There's a moment inwhen Cobe Williams, a man who works for the Chicago anti-violence organization CeaseFire, gets a call from someone he'd met in the County Jail a number of years back.
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There's a moment in The Interrupters (a collaboration with my longtime friend, the acclaimed director Steve James and co-producer Zak Piper) when Cobe Williams, an affable, teddy-bear of a man who works for the Chicago anti-violence organization CeaseFire, gets a call from someone he'd met in the County Jail a number of years back.

Cobe once ran the street, shooting at people and getting shot at. He spent a total of 12 years in prison. To meet him now, though, it's hard to imagine him as an angry, hardened kid, someone whom I suspect many, if not most, would have written off. I have no doubt that had we met Cobe when he was in teens, most -- including myself -- would've predicted the shape of his narrative. And it wouldn't have been a story to celebrate. But Cobe, during his last stint in prison, realized he wanted to be there for his son. It would perhaps be too glib to suggest he's been transformed. Rather, he's figured out who he always was -- and who he wanted to be.

So, he gets this call from Flamo, a man in his early 30s who has a reputation on the streets for, as Cobe says, "taking care of his business." Flamo's reaching out to Cobe. He's in a fury, about to exact revenge. Someone had called the police on Flamo, reporting that he had guns in his house. When the police came, Flamo wasn't home, but they found the guns and arrested his brother, who was in a wheelchair as a result of being shot, and handcuffed his mother. By the time Cobe got to Flamo's house -- with us in tow -- Flamo had been downing Vodka, packing a pistol, waiting for a friend to bring him a car without license plates so he could 'take care of his business.' I don't want to give away the entire scene, but suffice it to say Flamo is boiling with rage, so much so that at one point he violently kicks a wall in his house, declaring: "You ain't just crossed me, you crossed my f..'n mama. For my mama... I come in your crib and kill every motherf... body."

Cobe told us later he thought this was a lost cause, a failed interruption. About ten minutes into his rant, though, Flamo turns to Cobe. "How can you help me? Right now. How can you help me?" Flamo demands.

"The only thing I can do," Cobe replies, "is try to get to know you more, spend a little time with you..."

"We can to go lunch right now? And we can sit down, we can talk about this motherf... problem? That's what you telling me?"

Cobe, who by this point, isn't quite sure what he's gotten himself into nods. "Yea," he says. "We could go out now."

Cobe takes Flamo to a nearby chicken shack, where Flamo, still agitated, calls a friend to get some bullets. Cobe then takes Flamo down to CeaseFire's offices where he invites Flamo to attend the weekly meeting of the Interrupters, men and women with similar resumes as Cobe's, and whose job it is to suss out simmering disputes in their neighborhoods, and then try to defuse them. By the time the meeting's over, Flamo's calmed down enough that he no longer seems intent -- at least at that moment -- to exact revenge.

I suppose the story could end here, but what's so striking is how Cobe stays with Flamo, calling him, taking him out for meals, cajoling him to get a job. Cobe won't let go. And in the end, you come to realize that all Flamo needed was someone to listen, someone to acknowledge his grievance, someone to believe in him. Cobe knew this instinctually. In his own life, Cobe had a grandmother who refused to give up on him. Despite all the trouble he had gotten into, Cobe told me, "she never turned her back on me."

Over the course of the 14 months Steve and I filmed, it became apparent that the one constant for those, like Cobe -- and Flamo, for those who were able to emerge from the wreckage of their lives and their neighborhoods was to have someone in their lives who carried high expectations for them, someone who treated them with a sense of dignity and decency, someone who wasn't afraid to slap them across the head when they did something wrong (when Cobe was a teenager, his grandmother refused to bond him out of jail) but who never viewed them as an inherently bad person. Someone who saw something in them others didn't. We're quick to judge, to pigeonhole people, especially when it comes to those with whom we have little connection. Consider the language in the media.

There was a period when the press used the term 'superpredators' to refer to teenagers involved in violence. We glibly refer to troubled youth as 'thugs' or 'gangbangers'. The police call them, simply, 'the bad guys.' I mention this because this is not only about personal relationships, but also how the rest of us come to view and talk about those living in the deep and profound poverty of our cities.

The Nigerian-born novelist Chimamanda Adichie talks about the danger of the single narrative, the notion that we think we know someone's story just by where they live or by their circumstance. But do we? In my first book, There Are No Children Here, Jimmie Lee was the leader of the local gang, and he virtually controlled the neighborhood I wrote about. He had more sway than the police. When he was sentenced for possession and intent to sell drugs, the judge called him "evil." Jimmie Lee, now silverhaired, is in his early 60s. He works as a Violence Interrupter for CeaseFire. We've shared a beer together, and talked about old times and the new. Who says there aren't second acts in life?

It perhaps seems self-evident and even perhaps glib, but it's worth contemplating nonetheless: Once people stop believing in you, you stop believing in yourself.

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