Word: chicago
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Muna Farah (Nisreen Faour), the Palestian single mother who moves with her son from the West Bank to Illinois in the new film Amreeka, is painfully unprepared for the world outside the West Bank. When the customs agent at Chicago airport immigration asks for her occupation, she answers "Yes" with great enthusiasm, referring to the political state she's lived in. She's the sort of person who, if confronted with the anti-immigrant sentiment "Why don't you just go home?" would naively attempt to give an earnest answer, explaining about the limited educational opportunities for her smart teenage...
...inspiration for both Cincinnati and Chicago's programs was Boston's Operation Scrap Iron, which began 15 years ago. Now called Ceasefire, Scrap Iron shifted gang intervention from police work to a more elaborate behavioral approach that has two prongs: using law enforcement to aggressively get the message of zero-tolerance for homicide to individuals known to be violent or believed to have the potential for violence; and using trusted people in the community, who know the streets and the personalities in them, to convince potential felons to put down their guns. "One of the things we recognized is that...
...talk without feeling they are violating the unwritten "stop snitching" street code. That approach involves putting social workers in the street to directly confront the violence. "There are credible messengers who can go in and influence change in behaviors," says Tio Hardiman, director of the gang mediation arm of Chicago's program, also called CeaseFire. "Some of these guys used to run the streets and they have backbone and fortitude and they let them know they should be putting the shooting behind them, and the data we have is backing up our claims...
...found this is a documented best practice for reducing shootings and killings," says Ceasefire's Slutkin. But the Chicago program recently suffered from a huge budget cut, part of Illinois' overall cutbacks. The state used to account for $6 million of Ceasefire's $8 million budget. That state funding completely vanished when then Gov. Rod Blagojevich slashed spending, resulting in a loss of 150 staff jobs and a surge in violence in the South Side of Chicago, where Ceasefire does a lot of its work. After Blagojevich's successor, Pat Quinn, saw the increase in crime, the funding was fully...
...ascended most of the world's tallest buildings, including Taiwan's Taipei 101, Chicago's Sears Tower and the Eiffel Tower in Paris...