Editorial: Jim Crown's loss another blow for efforts against gun violence

For decades, civic-minded business leaders have been willing to engage with this city’s quality of life. Their field hasn’t mattered, nor has their residence in city or suburb. Through vehicles like the Commercial Club of Chicago’s Civic Committee, they’ve rolled up their sleeves with the understanding that they have a role to play in making Chicago a better place to live.

James Crown, the billionaire chairman and chief executive officer of Henry Crown & Co., managing partner of Aspen Skiing Co. and a director of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and General Dynamics, among others, was a perfect example.

Crown died Sunday in a single-vehicle accident at the Aspen Motorsports Park in Woody Creek, Colorado, the Pitkin County coroner’s office said in a news release. Crown, whose family long has had successful ventures in the Aspen area, was celebrating his 70th birthday by driving a race car around a track. Survivors included both his nonagenarian parents, Renee and Lester Crown, irreplaceable philanthropists themselves, his wife, Paula, four children, two brothers, four sisters and two grandchildren.

While their hearts were going out to Crown’s large family, many in the city were feeling that Chicago, gasping for clean air on Tuesday, just could not catch a break.

James Crown’s death came hard upon the loss of Laurence Msall, who led the Civic Federation for two decades and who preached a gospel of civic financial responsibility, just as Crown focused on the more humanistic aspects of urban leadership. Both men, it’s fair to say, were beloved not just by their families but by the city’s business leaders as a whole, and both of their deaths came as a shock.

Add in the February loss of Andrew McKenna, who chaired the Commercial Club and served on a slew of civic, community, and philanthropic boards, from the Lurie Children’s Hospital and the Big Shoulders Fund, to the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the United Way of Metropolitan Chicago, and the Commercial Club in particular has had an awful 2023 so far.

McKenna had a much longer life than these other two men, but his loss was compounded by his reputation for mentorship of the succeeding generation of civically minded business people, including Msall and Crown.

Crown had decided that people like him, and with his level of resources at their disposal, had to be part of the solution to the city’s problem with gun violence.

Earlier this month, he announced he was putting his efforts and formidable resources behind a crime reduction strategy focused on persuading fellow business leaders to invest in the city and offer jobs to thousands of people in the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. At the same time, he set about funding violence intervention programs and other crucial reform efforts designed to bring down the city’s unacceptable murder rate.

“Historically, the Civic Committee has not been involved in public safety matters,” Crown told the Chicago Sun-Times less than a month ago. “I gotta say this with real humility: We’re late to the conversation. We’re late to the understanding of some of these things.”

In his effort to quickly put that right, Crown made extraordinary efforts to appeal to people of different ideological stripes. Although a Democrat who was active in Barack Obama’s rise and friendly with President Joe Biden, he did not ignore Citadel hedge fund founder Kenneth Griffin, a prominent Republican.

In fact, Crown praised Griffin’s major financial support of policing and other matters of public safety, when Griffin was living and working in Illinois. And Crown did not pretend to be a saint motivated entirely by altruism. Rather, he stressed that thriving businesses need people to feel safe to make any money.

When it came to gun violence, Crown was right when he said that “holistically addressing the issue” was the only way to go. He knew that a distinct, triage-type strategy was needed for situations where violence was escalating suddenly, as well as a long-term plan for creating jobs, improving schools and building supportive infrastructure.

Those ideas aren’t new or radical, of course, but Crown was willing to use his clout to insist that his peers put more focus on them and, in a city where great ideas have been floating around for years, intense focus and the provision of resources probably are what matter the most.

In essence, Crown was promising mobilization.

Businesspeople tend to like credible, well-defined goals. Crown had one. Reduce murders to fewer than 400 a year within five years. That would be 400 too many, and still far beyond what most cities could imagine tolerating, but it would be a vast improvement over the 700-plus number common here in recent years. Experts see such a goal as achievable; after all, that was roughly the city’s average annual murder rate in the 1990s.

Clearly, those of us who appreciate all that Crown did for Chicago have a challenge before them. To continue this work and meet this goal.

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