Chicago has a high-stakes mayoral election coming up in 2027. Given our dire budget situation, what should — or even can — whoever is in charge do to address the city’s top priority, gun violence? We offer here four evidence-based ideas that taken together have the potential to cut shootings in half at little to no additional cost:
•Getting more from existing spending on community violence intervention.
•Getting more crime prevention from our biggest social program: K-12 schooling.
•Harnessing other parts of city government — like parks, streets and sanitation, and even the Department of Transportation — that people normally don’t associate with public safety.
•Strengthening and modernizing the Chicago Police Department.
Some readers might wonder for starters: Isn’t the gun violence problem solved, given all the headlines about falling crime? It’s true that murders (most of which are with guns) and nonfatal shootings have been plummeting since 2021 around the country. But while in most other cities that’s continued into this year, in contrast, fatal shootings are up 12.3% in Chicago through July 29 this year compared with last year.
If our goal really is to be the best city in the world, this needs to change. Compare our murder rate of 15.6 per 100,000 people with that in Los Angeles (5.9), New York (3.6) London (1.1) or Tokyo (0.6). This is not just a major public health crisis — and a regressive one at that, affecting the most vulnerable communities the most — it’s also an existential threat to the city, given that every murder reduces a city’s population by 70 people.
Gun violence is one important reason why our population is down nearly 1 million people compared with 1950. That’s hollowed out neighborhoods, led to half-empty schools and cost billions in lost tax revenues.
This is to say, gun violence is the problem upstream of every other problem the city faces.
What would a public safety plan for Chicago look like? Whoever is in charge next will have no choice but to figure out how to do more with less. A key to doing that is to get the gears of government better aligned with what the gun violence problem in America really is.
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While the media coverage overrepresents shootings that stem from organized, hierarchical gangs fighting over drug turf, that’s not what most shootings are. They’re arguments, or retaliation for a past argument, that end in tragedy because someone’s got a gun.
For a hundred years public policy in America has been all about trying to change the incentives people face for pulling a trigger — either through bigger criminal justice “sticks” or “carrots” like better jobs or social programs. But anyone in the middle of a heated argument is not at their most rational.
The key is to inject a moment of reflection into these events, either by having a third party step in to interrupt, or else helping slow down people’s decision-making. Not enough of that is being done here in Chicago, or being done well enough — a problem that also creates an opportunity.
The first thing the new mayor could do is help get more public safety out of existing spending on community violence intervention (CVI). This has become an umbrella term for a variety of things, usually carried out by local nonprofits, that ranges from having CVI workers try to defuse conflict (violence interruption) to connecting people at elevated risk of gun violence with mentoring programs, jobs or other social services.
Given that most shootings stem from conflict — often the result of someone misdiagnosing the situation they’re in, or misreading what someone else intends, or responding just a bit too quickly before they can think through all the consequences — it’s maybe no surprise that some of the strongest evidence we have is for CVI programs that help people learn to navigate fraught moments.
The key skill to develop is to help people become more objective and skeptical in thinking about their own thinking, or “meta-cognition.” The data shows we can make common approaches like subsidized jobs much more effective by incorporating this element. The implication is that the next mayor could help get more public safety at low cost just by ensuring that every CVI program includes this component, has the training it needs to execute that (maybe with city help), and is held accountable for successful delivery.
Second, there are opportunities to get more gun violence prevention from the city’s biggest and most important social program: K-12 schooling. Research on Youth Guidance’s Becoming a Man (BAM) program and Brightpoint and YAP’s Choose 2 Change shows that it’s possible to substantially reduce violence involvement for teens through meta-cognition programs delivered in schools.
The biggest challenge with these programs is scaling them up, partly for reasons related to cost. One way to scale these programs at low or no cost is to incorporate them directly into the school curriculum and have existing teachers deliver them as part of the regular school day, as for example nonprofit Youth Guidance is working on with its EVOLVE program.
What might this look like? For example, middle and high school students already have to take health class, yet there is substantial room for improvement in what’s taught. That’s a missed opportunity in a country where the leading causes of death to teenagers are homicides, suicides, car crashes and drug overdoses, all essentially “deaths of decision-making,” the CDC already encourages health classes to teach decision-making, and where successful meta-cognition programs can be taught in just three or four weeks.
Most teachers are eager to help their students however they can. The next mayor could enable them to do that by carving out a month of health class for this type of programming, which wouldn’t cost the city much of anything at all (just some teacher training) but could wind up helping save a great many lives.
Third, the city could do more to capitalize on the predictability over when and where the arguments and retaliation that drives shootings will happen. For example, data from the University of Chicago Crime Lab shows that we can predict which 5% of blocks in Chicago will experience over one-quarter of next year’s gun violence.
Data from other cities shows that neighborhood improvements like fixing up vacant lots and abandoned houses, better street lighting or cleaning up streets and sidewalks can get local residents out into public spaces, increasing the odds a neighbor is around to step in and interrupt an argument before it escalates.
Chicago already has the capacity to do all those things — our departments for parks, streets and sanitation, and transportation. Those activities get distributed across the city’s 234 square miles in some opaque way that surely underattends to the tremendous public safety value of prioritizing blight remediation on the most impacted areas.
If the city asked relevant departments to prioritize fixing up 10 high-violence blocks a week, in four years we’d have improved the nearly 2,000 blocks that consistently account for a quarter of the city’s shootings and gotten a big public safety “double dividend” from city functions most people never associate with safety.
Finally, the same predictability of when and where shootings will happen suggest that police also have a tremendously important role to play in interrupting and preventing shootings. Police also have the uniquely important role of solving crimes; the failure to do that can lead people to conclude the only justice they’ll ever get is vigilante justice.
The data show that even among cities with similar poverty levels and police budgets, there are big differences in how much public safety different police departments create. One thing the best police departments in America have in common is that they’ve fully transitioned into becoming modern organizations: hiring and promoting on merit, not favoritism; investing deeply in the quality of people running the organization; and empowering leaders to lead but then also holding them accountable.
This all suggests there should be ways to get more public safety per dollar spent on the Chicago Police Department: move to an objective, performance-based promotion strategy; provide potential future CPD leaders with the sort of leadership training the U.K. College of Policing provides (and requires) before anyone can be eligible for promotion, to make sure the best people are best positioned to lead successfully; and empower leaders by pushing resources and decision-making authority down to the district level so there can also be more accountability for how those resources are being used.
While these strategies don’t require many new city dollars, they do require the city’s commitment to make them happen. Experience from other places suggests that if well implemented here, these changes together could reduce shootings by as much as 50% to 60%.
No one would claim that these are the only things we should be doing over the next four years to make Chicago better and safer. For example, we take for granted continued efforts on things that are already underway like the CPD consent decree and workforce allocation plan. CPD is also down
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around 1,700 sworn officers compared with 2019; the data suggest that a mayor who could figure out how to get the department back to prepandemic staffing levels would reduce murders in Chicago by 10% through that step alone.But a clear commitment to doing at least these four core evidence-based strategies over the next four years would go a long way toward addressing the city of Chicago’s biggest challenge, and the biggest concern of its voters.
Charlie Beck was chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and interim superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. Jens Ludwig is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago and Pritzker faculty director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Chico Tillmon is executive director of the University of Chicago’s Community Violence Intervention Leadership Academy.
A full list of people who are backing these ideas can be found here.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].