Amid all the bad news of early 2012, one murder got my attention even more than the others. It was the first double homicide we’d seen in years, and both of the victims were only nineteen. Then, a few months later, an eighteen-year-old was killed in an unrelated incident at the same address. I wondered what could possibly be going on at this residential corner to make it so violent. So, on the quiet Saturday morning after that crime, I drove to the location, a few blocks from my boyhood home on College Street. Stepping out of my Taurus and standing alone on the lawn of the house, I tried to imbibe the energy of the place, seeking some kind of insight or understanding by virtue of being there. But the scene seemed totally ordinary. There was no sinister aura hanging in the air—just a regular house with white vinyl siding on a small corner lot.
A tired-looking man wearing a football sweatshirt walked toward me on the sidewalk, and then stopped next to me. I think he recognized me. I explained what I was doing there, not that it was really explainable, and he said that he was a relative of the victim. Then a couple more people appeared on the sidewalk, and a few more stepped out of two cars. Family, friends, and neighbors were converging, and soon it was clear that I had inadvertently crashed a kind of impromptu wake. I joined the neighbors in the headshaking, muttered condolences, and tried to think of something meaningful to say. Then one of the men pointed toward a car pulling up on the cross street. It was the mother of the victim, he said, and he asked if I wanted to go speak to her.
Honestly, I didn’t.
It’s not that I didn’t wish to comfort her or be helpful, it was just that I didn’t know how. I had expected to be here alone—and being among these mourners already felt like intruding. Besides, I had no relevant skills for this situation; nothing from my McKinsey training or college education was going to be useful here. I had no knowledge of grief counseling, no qualification for dealing with victims of this kind of trauma.
The grieving mother stepped out of the car, composed but devastated, leaning on a relative for support as she walked up the slight slope of the small lawn, not because she wasn’t physically able but in case she became overwhelmed with sorrow and unable to stand. And I realized then that, of course, I was going to have to go talk to her.
I approached her, and she recognized me. I shook her hand, which seemed like an absurd thing to do. I tried to think of something comforting to say, something about how the whole community was holding her in our hearts.
“I know you,” she said. Then, out of nowhere:
“Didn’t you go to Saint Joe?”
“Yes, I did.”
“I went to Saint Joe, too. So we have something in common!”
Small talk felt unnatural in the midst of grief—but isn’t that what we need, sometimes, when grieving? Just someone to talk to, about nothing in particular. Nothing profound. Just being there.
I don’t remember the particulars of the conversation. I’m sure it was awkward, and consisted mostly of generalities and obvious expressions of sympathy, a pitter-patter that I would have thought of as inappropriate for the situation before I became more practiced in consolation and mourning.
Yet later, occasionally, I would run into her or another relative who would let me know how much that conversation had meant. It was humbling, since I had not said anything memorable or used any particular skill. But this was the point: you do not necessarily console through the wisdom of your words, especially as a public official. It was a powerful, if grim, early lesson in the fact that as an elected official, I had become a symbol. What mattered to her was that I showed up. In contrast to my student or consulting days, the value was not in the cleverness of what I had to say, but simply the fact of my being there. Not that I, Pete, was there, but the mayor was there—a walking symbol of the city, and therefore a signifier of the fact that the city cared about her loss.
CARING, OF COURSE, is not enough. As the count of shootings rose, I became more practiced and capable at consoling bereaved mothers, and utterly sick of doing so. Every time, there were the usual cathartic statements about how we as a community won’t tolerate this kind of violence, “never again,” and so forth. But what would it actually take? Attending the funeral of a teenager whose mother worked as a secretary for the city, I asked myself what would have to happen for us to change the trajectory of violent crime in the community. The police were policing, preachers were preaching, the politicians were condemning, and yet here I was at a funeral for a fifteen-year-old boy, and I knew he likely wouldn’t be the last teenager we would lose that year.
Somewhere in the course of my search for answers, I learned of the Boston Miracle. In the late 1990s, during a similar crisis, community leaders tried a new approach to dealing with the gang-related violence that was causing an epidemic of youth homicide. Using rigorous analysis to map group associations, a team of researchers joined with prosecutors, law enforcement, social service providers, and faith leaders to identify and contact the people most likely to kill or be victimized. The young men (nearly always men) were gathered, in person, for a “call-in.” Here, officials and community members would promise to concentrate all law enforcement attention on anyone involved in the next group or gang to be involved in a killing—and also offer social services for those prepared to make a change before it came to that. Sometimes misunderstood from the right as an amnesty or from the left as a crackdown, the strategy’s true core is in recognizing that would-be shooters are also people. Leaving aside the handful of people who are actually pathological, most of them just make decisions based on incentives and influences around them.
The overall message was, “We’ll help you if you let us and we’ll stop you if you make us,” and it was backed by agencies committed to keeping their promises on both enforcement and support. Reading David Kennedy’s book Don’t Shoot, which explains the approach in detail, I learned of the dramatic drop in violent crime in some cities that successfully executed the strategy.
Under various names including “Operation Ceasefire” and “Group Violence Intervention,” versions of this approach were being used more and more widely around America, and I decided to apply it in South Bend. Controversially, I hired an outsider from Massachusetts to fill a vacancy in the position of police chief, and with him convened an Anti-Violence Commission consisting of relevant players from around South Bend. Mixing the symbolic and the substantive, we sat around a big square table at the West Side’s Martin Luther King Center, on public display acknowledging the problem and committing to the strategy. Over a period of months, one working-group session after another honed the plan. The “call-in” was arranged, set for precisely one hour, the speakers carefully chosen and rehearsed. A mother, a pastor, a prosecutor, an ex-offender, and so on. I couldn’t be there for the evening of the first call-in, on military duty half a world away. All I could do was watch the numbers, as a violent spring of 2014 gave way to a period of relative peace after the event.