The impact of violence

Originally published on June 27, 2012 in the Chicago Tribune.

Some of us have a new habit. Each weekend morning — and increasingly during the week — we turn to the Internet or our daily newspapers to check the violence quotient of the night before, a typical weekend now running about four dead, another 35 to 50 shot. Then we search for the location of the shootings, taking comfort when the locus of violence is where we don’t live.

And while Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy reminds us that crime is down, it is increasingly clear that Chicago’s spiraling epidemic of violence is not only a threat to the young, to specific neighborhoods, it is symptomatic of and is a real threat to the future of Chicago.

Understanding the epidemic of violence as a threat to the well-being of each of us is important not only as a moral imperative, but as a foundation for forging a viable solution — one that will take far more than the breaking up of drug markets or beheading gang structures.

On the surface what we know — from the early, successful days of community policing, from the massive study sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation on decreasing crime and from anti-violence groups like CeaseFire — is that success in reducing crime requires good police practices, the removal of places for crime and the fancy term “collective efficacy,” meaning neighbors sharing a set of good values and watching out for one another.

What would that mean for Chicago?

It would mean understanding that the police alone will not solve the problem. It would mean empowering and involving ordinary citizens in block clubs, churches and school-parent groups to embrace the community challenge as their own and forbid criminal and violent activities in their households and on the blocks where they live.

It would mean embracing groups like CeaseFire, which with its unorthodox methods has demonstrated that it can interrupt the retaliatory behavior of youth violence and change a culture that too easily uses the death of one’s opponent as the way to settle disputes and scores.

These steps, however effective in the past, fall short today. We have to take bolder steps.

When one looks at Chicago maps pinpointing shootings and violence, an interesting fact jumps out: The maps are congruent with areas of post-2008 home foreclosures — communities like South Shore, Chicago Lawn, Englewood, Lawndale, Hermosa. Areas where there are several vacant buildings on a block not only become shooting galleries but undermine the ability to attain the collective efficacy that we now know is critical to public safety. Gaining control of these properties and putting them back into productive use must become a priority.

Then there is the question of youth. According to a 2011 report commissioned by the Chicago-based Alternative Schools Network, 15 percent of male dropouts in Illinois who are age 18 to 34 were incarcerated, compared with 3 percent of high school graduates. Black youths are far more likely to end up in prison if they drop out of school, compared with 7.6 percent of black male high school graduates, the report revealed. Without a high school diploma, the selling of drugs and gang affiliation must surely become an alternative for these youths.

Not only should we invest in helping at-risk youths overcome the impediments that discourage them from learning and achieving, we need to assure a path to a sustainable future. While Chicago-based corporate headquarters are nice and make us feel good about our city, we need to create the conditions for manufacturing jobs and other less lofty jobs that are attainable by our youth. We need to encourage small and big businesses to hire inner-city youth — using the many tax credits that are available to businesses that hire the long-term unemployed.

It is our collective responsibility to say we are willing and able to connect our young people to a life that puts them — and us — out of harm’s way.