Chicago’s Community Violence Intervention (CVI) operations have been reeling over the past few days after a lengthy article and video published in The Free Press by reporter Olivia Reingold cast the entire philosophy of hiring former gang members to try and stop future murders and violent crime as little more than a racket replete with corruption, fraud and abuse.

To Reingold’s credit, the piece was deeply reported and offered some receipts. Not to mention it offered much catnip for right-wing media outlets who are looking for another example of Minnesota-style welfare fraud and long have accused Chicago journalists of being overly snowed by the CVI ethos.

Reingold wrote of millions of dollars disappearing into opaque operations, of so-called peacekeepers themselves being arrested for subsequent violent crimes and drug offenses, of peacekeepers collecting stipends and doing little or nothing to earn them. She makes much of an incident last fall involving a man named Kellen McMiller who had been involved with Chicago CRED, the organization founded by former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and then went on to rob the Louis Vuitton store on Michigan Avenue; the getaway car crashed and killed an uninvolved man.

Unfortunately for Gov. JB Pritzker, he had posed earlier with McMiller during a visit to nonprofit Public Equity in Englewood, with the governor telling McMiller that he believed community members would feel safer around him than, Pritzker implied, cops. Pritzker did not know at the time of the photo-op that McMiller and his accomplices would soon be facing first-degree murder charges. One can imagine the picture of two smiling faces (one a governor, one a felon) resurfacing during a presidential campaign.

So it’s a good moment to re-examine what has for us been a long-term commitment to organizations like CRED, which stands for Create Real Economic Destiny. That’s a reference to what Duncan always intended, and rightly so, as a holistic approach to the problem of violent crime, involving not just violence interrupting by former gang members turned peacekeepers but better education and job opportunities for the young people most at risk.

We’ll give you our bottom line right here: We continue to support CVI efforts because Chicago’s murder rate is dropping and we believe, and plenty of academic research shows, they are contributing to the improvement.

To wit: 2025 saw the lowest number of killings since 1965. There were 573 homicides in 2024 but 416 in 2025. There were also one-third fewer shootings in Chicago in 2025 than in the prior year. And shootings are down nearly 60% since 2021. These are hard facts, not individual events that conform to the predetermined points of view of either the left or the right.

There are, of course, many other contributing factors to the drop in crime. We’ve never been part of the CVI-instead-of-cops crew or of the group that sees its role as minimizing incarceration. We find the arguments against ShotSpotter and other gun detection systems reflective of leftist ideological dogma squelching simple common sense. We see the same anti-police biases in the media as did Reingold. And we think Chicago cops stop their share of murders by the old-fashioned method of getting the likely perpetrators off the streets while also understanding and helping these violence-plagued communities far more than many realize.

Most importantly, there’s no doubt in our minds that the tougher policies toward requesting detention and ensuring prosecution put in place by Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, as compared with her predecessor Kim Foxx, are also a good part of the reason those murders are dropping, along with other structural factors that flow from things outside the world of crime prevention. Violent crime rates fell last year throughout the nation.

Many hundreds of millions of public and philanthropic dollars have been flowing into CVI (although The Free Press story feels dated to us, in terms of the significant recent decreases in federal and state funds applied to these initiatives). Still, millions of dollars hit the street; there always will be some level of waste.

Not every nonprofit that declares itself a fighter for peace, and requests funding accordingly, will be worth the fiscal confidence of others. We have more trust in groups coordinated by the likes of CRED and the Metropolitan Peace Initiative; even then, the accountability measures need to go all the way down to the ground level.

But here’s the tricky part. We believe that if you are going to employ folks with credibility with gang members, whose battles cause the vast majority of Chicago murders, you have to use at least some people with histories of gang membership. And some of those people inevitably are going to relapse.

When they do, agonizing headlines result and rightly so. But on the other hand, a rehab center for alcoholics doesn’t fold because one of its participants goes on a bender. Nor does it close down if that person is a counselor, being as nobody is better than helping someone get sober than someone who got sober themselves. There is a commitment to that philosophy, even as there is a determination to minimize bad outcomes as much as is humanly possible.

Several of our editorials this past week have been about the consequences of violent crime in Chicago. That’s true of many of our weeks.

For that to change, we need CVI just as we need a state’s attorney unafraid of getting violent criminals off the streets and just as we need a well-equipped and well-supported police force that, yes, gets a fair shake in the media.

Let’s also remember that peacekeepers are putting themselves in harm’s way every time they step into the middle of a dispute and some have died doing so. This should not be a competition between cops and community interventions. We need all of these tactics in our fight against violent crime.

So, yes, Reingold’s story identified some disturbing failures. The new progressive philanthropic model of just handing over the money with minimal oversight, and in some cases minimal reporting, so as not to burden the recipients can’t be used in an arena where wasted dollars can mean wasted human lives. Fear of being charged with racism has been behind plenty of bad philanthropic decisions. CVI programs must never be above close scrutiny from outside.

But make no mistake. We need people on the streets in their peacekeeper vests, damping down emotions and trying to get would-be combatants to see these acrimonious situations in a less violent way. We should be improving what they do, and who does it, every day. And those who fall short should be held accountable.

But the drop in crime is the drop in crime. Leaders like Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling support CVI not for political reasons, but because he knows it works.

Just like us, he can read the results.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.