I know many of them and what they do is important and even noble. But what the police do is important too, if also problematic.  What churches and community organizations do is important.  There are many people out in Englewood besides CeaseFire putting their selves on the line on a daily basis, with little credit and less funding to “interrupt” violence.  What CeaseFire does is not new.  David Kennedy and his Chicago counterpart, Gary Slutkin, however, claim something more: that CeaseFire reduces violence and they point to a Northwestern University evaluation as proof. The problem is that if you actually read the evaluation, and more importantly the appendices where the data is displayed, you come to completely different conclusions than the PR spin from the academics who benefit most from the bloated administrative costs of CeaseFire and their newly claimed "superstar" status.

Carefully reading the study produces an embarrassment of riches. Since space is short, lets look at this chart buried in the body of the report.

Whoops. Except for one of seven Chicago neighborhoods, there is no demonstrable effect of CeaseFire’s programming by their own data.  A careful read of data analysis in the appendices by two respected academics, Richard Block and Andrew Papachristos, reveals statements again and again like “However the proportion of both the CeaseFire and comparison areas in the red or orange categories barely declined” (Block;  B-21) or  “both overall homicides and gang homicides dropped in the program and comparison areas, though neither change was statistically significant.” (Papachristos: C-12).

Papachristos even states that in Auburn-Gresham, the only neighborhood where there might be a CeaseFire effect:  “Yet, another spike in gang murders occurred in 2005, roughly two years after the start of CeaseFire”  (C-7).  Murders went up after CeaseFire was in full swing. What the heck is happening?

It’s not hard to figure out. Violence was already declining when CeaseFire began. Since they properly picked the highest violence neighborhoods, what we are seeing is “regression to the mean” or the tendency for high scores, or homicides, to decline over time toward the average. 

We might also ask the common sense question:  What accounts for variation in rates of homicide within a neighborhood?  CeaseFire is one intervention, but the evaluation admits that it does not take into account any other interventions or changed conditions that may have occurred.  Changes in police strategy?  Not measured. Changes in housing policy, which I showed to have a major effect on Chicago homicides in the 90s? Not measured. What about decisions by the gangs themselves, or action by churches or community groups that might vary by community?  Not measured, though Papachristos’ network analysis of gangs reports little or no changes in gang homicide.  What about neighborhood demographic changes or variation in employment? Not measured.

Some confusion may come from reading Skogan’s narrative in the evaluation. Nary a critical word can be found in his worshipful descriptions of CeaseFire. Where, for example, does he report on tensions with community agencies whose funding has been usurped by CeaseFire’s hogging of violence reduction resources? Where does he explore the problem of older former gang members who are completely out of touch with the younger generation? Where is the explanation of how much violence actually is “retaliation” and therefore even amenable to “interruption?”  The narrative is one-sided and uncritical, more fitting for a movie script than an expensive Justice Department evaluation.

And you know, sadly, it all comes down to the money. When the program started, violence was already on the decline and CeaseFire, just like the Chicago Police, claimed credit. What are they going to say when violence goes up? Oh, yeah, we need more money..... or cops. According to a state audit in 2007, CeaseFire in Illinois received more than $13 million,  not pocket change by any means.   The dozens of on-the-streets, risking-their-lives  violence interrupters, according to their own evaluation, were paid $189,050 total (3-19). CeaseFire is not a struggling grass roots program, but a multi-million dollar enterprise, now with their own myth-making movie.

Violence has deep structural roots untouched by Ceasefire.  A short paragraph at the end of the evaluation admits: “The reasons for this general decline in crime are, as elsewhere in the nation, ill-understood, and we could not account for possible remaining differences between the target and comparison areas in terms of those obviously important factors.”

But lets forget the facts. Watch the movie and send CeaseFire more money. The Open Society Institute has already swallowed the Kool-aid as CeaseFire is now in Iraq on its grand journey to “cure violence” all around the world. They say violence is a disease, like Aids, and the doctors have the cure.

Violence is not a disease, but that is a story for another day. My problems with CeaseFire begin with its shameless spin, and the movie adds to the myth. My reading of history is that major changes in behavior, like street violence,  occur with the emergence of mass social movements who challenge authority.   Social movements are about change. CeaseFire isn't about change, it's about big bucks.

Read the NU evaluation for yourself as well as the State of Illinois audit of CeaseFire.

1 CeaseFire in Boston is different in many respects from its more famous Chicago counterpart. Both, however, claim to have "the cure" for inner city violence.