Managing violence, Chicago-style

In the past year, I've written multiple articles about the war crimes tribunals and violence in Bangladesh. People tend to say I must be too coddled by my Western upbringing to understand Bangladesh's problems. It's a funny remark, because when it comes to violence, it's totally untrue. My city, Chicago, is more objectively violent than Dhaka.

As a result, we've been forced to develop insights that might be useful to Bangladesh.

A recent documentary, the Interrupters, details the violence in Chicago. "Shooting at two in the afternoon when it's kids coming home from school!" violence prevention worker Ameena Matthews roars at a group of teens in one scene. They seem ashamed. When I saw the movie, though, her indignation left me surprised. At the time, I was living on Chicago's Southwest side. My house was near two schools, but I heard gunfire at all hours– including, yes, when kids were going home from school. It was horrifying, but ordinary.

In January, when yearly data became available about murders in American cities, Chicago was ranked among the most violent. No one was surprised. Actually, the city government enjoyed pointing out the 20% decrease from the previous year.

I found it hard to celebrate that. (It might not be true anyway). Instead, I compared the figures to data from the Dhaka Municipal Police. I realized that Dhaka – allegedly the second least livable city in the world– appears to be the more peaceful of the two.

The numbers are clear. The Chicago area had 415 murders in 2013. The Dhaka Metropolitan Police website reports 259 murders in Dhaka in 201. Dhaka has about 144 lakh people. This means it has 1.80 murders per one lakh people. Chicago area has 95 lakh people, and therefore 4.63 murders per one lakh people. In other words, Chicago had a per-capita homicide rate almost two and a half times as high as Dhaka.Between the two nations, it's much the same. Bangladesh reports a murder rate of 2.7 per 1 lakh people; the US, 4.7 per lakh. (This does not include the special case of Rana Plaza.)

The University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt has commented that at one point drug dealers in Chicago neighborhoods had a morality rate twice as high as American soldiers in the last Iraq War. It is hard to overstate the mental trauma that comes from living in such conditions – or how, as in Dhaka, violence in Chicago has taken on a festering chronicity, far outliving the reasons it first emerged. Last year, a popular American radio show detailed life at a Chicago school where 29 students had recently been shot. Three had died. Surviving students were fatalistic about being killed. None of them could quite explain what the inherited violence was about.

The story was deeply sympathetic to the kids' suffering. One of the journalists was Alex Kotlowitz, the same guy who produced the Interrupters. He brings a surprising gentleness to both projects.

In Dhaka, I thought of that often – not only my city's extreme violence, but the mild-mannered way we react to it. I thought of gentleness during the war crimes tribunals, amidst a crowd at Shahbagh screaming for people to hang, and during the calls for the banning or elimination of political groups.

The argument against gentleness has been that any leniency towards war criminals will be an opening to more violence from the same perpetrators or their allies. (At one Shahbagh protest, a muktibahini veteran told me he feared Pakistan would attack Bangladesh again.) Younger Shahbagh activists have rallied around banning Jamaat, whose members are on trial for war crimes, the perpetrators of recent violence against minorities, and clear opponents of Shahbagh's overall political stance. Old and young both tend to phrase opposition in the strongest possible terms. Many scorn a gentler response.

It's not irrational to be angry at previous abuses or to want to remove a perceived threat. Here's the thing about responding to violence without gentleness, though: Chicago already tried that.

Being "tough on crime," as the saying goes, has been required in many American politicians' careers over the past decades. The outcome has been more prisons nationwide; strict sentencing for criminals; and in a few states, renewed support for the death penalty. America is now the global epicentre of prisons, with the highest rate of incarceration per capita of any country in the world.

No one could claim Chicago goes easy on criminals. Beyond the harsh punishments permitted by law, Chicago was once known for police brutality, including the torture of hundreds of accused criminals. It would be hard to envision a less gentle approach to violence.

We eventually discovered that the outcomes of this approach served few. There's no evidence that the legal penalties of longer prison sentencing or imposition of the death penalty has prevented violent crime. It hasn't had a clear impact on any crime in the US, which remains among the highest in the developed world. It hasn't helped Chicago end its severe problems with killings.

In light of this, many Chicagoans have stopped believing the premise that some Bangladeshis support: that brutality or severe punishment of violent people could ever reduce threats or lead to greater safety. We tried that. It failed.

Kotlowitz's gentle style is more common now.

Evidence shows gentleness works. The most famous example is Cure Violence (formerly called Ceasefire), the programme shown in the Interrupters. This organisation regards violence as an infectious disease and focuses on ending transmission. This means sending community health workers ("violence interrupters") to talk to people threatening to commit violence. To be clear, these are not police. They're regular people, unarmed. Usually, their work hinges on alliances with the people who present a threat – just enough to avert violent acts. The programme has had large positive effects.

Gentleness does not mean approval. The people targeted for this programme are not considered nice. Many are gang members. Some have committed violence already. If they commit violence again, they can be arrested and imprisoned. The point is to reduce the threat they pose. The crucial step is not excusing their wrongdoing, but rather, defining their violent urges as a disease changes the question from "How do we remove power from this evil person?" to "What can be done to heal the person so he can act right?"

For people concerned about violence in Bangladesh, adopting Cure Violence's perspective might be wise.

In reality, this isn't a big shift. There was a simple and profound statement implicit within the Shahbagh protests last year: when Pakistanis and razakars attacked Bengalis, something was wrong with them. The perpetrators were to blame for violence, not the victims. For survivors of traumatic violence, refusing to carry shame is crucial. Shahbagh made this real for Bangladesh. That is a huge accomplishment.

Rephrasing its message very slightly aligns it with Cure Violence's viewpoint: when people commit violence, it is because something is wrong with them. From there, it becomes easy to see that in the future Dhaka's answer to the threat of violence should not be banning or hanging. It should be similar to the approach of a city much more violent than yours: restoring the perpetrator's blighted humanity by inducing him to change.

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M. Sophia Newman, MPH, is a public health researcher specialising in mental health.