On a summer evening in the South Side region of Chicago known as the “Wild Hundreds,” Cedric Hawkins walked with a cheery mob of current and former gang members, pointing out invisible landmarks.

A few square blocks bounded roughly by 117th and 119th on either side of Perry Street in West Pullman is Buff City, named for a Black Disciples member who was killed when Hawkins was a teenager. The slight slope along South Michigan Avenue divides Up the Hill and Down the Hill, topography that borders two cliques of Gangster Disciples. 

“And the GDs that stay up the hill don’t like the GDs down the hill,” said Hawkins. “And all that can change by the day.”

He also points out closed schools and formerly vibrant shops, and even a site that was most meaningful to one of Hawkins’ fellow travelers.

“That dude up there, he got shot right on this corner,” Hawkins notes as he walks toward the intersection of State and 119th, gesturing toward a tall gang member with thick braids hanging below his baseball cap a few paces ahead.

“Nine times,” the one-time victim says matter-of-factly.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Such hard-won knowledge of the streets is among the unique qualifications for the dozen or so South Siders canvassing this often-violent section of West Pullman and Roseland.

As Memorial Day weekend marks the unofficial start of summer — and historically, a seasonal surge in violence — CRED is one of more than a dozen community-based organizations that are dividing some $11 million in state funding to try and prevent violence, including through the group’s FLIP program, which provides $100 daily stipends to “peacemakers.”

FLIP (Flatlining Violence Inspires Peace) and similar programs have nearly doubled in size thanks to funding from the state Department of Human Services and an influx of local, federal and philanthropic dollars amid a surge in violent crime that coincided with the coronavirus pandemic.

All told, this summer will have 500 workers assigned to 102 “hot spots” — pockets in Chicago’s 14 most violent neighborhoods that, combined, account for half the city’s homicides. Another “crisis team” of 30 outreach workers was launched this year to work in the city’s bustling downtown.

From February to May, when FLIP workers were deployed, targeted hotspots have seen a 21% decrease in shootings, well above a 14% decline citywide during the same period. In 88 of the 102 hotspots, there were no shootings at all, according to a preliminary report by the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research & Science at Northwestern University.

The study notes the data is still too incomplete to draw a link between the presence of FLIP workers and shootings. But a growing body of evidence is showing that FLIP and outreach programs targeting the people most involved in violence can curb homicides, said state Sen. Robert Peters (D-Chicago), who sponsored the Reimagine Public Safety Act, and paved the way for state funding for FLIP-style programs.

“These folks are working in the hottest zones of the city, taking immense risks and it has a track record of success,” Peters said. “We have to make sure that we are trying things that are working and moving away from things that aren’t.”

Former CPD Deputy Chief Anthony Riccio, who retired this year after three decades in the department, has seen FLIP and many of is predecessors come and go. He recalled when the city put $2 million into CeaseFire, which hired former gang members as “interrupters” to suppress ongoing conflicts. CeaseFire lost city funding amid the economic downturn in 2009, never having won the trust of CPD brass or rank-and-file officers, Riccio said.

“You can never quantify shootings that don’t occur, so I think it’s hard to say they de-escalated anything,” Riccio said. “From a police perspective, I think a lot of officers would prefer that money be spent other ways… I’d rather have two police officers than 30 violence interrupters any day of the week.”

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

For their stipends, FLIP participants take on an eight-hour shift, Tuesday through Saturday, suppressing violence in their neighborhoods. The workers get training in conflict resolution, but their credibility to mediate disputes and know when friction between groups is inching toward gun play, comes from having once — and for some recruits, still having — a foot in street life, said Terrance Henderson, manager of Outreach Operations for CRED.

Henderson acknowledges that police and residents in hot spot neighborhoods may not recognize when FLIP workers have moved from being bad actors to peacemakers. FLIP workers wear colored vests in part to identify themselves, and hopefully avoid attacks from former rivals, or being stopped by police who may have arrested them before.

“There are a lot of guys out here who won’t give us the time of day. They’re completely engulfed in the warfare and the violence,” Henderson said, watching as a half-dozen members of his FLIP crew pushed a stalled car down South Michigan. These here are trying to make a change. Give ‘em a little grace.”

Rival gang members also may not identify, or much care, about the shift. Ronnie Roper was gunned down two weeks ago, in broad daylight and in front of a building where CRED holds classes for a program of intensive job training and cognitive behavioral therapy. Roper was on track to earn a high school diploma in August, though he remained too “hot” to do outreach work, or even to be seen out in the open, Henderson said.

“There are some people who are just too hot to ever be out here. They’ve just done too much, and too many people will be looking for them, always,” Henderson said. 

Recruits for FLIP are drawn from a pool of Chicagoans, nearly all of them Black and Latino men in their teens to 30s, who are among the most at-risk of being shot or shooting someone else. They’re identified by an algorithm that analyzes webs of family and friendships called social networks, data on shootings and arrests, as well as knowledge gleaned by outreach workers on the players in ongoing conflicts. Statistically, they are 50 times more likely to be shooters or victims than the average Chicagoan.

FLIP workers tend to be younger, in their teens and 20s and far closer to the violence, and therefore, more able to talk to some of the most active participants in gang conflicts, which often stem from minute, banal personal grudges.

Charles Bowers, 26, is working for FLIP covering a few blocks of Buff Town that surround the home where he grew up — and at one time sold drugs and ran with gang members. Standing on the porch of a house on Perry Street, he recalled that a close friend had been shot in the chest in the same spot just a few years ago. Down the block, days earlier this month, Bowers was able to tamp down a conflict between an active gang member he’d known since childhood and an older man who was brandishing a gun.

“I seen he had a gun, and I stepped in, just got between ‘em,” Bowers recalled. Asked how he was able to diffuse such a tense situation, or not be shot himself, Bowers gave a puzzled grin, as if the answer were obvious.

“They’re my people. I know them, they know me,” Bowers said. “They know I’ve been out there, I’ve done stuff. I changed that, but I’m still a regular person to them.”

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times