A months-long investigation into Chicago’s community violence intervention programs has found a billion-dollar industry funded increasingly by taxpayers, producing a fraction of the outcomes its advocates claim, and in some cases employing the very criminals it was designed to deter. Olivia Reingold, a staff writer at The Free Press, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss her findings, published under the title “What Happens When You Pay Ex-Gang Members to Stop Crime? Ask Chicago.”
Reingold said the investigation began after someone at a party mentioned offhandedly that Governor Pritzker had done a photo opportunity with a peacekeeper who was subsequently arrested as part of a crew that robbed the Louis Vuitton store on Michigan Avenue of roughly $700,000 in merchandise. One of the getaway cars from that robbery collided with another vehicle, killing a forty-year-old hospital researcher the day before his fiancée gave birth to their son. Reingold said she was struck by the fact that local press had covered the initial incident but done virtually no follow-up on the broader question of how often peacekeepers were being arrested and what the programs were actually producing.
Answering that question, she said, turned out to be extraordinarily difficult. Neither the Chicago Police Department nor the nonprofits running these programs track arrests of participants. After months of public records requests, Reingold was able to document twenty-nine arrests of peacekeepers or individuals arrested while wearing a peacekeeper uniform. That total included not just Kellen McMiller, the man photographed with Pritzker, but a second individual pictured with the governor that same day who was arrested weeks later on drug charges. Sources inside the programs described the situation to her as a revolving door for crime, an assessment she said came not from outside critics but from people directly involved in running the initiatives.
The financial architecture behind the peacekeeper model, Reingold found, traces back largely to Arie Duncan, the former education secretary under President Obama, and his primary financial backer Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, who together founded the organization Chicago CRED. What began as a privately philanthropic venture has become increasingly dependent on public money, and tallying the full scope of that spending required Reingold to go grant by grant across city and state disbursements over multiple years. Her conclusion was that approximately one billion dollars has been spent on alternative anti-violence programs of this kind in Chicago, with the taxpayer share growing steadily.
The return on that investment is difficult to assess in part because of how outcome data is generated. Reingold found that Chicago CRED contributes funding to a Northwestern University lab that produces research on the community violence intervention sector, research that advocates then cite as independent validation of their programs’ effectiveness. She described this as a circular evidentiary structure in which nonprofits point to data they have at least partially funded as proof that their approach is working. When she pressed CRED on the underlying numbers, she found that at two program locations the organization had spent ten million dollars annually and over several years graduated twenty-seven participants — a cost-per-success-story that she calculated at roughly $400,000, a figure she noted would be difficult to sustain or scale even with Powell Jobs’s resources behind it.
Proponents of the programs point to declining homicide and shooting numbers in Chicago, with figures roughly halving from a peak of around 800 homicides in 2021. Reingold acknowledged the improvement but noted that crime has declined nationally over the same period and that Chicago’s trajectory tracks broadly with that national trend rather than representing an outlier result attributable to local intervention programs. She also raised questions about arrest statistics cited as evidence of success, noting that declining arrest numbers may reflect prosecutorial reluctance under former State’s Attorney Kim Foxx rather than reductions in underlying criminal activity.
The most candid assessments Reingold gathered came from former gang members who have genuinely turned their lives around and are involved in community work, many of whom she said view the formal peacekeeper programs as farcical. Several told her that when they asked themselves honestly whether such a program would have changed their own trajectory, the answer was no — that incarceration, not a paid intervention job, was what finally forced a reckoning. The broader consensus among serious advocates she interviewed was that resources directed at young children, providing safe spaces, adult supervision, summer programming, and consistent access to basics like meals and libraries, have a far stronger evidence base than programs aimed at adults already embedded in gang life.
Reingold said she came away from the reporting with genuine sympathy for the scale of poverty and need she encountered in Chicago’s hardest-hit communities, and with respect for individuals doing authentic community work without compensation. Her concern is with a billion-dollar institutional layer that has grown up around those needs, insulated from accountability by self-funded research, sympathetic politicians, and a media environment that has largely accepted its marketing at face value.