It has often said that hurt people hurt people
Eddie Bocanegra was only a teenager when he decided he wanted to hurt the person
who hurt his friend what happened when he was 18 years old transformed his life
and that of his family forever please welcome him as he shares some of his
story and then discusses his ideas to remedy gun violence on the ground
so in my professional experience I've had the opportunity to meet so many
people and some of these people have been formally incarcerated and in some
cases people who have who are currently still incarcerated and I've asked the
question if there was a way then you could change the circumstances that
you're in right now what would you've done differently and surprisingly they
don't mention I wish I would have gone back to school or I wish I would have
seen a therapist or a psychologist
majority of the time they reference to that one moment in which they pulled the
trigger and they wish they could take it back so imagine if moving forward that
was possible imagine if we were able to use the science to help identify
individuals who are at the highest risk of gun involvement and intervene during
that moment imagine if instead of taking a punitive approach to addressing these
individuals we saturate them with resources and imagine if the people that
I'm referring to we actually saw them as family members
as brothers and sisters as father's as mothers as our own children so in the
line of work that I do I've been very blessed to be invited into the lives of
so many people particularly during a time in their lives where they're
drowning in misfortunes and which are suffering in which everything seems to
be going wrong and yet at the same time I've been very blessed to witness
people's resiliency and tenacity and love this is young man by the name
of Devon Divine's from a community in North Lawndale a community here in the
west side of Chicago young man about six to 63 lengthy and I couldn't help it but
the moment you see Devon is smiled his personality just seems to glow in fact
even rival gang members who typically would be opposed of his thoughts and
philosophies actually really take a liking of him which is rare to be quite
honest with you in some cases and so Devon he's been with us since early this
year actually late last year and he's been slowly moving up in the
stages and by stages I really mean he's achieving certain benchmarks of on kind
of behavior therapy on professional development showing up to work on time
showing up consistently and we're literally meeting him where he's at and
then van Devon is not an exception to any of the participants that we're
working with because Devon also has witnessed chronic violence from her
early age his mother's a matter of fact is still struggling with substance abuse
for a large period of his teenage lives he's been couchsurfing and more recently
he's been living with his aunt and his grandmother
so his coach which is who's facilitating economy here at therapy three times a
week with Devon shared a small glimpse of the journal that he's been writing
since day one and his first entries he's talking about how how much he hates the
environment that he's in the situation that he finds herself in he talks about
the challenges of having to navigate the community the neighborhood that he's in
and in many ways he's also describing that he doesn't see a real future
fast forward several months and his most recent entries he talks about how his
finding refuge with some of his peers he's created new alliances within their
organization within the program he has caring adults who really care for
him who have his best interests in mind and is also lifting up what he's
learning through kind of behavior therapy in fact to incentivize and to
reward him for his contributions and his commitment last Tuesday we had about 15
of our participants 15 of about 540 of the guys went now to one of our partner
sites which is a Chicago Bear so he went out and was exchanging smiles and
autographs and pictures with some of the players at their training camp and of
course that evening I was getting pictures from staff and they were
showing me all the smiles and the faces of our men who have actually in many
cases many of them have never even stepped out of our city let alone to go
out to the suburb
right now as I speak Devon is being carried in a coffin
by his family by some of his peers and ready and by some of the staff and
murder Chicago Devon the following day after he was the Bears camp trip the job
concluded around five o'clock him and two peers were walking back home
and for most of our men in our community that we serve they have to learn how to
navigate the community it's almost like walking and land mines and booby traps
and ambushes for whatever reason this particular day two decided to take a
different Street just one city street down from the normally route normal
route and a young man started chasing them they saw they had a weapon the
three young men three participants in very Chicago fled shots were fired
Devon fell and the young man with the gun allegedly walked up to the young man
Devon on the ground and unloaded the rest of his clip Devon
in that moment from witnesses stated that Devon beg for mercy I can't tell
you how this situation has impacted us as a family or the for his immediate
family but Devon has been one of ten individuals that we've lost this year so
far
imagine if the person who pulled the trigger would have been able to pause
for one moment and reflect and think about the consequences of his actions
imagine if you would have had the tools imagine that that young man would have
also been a part of ready Chicago and that is
exactly who already Chicago is designed to serve we work with the most
marginalized individuals in our city in the south side and the west side we work
specifically in four communities where we have the highest concentration of gun
violence in the highest recidivism of gun violence and really Chicago was born
as a result of 2016 spike in violence in our city where we had over 750 homicides
and about 4,500 shootings you know as clinicians then when these kind of
incidents happened they don't operate in isolation they don't operate in a vacuum
but every week we're grappling with shootings and
homicides now in our program there are three main objectives to help reduce
violence with the men in our program to provide a viable pathway through
employment opportunities and lastly to support the nonprofit partners that are
provided direct service so they could continue to do this work beyond the time
limit that we have the program is currently being evaluated through an RCT
study through the University of Chicago's Crime Lab and we are testing
and whether or not kind of behavior therapy and jobs are able to reduce
violence we have been able to leverage some of the best practices out there
people's experience with an injustice system people who are doing direct
service people possibly who are in this room like a good friend of mine dr.
