With “The Interrupters,” Alex Kotlowitz Goes Back to “the Other America”

After 25 years writing about violence, poverty, and crime in Chicago’s worst neighborhoods, I thought the author and journalist Alex Kotlowitz would be losing hope for solutions. In a phone interview in February I asked him why we had made so little progress. “Why,” I asked, “are these problems are so intractable?”

“I don’t think these problems are intractable,” he told me, “they’re certainly persistent, but they’re not intractable.”

“The Interrupters” has earned acclaim for its look at a new strategy for fighting violence in Chicago’s worst neighborhoods.

There are programs that are working, he said, but not much will be done if most of us can pretend the problems are not there.

“These are people who are spiritually and physically isolated from the rest of us, so it’s easy for us to just turn our heads,” said Kotlowitz, who lives in Oak Park, Ill., just west of Chicago. “It’s very easy for most of us to go about our lives without ever having to see these neighborhoods, this violence, or to interact with the people living with it.”

The previous evening Kotlowitz had taken 25 attendees through the making of his first documentary film, The Interrupters, at Northwestern University. The much-lauded film, directed by Steve James (Hoop Dreams, No Crossover) follows three violence interrupters working to curb the violence they once employed in their own Chicago communities.

The interrupters work for CeaseFire, a violence intervention program founded by the epidemiologist Gary Slutkin who believes violence mimics the spread of infections disease, so it must be stopped like a disease – by going to the source. The violence interrupters jump into the middle of tense, potentially violent disputes to mediate and “de-escalate a situation before it results in bloodshed,” according to the CeaseFire website.

Kotlowitz wrote There Are No Children Here, a book about two boys growing up in Chicago’s infamous Henry Horner Homes, in 1991. The book sparked a national debate about urban decay and drug violence, but the debate was fleeting.

“These things tend to go in peaks and valleys,” Kotlowitz said. “It’s hard to create lasting interest. The hard part for me is that these issues have not been a part of the public conversation for so long.”

Most of us, he says, have one of two reactions when we discuss these problems.

“One is to throw our hands up in resignation and say there’s nothing we can do,” Kotlowitz said. “The other is to say that these people are in these situations because of who they are.”

Kotlowitz said his experience reporting for two years in the Henry Horner Homes for There Are No Children Here, showed him just how deeply entrenched the roots of the violence in such neighborhoods are.

“I came away from that project incredibly depressed, and I didn’t live there that whole time,” he explained. “These people are living this, especially the kids. Adolescence, in the best circumstance, is tough. In that environment it’s unimaginable.”

Progress, but not where it’s needed most

There are signs of improvement in Chicago’s urban core. Since 1990 the number of murders in the City of Chicago has dropped from 900 annually to 431 last year. Experts cite many reasons for the decline – the waning of the crack epidemic; stricter sentencing; better policing, and programs like CeaseFire.

But for those living in the city’s worst neighborhoods, Kotlowitz said, it feels worse than it was 20 years ago. That’s because 90 percent of the city’s murders are concentrated in just 10 percent of its neighborhoods, like Englewood, where much of The Interrupters is filmed.

“In the places where the violence is concentrated it certainly doesn’t seem like a safer place,” Kotlowitz said.

In 2011, Englewood was the only Chicago neighborhood where the murder rate rose, climbing 40 percent over 2010.

There, Kotlowitz said, the violence feels more random than ever before, and it’s not primarily related to the drug trade or traced to our assumptions of what gang violence is.

“It’s not gang violence,” Kotlowitz said. “It’s the escalation of everyday minor squabbles into violence in neighborhoods where children learn to solve problems only with violence. They’re raised in it. They live in poor neighborhoods with parents who can’t find jobs, and they often go to schools that aren’t safe or don’t provide quality education.”

The Centers for Disease Control released a study in January that aimed to identify the causes of homicides in large cities in 17 states. It revealed that very few of those homicides are related to the drug trade. In Los Angeles, less than five percent of murders were found to be associated with drug trade or use.

In one of the film’s more evocative scenes, the violence interrupters, led by the fearless former drug enforcer Ameena Matthews, intercedes in a tense argument between two groups of teenagers on the verge of growing violent.

The root of the altercation? Five dollars.

“One of the revelatory moments in making this film for me was realizing that this violence comes from a different place,” Kotlowitz said. “There is stuff going on in their lives that has little to do with the moment at hand that causes relatively petty disagreements to become violent.”

Finding humanity

For 25 years Kotlowitz has used his books and reporting to bring humanity to a story usually told with grim statistics and splashy, if easily forgotten, headlines. In The Interrupters, he and James find that humanity again. At times the film is difficult to watch as characters sabotage their own lives, but there are surprising moments of humor as well.

In fact, Kotlowitz said he laughed more in the making of this project than in anything he has ever worked on.

Take the story of Flamo, introduced to the viewer as “a pretty stereotypical angry black man,” Kotlowitz said.

The violence interrupters visit his home to find him drinking and caught in a rage about having his home invaded and his family humiliated. Flamo is threatening violence, but in the midst of his tirade he is surprisingly funny.

“Without giving too much away, I’ll just say that Flamo’s journey is pretty darn surprising,” Kotlowitz said. “He has that anger, but his story reveals that the anger isn’t permanent. It’s not always there.”

People like Flamo are why Kotlowitz is not throwing up his hands. He believes that CeaseFire is making a difference, as are some programs being implemented in the city’s public schools. He made The Interrupters hoping to make people “sit up and pay attention,” not only to the fact that the violence continues, but also to the people who are working so hard to save their communities.

Still, the fact that Kotlowitz and James could make this film about the same problems, in the same city, that Kotlowitz wrote his heart-wrenching book about more than two decades ago, is distressing. It can leave the viewer feeling the same resignation Kotlowitz abhors, the same resignation that first piqued his interest in these issues when he visited the Henry Horner Homes to write captions for a photo essay in 1987.

At the Northwestern appearance Kotlowitz recalled meeting Lafayette, the young boy at the center of There Are No Children Here. The boy, then 11, told him the story of a murder he witnessed in his building.

“He told the story without any affect,” Kotlowitz explained. “It was striking, to the point that I nearly didn’t believe him. But in these communities such awful bloodshed had grown routine.

“That violence is what brought me there, and it’s what has kept me there.”

To watch The Interrupters, click here, where it’s available on PBS’s Frontline program. There you can also find chats with the characters and Director Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz, as well as information on where the main characters are now. To learn more about the film, including how to arrange a screening, visit the website here.