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Bam, then a pause. Bam. Bam. Bam.

Mayor Tishaura O. Jones didn’t duck. She didn’t flinch. She calmly looked over her shoulder in the general direction of the noise. Jones was, as luck would have it, in the Dutchtown neighborhood on the city’s south side, holding a news conference with Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas about the problems related to gun violence in both of Missouri’s biggest cities.

“I hear gunshots in my neighborhood every night,� Jones said as the cameras continued to roll. “My son and I fall asleep to the lullaby of gunshots.�

The phrase packs a punch like a poignant poem meant to shock the senses.

Indeed, in north St. Louis, where Jones grew up and still lives, and in south St. Louis, where the gunshots rang out, too many children and their mothers have their sleep disturbed by a nightly melody of popping gunfire.

“That really hurt me,� says Sal Martinez, of how he felt when the mayor spoke of falling asleep at home with her teenage son, with gunshots as an unwanted lullaby. Martinez is the CEO of the , the nonprofit that supervises two of the Cure Violence programs in the city; one in Dutchtown and another on the north side, in the Wells-Goodfellow and Hamilton Heights neighborhoods. A third Cure Violence program is supervised by the Urban League in the Walnut Park neighborhood. Cure Violence is the program through which violence “interrupters� talk with young people, with their parents and their neighbors, trying to calm frayed nerves and seeking solutions to problems so they don’t end up in death.

That’s one of the topics that was on Jones’ mind as she hosted her fellow mayor from across Missouri. They spoke about programs like Cure Violence, and the “Cops and Clinicians� program in which social workers respond to some incidents with police officers. Those programs, Jones says, are key to getting to the root of the city’s long-standing violence problems. Though delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, the mayor believes the programs are working. While early evidence is anecdotal, homicides are down significantly in St. Louis in 2021.

But reminders — like midday gunshots — are a constant in some parts of town.

“That typically doesn’t happen in Dutchtown in the middle of the day,� Martinez says. “It was a fairly unusual situation. It is the sort of thing that happens more at night. I was shocked. I was disappointed that it happened. It was a stark reminder that there are too many guns out in the community. I’m going to assume that it was probably an illegal firearm. This is something that we see a lot. My Cure Violence staff tells me they see people with guns every day. They’re not trying to hide them. This is why our work to change social norms is so important.�

The interrupters, who spend time in the neighborhoods at night trying to stop violence before it happens, have a daunting challenge that involves convincing young people that there’s a better way to solve their problems than to shoot bullets at each other. And when they succeed at getting people to listen, then comes the hard work:

“We know we are asking them to change the life that they are living,� Martinez says, “so that means we have to provide housing and clothing assistance, help with job skills.�

All of those things cost money; and that money for too long — at least from an institutional and government perspective — hasn’t very often been invested in the parts of St. Louis where, sometimes at least, gunshots can be heard in the middle of the day, as a poignant reminder of the challenges facing the city.

After the gunshots were fired near the news conference, Cure Violence workers tried to track down the story behind them. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ wanted to head off the cycle that so often leads to more gunshots, and then a rise in the city’s homicide count.

In some ways, that midday lullaby served as a reminder to the people Martinez leads, about how important their work is. Important not just for the young people they are trying to save, but for the others living in the neighborhoods who just want to lay their heads down at night for a peaceful rest.

“Mayor Jones could be my cousin, my sister, my aunt,� Martinez says. “To hear her say that, it shows you how real this program is. It was a stark reminder for me to tell the team that this is what we’re really dealing with here. A lot of people want to change; they just have to be given the opportunities to do that.