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I don't know. It makes sense to me, that this is a public health crisis. I watched a bunch of people struggle to save the life an 8-year-old girl last night, a bunch more try to process what they were seeing. The girl died. Grief all over. https://twitter.com/GovPritzker/status/1303468391504777217
I don't see the urgency to address violence that the term crisis implies. I don't see it almost anywhere.
I considered all the other times I've seen something similar, though never quite the same, as last night. I considered the state of discourse between elected politicians, the state of our state budget, the way national politics and COVID have taken the oxygen in the room,
the death toll just this year with the shootings, the complete loss of faith in police by the left, the complete faith in the police by the right (neither of which are quite correct IMO), the way police are being worked into the ground in Chicago,
the lack of capacity of every system that touches violence, the fact that the feds here could spend every day prosecuting nothing but UUW by felon and it would jeopardize their time, the fact that city detectives and patrol are both not able to meet demands for their services,
the lack of resources for traumatized families, the lack of in-school resources often available for children, the way police stats are politicized by people on the left who don't want Chicago to look bad and people on the right who want Chicago to look worse than it is,
the governance by press release, the use of public-relations tools to address actual public-health problems because that's what works when you're judged by news- and election- cycles and not on long-term results,
the complete lack of long-term incentives in general to address any of this, other than because it's the right thing to do, which hasn't shown itself to be a good enough incentive for anyone yet,
the rampant politicization of the promotion process within CPD, the degree to which important middle- and upper-middle-management positions are filled by politics, the different sets of rules that apply to officers and supervisors, and within that depending on your clout,
the lack of attention and effort made to professionalize the police in general, the way city alderman and the mayor's office have escaped their responsibility for oversight of what is basically just another city agency,
the lack of attention and on-the-ground resources the media dedicates to this problem, the hurt in neighborhoods that can't be measured in a compstat meeting but still drives violence,
the lack of respect paid to teachers / school administrators, women mostly, who function as the get-shit-done extended family for so many kids, the lack of respect paid to schools in general (example: dozens were closed years ago largely in communities that needed them the most),
the fact that we're 20+ years removed form the ACEs survey and that two decades of research since have established links between early childhood adversity and negative health outcomes and it's not part of mainstream media or professional discourse in any violence-adjacent system,
the lack of support for people who do treat this as a crisis and who treat every potential act of violence or rumor of conflict as a point of intervention, the lack of support for people burning themselves out just trying mitigate conflicts all over,
and at the end of it, I don't know. I guess I have a hard time believing at the outset that incremental progress, or any single law being signed, saving lives. I am skeptical, and I feel like I come by that skepticism honest.
Maybe it will. And maybe incremental progress is the only way right now. But thinking on this, it's almost too much to consider that any single legislator, mayor, governor, legislative body or coalition could address this any other way than incremental.
Maybe I'm not seeing the path toward progress because of how close I am to this, I'll allow for that. I'm not close enough to the politics, the circles where policy is made. But I don't have a lot of hope.
I want to. It's what keeps anyone near violence going each day. An investment in the day is acknowledgment of some optimism. But it just doesn't feel within the realm of possible to address right now. It saddens me. I don't know. I don't know.
All that said. Tomorrow. The work is still here, and I will try. Same as everyone else who gets close and sees something worth addressing. That people should avoid hurting each other, that children are affected by this, that we should do better by them. What else is there.
