4
Something in the air
‘W with real violence.’ After a decade spent
working on disease epidemics in Central and East Africa, Gary
Slutkin had returned home to the United States. He’d chosen Chicago
to be near his elderly parents and was struck by the extent of violent
attacks in the city. ‘It was surrounding, it was inescapable and so I
just started to ask people what they were doing about it,’ Slutkin said.
‘And there wasn’t anything that anybody was doing about this that
made any sense to me.’[1]
It was 1994 and in the preceding year, there had been over eight
hundred homicides in the city, including sixty-two children killed in
gang violence. Even two decades later, homicide would still be the
main cause of death for young adults in the state of Illinois.[2] Slutkin
heard a range of explanations for the crisis, from nutrition and jobs to
families and poverty. But the discussions often came back to a narrow
set of solutions involving punishment. In his view, violence was what
he called a ‘stuck problem’. A physician by training, he’d seen similar
situations in his work with infectious diseases like / and
cholera. Sometimes the thinking about a situation gets stuck for
years. A strategy doesn’t really work, but it doesn’t change.
If violence were a stuck problem, it would need new thinking. ‘You
have to kind of start over,’ Slutkin said. So he did what any public
health researcher would do: he looked at maps and graphs, he asked
questions, he tried to understand how violence was happening. And
that’s when he started noticing familiar patterns. ‘The clustering seen
in maps of killings in US cities resembles maps of cholera in
Bangladesh,’ he later wrote.[3] ‘Historical graphs showing outbreaks
of killing in Rwanda resembled graphs of cholera in Somalia.’
S her water delivered each day. After her
husband had died, she’d moved from the bustle of London’s Soho to