brass go back and take their information and their knowledge and apply it that is
innovation and if we're going to address this issue of violence we have to think
creatively and we have to think outside the box because things that we've been
working on the last few decades are not working people across the country are
being killed Raina Chicago has identified about 1,100 people and I
apologize the numbers in my head are actually from last week
so these numbers you see here are from the end of May but we reached out by
1100 individuals and these are individuals in which we use predictive
analytics to help identify who is at the highest risk of gun involvement so we
use science we also use human Intel we have four amazing great street-level
organizations that are engaging community members and really spotting
who is more likely to be a victim or an offender of gun violence and then we
also have the Department of Corrections in the Sheriff's Office who also
identify individuals who have the most violent cases I'm not in the business of
creaming too many of us do that already and this is another reason why we are
where we're at right now because it's much easier to work with individuals who
have lesser offenses who are easier to engage who are willing to come to our
office but it is much more complicated to go out into the community and find
them the program is a 24 month program in which 18 months of the cert of the
services they receive is through subsidized employment opportunities they
are my colleagues there are employees of hardened alliance since the beginning of
this program we have about 540 participants who actually started off
the jobs think about it for a minute there is a misconception that people who
are drivers of violence don't really care about employment and I'm here to
disprove that by using real data to give you a snapshot of who it is that we work
with on average our participants in our program have about between 17 and 18
arrests and for them are furni convictions about 60% of our
participants also have children which for me it's an opportunity to stop a
cycle of violence
our hope with innovative Chicago is that as we provide kana behavior therapy
three times a week for an hour and a half time and we provide them a stipend
of twenty five dollars every single time that coupled with 29 hours of job
opportunities a skill building and professional development that they could
see him themselves of what's possible a
few years ago there were two siblings having a conversation across a small
coffee table and these two siblings were veterans of war the younger sibling was
in his uniform and his army fatigues and they were both exchanging stories of
first childhood memories they slowly escalated to stories of war of conflict
and they were not bragging about what they have done or what they have
witnessed but simply drawing the parallels between one who was deployed
in Iraq twice and then the other sibling the
older one who was in a civil war conflict and in exchange of these
stories as they were about to part ways and they were both standing up the older
brother saw his younger brother and he was just mesmerized are so proud of him
because in his left lapel he saw these amazing ribbons of all the achievements
and awards Bronze Star the missions that he's been a part of this deployments his
stripes as a sergeant and as he looked at himself he looked at his uniform and
ironically he had pants about this color navy blue and ironically a t-shirt about
this color and this his left lapel there was an ID with his picture and it
had be seven five seven eightt two in the north department of corrections in
the water the book on England I am the oldest of that sibling and I am
a sibling of two other veteran soldiers who served our country and we could
debate whether or not my upbringing in a community in the southwest of Chicago
was a war Commodore not I'm here to tell you that my exposure really felt like it
especially when you compare it to returning veterans I've served over 14
years in prison so my perspective in this work and how we've informed Brady
Chicago which by the way it is the largest violence prevention in the
country it is informed by the perspective that I bring both in terms
of the street gangs Penitentiary but also coupled by my education from the
University of Chicago and all the positions that I've had thus far as I
wrap up I want to leave you with this thought in the Gold Coast of Chicago we
have about three hundred and sixty five clinicians per thousand and in the west
side of Chicago we have 0.1 clinicians per thousand for
those who are not familiar with Chicago the Gold Coast very affluent very rich
and prosperous community what does that tell you because for the average person
one would assume that the me is much greater in the Gold Coast but the suit
is in homicides that I'm describing and the men in our program are not coming
from the Gold Coast there are coming from the west side that comes from the
south side and this is why accessibility it's important we need to be more
accessible and then note thank you so much for your time