It is human to get distracted.
Too many activities compete for our attention; too many tasks demand to get done. Facing an essential project, functioning under strict deadlines, we still lose focus and turn aside to some seductive pursuit.
Elected officials also lose focus. Politicians run on platforms to which they are sincerely committed, only to arrive in office and be confronted by other work that presents itself as urgent. Some spend their terms dealing only with these matters and discover when their time is up that they did not fulfill their campaign promises.
Memorial Day is the unofficial kickoff to summer, when school is out and the beaches are open in Chicago. Summer is also when gun violence is at its height. For years, Chicago’s mayors and chiefs of police have spent serious time planning to mitigate the summer spike in violence. It is the essential work of our city.
This summer, however, will be filled with distractions. NASCAR returns this year to shut down downtown, Lollapalooza crowds will overflow Grant Park and Taste of Chicago will consume the city over Labor Day. While these events are wonderful, they draw a large law enforcement presence. Officers are moved downtown, away from Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods. Those bent on doing harm know very well when neighborhood policing will be virtually nonexistent.
On top of this mix, this year we host the Democratic National Convention, with its security needs and with massive numbers of protests.
Distractions, distractions, distractions.
It will be way too easy for our leadership to lose their focus, not to keep their eye on the ball of mitigating gun violence in Chicago. Part of this is because we are a busy, complicated city with many great events taking place. And part of the reason our leaders get distracted from gun violence is because they can.
Chicago has no official mandate declaring gun violence to be a standing priority of our elected and appointed officials.
Chicago has no office formally tasked with mitigating gun violence in every neighborhood and in every season.
Chicago has no structure ensuring that any given mayor see through his or her own gun violence strategy to its conclusion. We certainly have no guarantee that any mayor will see through the gun strategy of his or her predecessor. Instead, each of our past three mayors has spent a year drafting a (barely) new plan to combat gun violence, a year during which the advances of their predecessors were let to lie fallow.
Chicago also has no official role or funding for community-led strategies in violence reduction. The mayor’s office listens to the voices it wants to and excludes others. All municipal funds — including the $100 million promised by Mayor Brandon Johnson about which few details have emerged — are at mayoral discretion. When effective community-led strategies are in place, funded and coordinated, it would be no problem for police to be called to cover major events.
This is why we, along with a larger group of faith leaders, have been advocating for more than six years for City Hall to establish an Office of Gun Violence Prevention through ordinance. Johnson’s “new” strategy is little more than a name change. There is no plan for permanent infrastructure supporting the new role of deputy mayor of public safety; neither do we see transparency around funding or any assurance of commitment to continuity of this plan. It is now clear, after a full year, that Johnson — regardless of a campaign pledge to us supporting an office created by ordinance — has no interest in changing the status quo of gun violence being a matter of mayoral prerogative, a matter in which the mayor gets to decide the when, the how, the what and the dollars around combating gun violence.
Gun violence is a matter of life and death. It shouldn’t be a matter of mayoral prerogative.
It is easy for mayors to get distracted, let alone change their mind entirely. That is why we are working, with yet another class at City Hall, on establishing, by ordinance, a permanent Office of Gun Violence Prevention for the city of Chicago. To successfully reduce gun violence in our city, aldermen must pass an ordinance and provide robust funding for an office specifically tasked with gun violence prevention. As Anthony Smith, an expert on public safety and executive director of Cities United, explains: “This office must be seen as part of the city’s public safety ecosystem, while still having the autonomy it needs to support those most at risk of being impacted by gun violence. The city needs to provide funding so the office can build out a long-term, comprehensive public safety plan.”
As citizens of Chicago on the cusp of summer, we should demand that our leaders pay the fullest of their attention to the urgent matter of gun violence. The way to ensure our leaders pay attention is through an ordinance. If massive summer gatherings and mass political gatherings can distract from violence in our neighborhoods, an ordinance establishing an Office of Gun Violence Prevention will ensure that such potential distractions do not cause us to lose focus.
If it is human to get distracted, let us work together as human beings to ensure that Chicago not be distracted from dealing with the life-and-death matter of gun violence.
Chicago faith leaders Rabbi Seth Limmer and 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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