Written by Don Washington   

There are 507 less Chicagoans due to gun violence and 2013 got off with a bang… We are at five and it’s not even the 5th… we’re number one… but 2013 does not have to be 2012 with new improved mayhem. For that to happen however, we, the public, need to be really clear about how we ended up with so many of us shot down dead on our streets.

Violence is not a cause of a society’s decline it’s a signpost… a derivative side effect of something else being deeply wrong with one’s approach to public policy. When poverty and financial inequality get out of hand and public policy does nothing or the wrong things to address them, violence manifests like a tagalong sociopathic brother with nothing better to do than pop a cap in a mother#*c@$.

Addressing violence means pouring public resources into places impacted by violence. The rub is that unless you want Somalia or its American equivalent Newark, to spring up in your city and spread like a cancer you have to pour public resources into the area and our Mayor has been pouring resources into the neighborhoods hit by violence. The results have been demonstrably bad. You would think this would cause the Mayor to change strategies and tactics and it might but the strategies and tactics are not what’s creating these bad outcomes… it’s our Mayor’s philosophy.

So whatever he comes up with the one thing we can count on is that it will not work. This is because no matter how many rocks you throw a guy he just won’t float. This is the point where you ask, what the hell is wrong with his philosophy and then I tell you what I think and everyone starts arguing among themselves.

His Royal Badness, Mayor Marmoset 1% Rahm Emanuel is a political operative who has spent his political career in the service of the most powerful, amoral and demonic corporate interests this country has ever known. He shares with them the brutal philosophy of the balance sheet. It begins with an utter disdain for the public sector and leads to public service on the cheap and in this case public safety on a shoestring. We cannot argue that this approach has been a wholesale disaster.

Violence is driven by poverty, unemployment and economic inequality. Responding to it by cutting city services and eliminating jobs in communities hardest hit by violence, dispatching aggressive and overworked policemen to contain and respond to that violence and then spinning numbers to pretend like this bad strategy is working is not going to make things any better.

For Rahm using money to deliver public service to people who can’t turn it into a profitable enterprise is fundamentally antithetical to his political DNA. Since I live in one of those neighborhoods right in the middle of the distribution of bullets to bodies I have a vested stake in getting this man to consider coming up with an effective solution set. Not that he reads this blog or the dozens of other places this scribbling is going to turn up but on the off chance he does I’d like to think I could give him something he could take credit for doing… like his fictional book the Thumpin’.

Here are some facts and possible solutions:
• One, you can’t “solve” violence by “attacking” it. The preponderance of studies on crime tells us that arresting people and writing tickets does not impact crime. If you just did a spit take that is understandable because that’s the heart and soul of Superintendent Gary McCarthy’s strategy. Because Comp-Stat numbers can be pointed to as progress when you get to spinning how well your strategy is working no matter what the dirty, illiterate peasants on the ground are saying about how well things are going. We should be on our guard because this is the present plan.

• Two, policing is not going to solve this problem because public safety is always about a lot more than police presence and action. If Mayor Emanuel is going to have a chance in hell of addressing this problem he’s going to have to embrace a full spectrum of violence intervention strategies. To begin with after school programs that get kids off the streets in productive ways that inject conflict resolution and peer intervention skills into impacted communities. These programs dramatically reduce teen violence and our Mayor has been cutting them down like a maniac with an assault rifle.Forgive the analogy but people are being killed and it is a direct extension of his bad public policy.

• Three, instead of building charter schools the Mayor should be expanding community-learning centers. These are public schools that are open late into the evening that provide adult education classes, community/cultural enrichment activities and bring parents and positive community groups into schools directly into the schools on a day to day basis. These centers have significant positive impacts on violence reduction, educational achievement and community building. Ironically our Mayor is busily trying to choke the life out of this concept in Logan Square and Little Village.

• Four, violence is not a policing problem but it takes quality, problem solving, policing to begin to address the problem, something our police force in Chicago is not trained to do. This is not a slur on officers. They are not trained in conflict resolution. They are not trained in relationship building and community engagement. They are not trained to gather intelligence and create trust in a problem-solving manner. They are trained to arrest people, issue tickets, control situations and protect their fellow officers out there. Any changes in what they do will take cooperation with them in building what happens because if they don’t trust changes they will resist them.

• Five, if our Mayor gave a tinker’s dam about reducing gun violence he’d be finding and advocating for funding for prisoner reentry jobs programs that move the formerly incarcerated away from crime and into work. He would be focused like a laser to create grants, loans and other incentives to bring living wage jobs into communities. So he’d be an advocate for Costco not Wal-Mart to contend with food/employment desserts in our city. It turns out that the city is a jobs program after all. If ex-offenders can’t find living wage jobs they become recidivists and if living wage jobs don’t come to a neighborhood it falls apart no matter how many fast food joints and Wal-Marts one builds.

• Six, our police force has many levels of awareness and attitudes about the present situation. I strongly suggest you start reading some police blogs. My favorites are Second City Cop and Chicago Cop.Com. They have a tough job and when you wed that to a police culture that has included organized torture, endemic racism and levels of aggression that are not to be trifled with our police force is uniquely not suited to contend with these shootings. They are, after all, heavily deployed in the very places where the shootings are happening. Police officers, in their traditional role and deployments don’t stop crime they respond to it and it responds to them. Talking about how many policemen there are and how many of them are on the streets is exactly the wrong conversation. Talking about what they do and coming up with new metrics that capture how they impact crime would be the right conversation and that has yet to come up.

As I write this I am very certain that someone is being shot and possibly killed and that our policing strategy and tactics have not changed. I know that Superintendent McCarthy is keenly interested in getting the Comp-Stat numbers to say the right things and Mayor Emanuel is breathing down his neck to get those numbers right.

We can rest assured that the spin machine is prepared to leap into action to get the crack Chicago Stenography Corps writing articles on the Mayor’s cynically sound stand on gun control, which is not going to happen and how the Mayor is virtually helpless and frustrated by the tide of illegal guns.

We know that they will hang on his every announcement that things are getting better with nary a look at how his overall public safety plan… such as it is, and never question if it could possibly work. Heck, they may even blame the homicide rate on the weather and of course the ubiquitous and nihilistic catchall of gang violence. In fact it’s an easy bet that of course they will.

Your job, when you read how the media is going to cover Rahm's response to gun violence is not to be spun. Imagine for a moment that Mayor Rahm Emanuel approached public safety with the same ermine ferocity that he went down to Springfield to destroy the Chicago Teacher’s Union, eliminate public pensions and secure a ten trillion dollar set of tax breaks for the CME Group over the next ten decade?

Can’t see it right, well if we apply foot to ass with enough intensity we may get a semblance of something that can make the entire city safer. There are strategies that Mayors who actually like humans and not just wealthy ones with corporations deploy. Hell, I’d even let Rahm take credit for it.