On Dec. 14, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration unveiled “The People’s Plan for Public Safety” at King-Kennedy College. It marked the third major mayoral presentation of a city plan to mitigate violence in only four years. The release and fanfare beg the question: What is new here?
For the past seven years, our committed group of Chicago clergy has been working with three consecutive administrations and councils to create a more effective, long-standing solution to Chicago’s violence. In a frustrating process of starts and stops, one with real-world consequences of life and death, we have seen plan after plan created with little implementation or oversight. Now is the time to analyze and set accountability standards regarding Johnson’s plan.
First, a little history is in order. Our coalition united in 2016, met with national experts who had made major reductions in homicides and learned of the effectiveness of established corporate centers for cities to counter violence. Thus, in 2017, we advocated for creating, by ordinance, an Office of Gun Violence Prevention, with guaranteed funding of at least $10 million.
In 2018, we were consulted by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s lead, Walter Katz, in the creation of a plan for the Office of Violence Prevention. That plan was shelved by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who undertook a lengthy violence prevention planning process, culminating in the 2020 “Our City, Our Safety” plan of 103 pages. The Lightfoot administration then put millions in city funding toward violence prevention (soon expanded by $150 million in American Rescue Plan dollars).
The need for an Office of Gun Violence Prevention — established and funded by ordinance — became clear when Lightfoot created the Community Safety Coordination Center, a new body that effectively jettisoned the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and many recommendations of “Our City, Our Safety.” After one formal meeting, this new agency ceased to function in any visible fashion.
This history was behind the December launch of yet another Chicago mayor’s plan to counter gun violence, the fourth major policy change — advised by similar experts and consuming costly public funds — enacted over six years. We note that we have continually sought to meet with Johnson to develop this plan and have been heard by Deputy Mayor Garien Gatewood and his staff in two receptive meetings. However, despite our requests, we were excluded from the core leadership convened to create this new plan.
On Dec. 14, we watched the announcement — from the perspective of support, yes, and also one of resolve to ensure the city sees a new era in the eradication of gun violence in which leaders adopt a public health outlook and a whole-of-government approach.
To begin with, the launch of “The People’s Plan” was little more than a news release of a one-page outline of a plan that — six weeks later — has yet to be released. Even this brief sketch displays tension between Johnson’s claim that his administration is going “to solve decadeslong problems in a new and bold way” and Gatewood’s more modest admission that, in Chicago, “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”
To date, we see very little new in “The People’s Plan,” other than the coordinated participation of the Civic Committee, coded repeatedly as “the business community.” The pledge of $100 million — a very specific amount in a completely unspecified time range — does not even cover the gap of the American Rescue Plan funds from the pandemic that are about to disappear. Even as we applaud the participation of “the business community,” we still face less funding for gun violence prevention in Chicago in 2024 than in previous years.
Chicago Tribune Opinion
Weekdays
Read the latest editorials and commentary curated by the Tribune Opinion team.
In this way, “The People’s Plan” perpetuates the major mistakes of its predecessors: There is no guaranteed…
This article was originally published by a www.chicagotribune.com . Read the Original article here. .