More than 16 hundred people have been shot this year in Chicago. Increasingly, the city is leaning on anti-violence workers to try and bring that number down.

There are hundreds of these workers - many of them former gang members. As part of their job, they step into the middle of intractable gang conflicts to try and prevent further shootings.

WBEZ’s Patrick Smith spent a year documenting their work for the most recent season of our Motive podcast.