The Book of Deuteronomy prescribes a building code: “When you build a house, you shall make a parapet, a railing, for your roof; thus you will not bring blood guilt on your house if someone falls from it to their death.”
The law contains no fire, brimstone or compelling story to illuminate how this building code is in fact a moral code. However, the logic underneath is the whole of the argument. Anyone who builds a place where people gather is responsible for the safety of those people; that responsibility is discharged during construction. Morality demands we protect people in advance.
Chicago has spent roughly a decade building such a railing. It is found in our remarkable civic infrastructure of the community violence intervention networks that span our city.
From January through August, Chicago recorded 289 homicides, almost exactly even with the total last year during the same period. Last year closed with the fewest homicide Chicago has seen in six decades. Last month saw the fewest deaths of any August since 2011.
These numbers did not drift downward on their own. They are the result of thousands of people who went to work: Street outreach workers who know which corner is about to erupt, medical responders who sit with members of a family in the worst hours of their lives, case managers who find a young man job and a reason, congregations that keep the basement lights on and the gym open, philanthropists and a business community that fund it all and an amazing core of executives who run an array of organizations connecting all these communities. We, together with our colleagues and faith coalition, have witnessed and shared this work for more than a decade. It is unglamorous, underpaid — and incredibly effective.
It is also a most fragile edifice.
Much of this infrastructure runs on philanthropic grants, funds from the business community or expiring federal dollars from one-year contracts. In June, Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order creating an Office of Gun Violence Reduction. We celebrated this advent, and we meant it. But an executive order lasts exactly as long as the executive who signs it; violence prevention cannot be rebuilt from scratch every time the Fifth Floor of City Hall changes occupants.
That is why Ald. Ronnie Mosley, 21st, filed an ordinance to create a Department of Gun Violence Reduction; it is now sitting in the Committee on Budget and Government Operations. A department, unlike an office, has a standing in the city’s infrastructure. A department, unlike an office, has contracting authority, so violence interrupters can be employed rather than be perpetually sent out for bid. A department has a line in the budget that a future administration cannot quietly erase.
This department asks the city for no new money; we in the faith coalition are not requesting an appropriation. We are asking that the scattered dollars the city already spends on violence reduction, with no full accounting, be gathered in one place, a department answerable to the City Council and legible to the public. No new funds, but a new system with accountability.
And here is where the arithmetic gets a little uncomfortable. Fifteen aldermen have told us, some privately and some from a podium, that they support this ordinance. Four names appear on it on the city’s website. The gap between 15 and four is the distance between agreeing with something and governing.
We understand the season in which we find ourselves. Elections are coming. Wars are grinding on overseas and fill the front pages, as they should. And football is back at Soldier Field.
But with gun violence, what is at stake is life and death in the city; it’s whether a 16-year-old on the West Side remains alive on Thanksgiving. Whether he makes it to Christmas.
We have also heard our ordinance described as the mayor’s project, which is a convenient thing to say in an election year. And it is absolutely untrue. Our faith coalition, Live Free Illinois, and block club leaders and mothers across the city have been pushing for permanent, accountable violence prevention infrastructure since before this mayor took office and before his two predecessors. We have buried young people under three administrations. We are not sent by City Hall. We come from the community.
Our coalition meets every Monday. We spend part of each meeting on the phone with organizers and other cities that have stood up to offices like this one and can tell us what worked, what was wasted and what they wish they had written into the ordinance. We know what works.
Chicago’s budget will be written in the next several weeks. After that, the window closes, and we begin again in the spring, a spring in which some of the people this department would protect may fall victim to gun violence.
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Last month saw the fewest deaths of any August since 2011. But 39 people were slain in gun violence in our city in August. That’s 39 lives lost. The numerical improvement over time is to be celebrated, but this tragic toll of death should never be tolerated.
So we are asking plainly of the 15: Sign on, publicly. Of the undecided: Read the ordinance and don’t be distracted by the politics that surround it. To the Committee on Budget and Government Operations: Call the question and advance this ordinance forward to the full City Council. To the City Council: Establish a Department of Gun Violence Reduction.
Tradition teaches that a city, like a home, is judged by what we build and how we protect, not by how loudly we mourn our losses.
Maybe we in Chicago erect this railing before anyone else falls victim to death by a gun.
Chicago faith leaders Rabbi Seth Limmer, the Rev. Otis Moss III, the Rev. Ciera Bates-Chamberlain and the Rev. Michael Pfleger joined the Tribune’s opinion section in summer 2022 for a series of columns on potential solutions to Chicago’s chronic gun violence problem. The column continues on an occasional basis.
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