Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Thursday announced a plan to use collaborative approaches learned during the COVID-19 pandemic to tackle Chicago’s violence problem at the neighborhood level.
Lightfoot appeared in the West Side’s North Lawndale neighborhood to announce the city’s first “Community Safety Coordination Center.”
The center is meant to help government and community members work together to solve challenging violence using a “whole-of-government approach,” Lightfoot said.
“This pandemic has forced us to come to terms with ways in which our city simply wasn’t working for everyone,” the mayor said.
That same reckoning will now be applied to dealing with systemic inequities, officials said, such as the lack of quality housing, health care and social services. Those issues have hit Chicago neighborhoods that have struggled most with both the coronavirus and violent crime.
Lightfoot’s office has spent more than $50 million on violence prevention and reduction in 2020, she said. That funding has been invested in street outreach, victim services, diversion programs and legal support for gender-based violence among other programs, according to the mayor.
Those efforts now will be expanded into more neighborhoods and be housed under the effort announced Thursday. Lightfoot said she will work with the City Council to find funding for the center, but the actual cost of the new initiative will depend on needs identified through data and on feedback from communities, the mayor said.
City initiatives dealing with community safety, health and well-being, and violence interruption will all be housed in the coordination center, helping facilitate cooperation, the mayor said.
Lightfoot promised a “data-based approach.”
“And what does the data tell us? It tells us that we need to maintain our focus on Black and brown boys and young adults,” Lightfoot said. “They are the ones most vulnerable, most likely to be victims, but also most likely to be criminal-justice involved.”
When the Chicago Department of Public Health pivoted to address the COVID-19 pandemic, they didn’t just look at data surrounding where cases and deaths were, they also looked at the department’s response to the cases, said Dr. Allison Arwady, commissioner at the department. Similarly, the city should not just be collecting data on shootings and homicides, Arwady said at the Thursday announcement.
“We have to use that data, pair it with the data of our response,” Arwady said. “And when I say our response, I don’t just mean government, I mean the dozens and dozens and dozens of groups around the city that are working so hard on this issue.”
The department will use its resources, including data that focuses on the city’s racial life expectancy gap and the root causes that have led to that gap, she said, to help the center’s efforts.
The new center is expected to operate temporarily out of a downtown location before moving to a permanent home in one of Chicago’s communities.
“The center’s resource pool will be extensive and further will show and demonstrate what we mean by an all-hands-on-deck approach,” Lightfoot said.
The city has been funding and supporting violence intervention in 15 priority communities identified in the mayor’s “Our City, Our Safety” plan. The center will initially focus on providing resources to West Garfield Park, North Lawndale, Little Village and Englewood, then phasing out to other communities.
Norman Kerr, director of violence reduction for the city, said the center will provide transparent data and analysis on crime.
For the last 16 weeks, city leaders and community organization leaders from the 15 identified neighborhoods have been meeting to discuss recent violence and to talk about what services are needed to reduce violence, Kerr said.
“We believe that we’re headed in the right direction, utilizing lessons learned from the summer safety strategy, as we move forward with the Community Safety Coordination Center,” Kerr said.
Lightfoot’s announcement comes as data compiled by the University of Chicago Crime Lab shows Chicago’s most vulnerable neighborhoods are bearing far more than their share of the city’s recent spike in violence.
And the disparity has gotten worse.
According to the crime lab, the 2020 per capita homicide rate in the four most violent Chicago police districts was 119 per 100,000 residents, compared with 87 per 100,000 residents in 1991, a year often considered one of the most violent years in Chicago history.
In the city’s four safest districts, it was 4.6 victims per 100,000 in 2020, compared with 6.5 in 1991 — which means those districts got safer.
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