The Survival Line As a Model for Community-Led Crisis Response

Background and Purpose: Community members seeking alternatives to policing have played a substantive role in promoting safety and responding to harm for decades. This study is a historical case study aiming to highlight strengths and limitations of one anti-carceral hotline formed several decades ago. The Survival Line was formed out of Chicago Urban League as a volunteer-run hotline to respond to community members’ concerns about neighborhood crime or police misconduct. It was established in summer 1970 as a mechanism for gathering data while also referring callers to community resources like pro bono attorneys and low-cost social services. It ran as a 24/7 hotline staffed entirely by volunteers from the Action for Survival coalition, a group of community-based organizations which included Chicago Urban League. In the first year that the hotline operated, about 2,000 calls were fielded. Using historical analytic methods, this study asks: what function did this citizen-run hotline serve in neighborhoods and marginalized communities, and what implications does this case study have for present-day community-based crisis response?

Methods: This study mobilizes archival research methods to analyze call records, meeting minutes, publicity materials, and internal memos from the Chicago Urban League and its Survival Line archives, which are housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago library and archival repository.

Results: This archival analysis found that the Survival Line served multiple functions; it was a non-state response to urban violence, a vehicle for neighborhood solidarity, and a mechanism for gathering data on crime and police misconduct in the city. The role of data collection in the operation of the Survival Line is distinctive because the data being collected was used in organizing and advocacy at meso and micro levels across local community organizations. Beyond its data collection function, the Survival Line’s modeling of a non-state response to violence in Chicago is significant for social work because of the contemporary push to generate alternatives to police-driven crisis and violence responses.

Conclusions and Implications: By functioning as an alternative to policing and state responses to crime, a vehicle for Black neighborhood solidarity, and a data-collection mechanism, the Survival Line was at the core of an impactful micropolitical intervention upon urban violence in 1970s Chicago. As a resource hub and referral clearinghouse, the relational ties forged through the Survival Line reflect micro-level political resistance to the status quo of policing as the solution to social problems in the city. As a historical example of community-driven violence and crisis response, this hotline has implications for contemporary social work–specifically for direct practice, community organizing, program design and evaluation, and community-based participatory research.