[Johnson, a progressive, has been calling for change by
implementing a public health approach to safety. Vallas, who has often
identified himself as a Republican and represents the most
conservative edge of the Democratic Party, has—in contrast to
Johnson—been calling for the expansion of existing police-centric
safety paradigms. ]
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CHICAGO’S ELECTION WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC SAFETY IN
AMERICA  
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Eric Reinhart
March 31, 2023
The TRiiBE
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_ Johnson, a progressive, has been calling for change by implementing
a public health approach to safety. Vallas, who has often identified
himself as a Republican and represents the most conservative edge of
the Democratic Party, has—in contrast to Johnson—been calling for
the expansion of existing police-centric safety paradigms. _

As we vote on Tuesday we remember Harold Washington, elected Mayor of
Chicago April 12, 1983, Paul Comstock

 

Chicago’s per capita police spending has, officially
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than tripled since 1964
[[link removed]].
The city now employs about twice as many police officers per capita
[[link removed].] as
the national average —markedly more than any other large city except
Washington, DC. The Chicago Police Department has attempted nearly
every possible police intervention and reform. Meanwhile, many of
Chicago’s segregated Black and Brown neighborhoods continue to
suffer from high rates of poverty and violence. In recent years, this
violence has begun to spill over into the downtown business core and,
as a result, to increasingly concern the city’s wealthy donor class
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_This article is published in partnership with The Nation
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_Visit __The TRiiBE Election Center_
[[link removed]]_ to learn more about
the 2023 Chicago municipal election. Click __here_
[[link removed]]_ to find your ward, precinct and
police district._

Chicago’s mayoral race between Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas is
placing this reality in the national spotlight. Johnson, a
progressive
[[link removed]],
has been calling for change by implementing a public health approach
to safety. Vallas, who has often identified himself as a Republican
[[link removed]] and
represents the most conservative edge
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the Democratic Party, has—in contrast to Johnson—been calling for
the expansion of existing police-centric safety paradigms.

The police model around which Vallas has built his campaign, with
backing from Republican donors
[[link removed]] and
the city’s incendiary police union
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considers public safety as first and foremost a matter of “crime
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Crime has spun out of control, this framework tells us, because we
have not yet spent enough money on police nor hired enough officers to
patrol the city’s schools and streets. Consistent with this
approach, Vallas’ central electoral strategy has been to cast
Johnson as a delusional proponent of “defunding the police” for
his suggestions that investing in a public health model for safety
would yield better results than repeating the police-first policies
that have ruled the city for decades while social services have been
defunded and privatized.

I am a physician and public health and safety researcher. I have also
spent a decade living and working as an ethnographer on Chicago’s
South and West Sides. Like many of my friends and patients, I’ve
been violently assaulted at gunpoint. I’ve spent nights in emergency
departments with families devastated by shootings. I’ve been at
blood-stained street corners the morning after. It is very clear to
me, as it is to most voters in Chicago, that we need a mayor who will
implement safety policy that works. So, what does the evidence show
works to actually make communities safe?

The Police Model of Safety

To answer that, we need to first acknowledge what doesn’t. Data
indicate that additional police do not make a substantial impact on
crime. A _Washington Post_ analysis
[[link removed]],
for example, found no correlation between spending on police and crime
rates. Studies have repeatedly shown that large increases in police
funding over the last several decades have not meaningfully reduced
crime nor have they increased the rate at which police solve serious
crimes
[[link removed]].
Researchers found that, in the 1990s, funding from the COPS program
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in federal grants to hire thousands of additional police officers, had
“little to no effect on crime
[[link removed]].”
The United States Government Accountability Office own estimates
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police officers hired from 1993 to 2000 drove only 1.3 percent of the
large decline in overall crime during that period. 

Hiring more police has been shown to increase reports of police
brutality. The US Department of Justice’s own statistics
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use-of-force complaints increase with the size of the police force.
These complaints rarely lead to any meaningful consequence
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officers involved, let alone systematic changes to address abuse
perpetrated by police or cuts to police budgets. Prior to murdering
George Floyd and then finally––in an exception to the
norm––being held accountable by the law, Derick Chauvin
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faced 17 misconduct claims, for example.

More police leads to more arrests, regardless of underlying
conditions. A study
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NYPD officers found that if you send more officers to a given
neighborhood, they end up arresting more people––even if crime is
falling. Recent research
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that each marginal police officer makes an additional 7.3 arrests for
non-violent “quality of life” offenses. This is especially
concerning given the criminogenic effects of jailing
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is, the way that being subjected to time in pre-trial detention in
jails increases the future likelihood that someone will commit crimes
and be involved in violence. In light of this, more arrests for
“quality of life” offenses increases the risk of violence in
communities down the road. 

The police model of safety that Vallas has made the centerpiece of his
campaign is full of destructive feedback loops like this. More
policing drives more incarceration. Incarceration then causes and
intensifies poverty. This worsens violence. Incarceration disrupts
families and employment, worsening poverty for individuals, families,
and whole communities. Research indicates
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without mass incarceration, the number of people in poverty in the US
would fall by as much as 20 percent.

This reactive paradigm for safety policy has been given trillions in
US federal and state dollars since the 1970s. It has been the longest,
biggest, and most expensive social experiment in the history of the
United States. 

So, what has it given us? The world’s largest system of
incarceration
[[link removed]].
Far more violence [[link removed]] than
peer nations. Dramatically worse life expectancy
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inequality [[link removed]], and
quality of life compared to peer nations. A public trained to feel
always fearful and unsafe, and to falsely believe crime is always
rising
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even when crime is in fact at historic lows. This fear and the public
distrust––along with devotion to guns
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breeds makes everyone less safe.

Given these realities, are voters in Chicago finally ready for a
change? If so, Brandon Johnson represents a chance to finally invest
in people through programs that work rather than repeating the current
police model that has already repeatedly failed for over 40 years
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produce safety. Johnson has embraced a public health model for public
safety backed up by actual evidence.

The Public Health Model of Safety

The public health approach to shared safety for communities begins
from several key redefinitions to detach us from distortionary police
narratives and to reattach us to obvious but long-neglected truths.

First, violence is not just a matter of interpersonal violence. To
effectively stop criminal violence, we must also account for
structural violence: poverty, unaffordable housing, unemployment,
police violence, barriers to healthcare access, mass incarceration,
etc––all of which kill and disable far more people each year than
violent crime, and that also ultimately drive ongoing high rates of
criminal violence. 

Second, we must redefine “the public” of “public safety.” The
police model of public safety has prioritized white middle- and
upper-class groups while disregarding others. For reasons not only of
justice but also just basic effectiveness at a population level,
actual public safety policy must protect everyone––including poor,
Black, Latiné, and other criminalized communities. 

Third, safety can’t be just about crime. The biggest threats to
safety are not in fact violent crime but instead what we can call
“the social determinants of safety
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lack of healthcare and housing, overdose risk, economic insecurity,
hopelessness and suicide, lack of consumer and environmental
regulations, etc. We must address all of these factors as interrelated
conditions if we are to build functional safety systems.

So, what defines the public health model for public safety? It follows
basic epidemiological principles, such as the observation that, as in
infectious disease epidemics, you can’t protect the public at large
unless you protect each individual and community––starting from
the most vulnerable. It subscribes to a “trickle-up
principle”––that is, that safety must be built from the
bottom-up, not top-down. When the poorest and most vulnerable benefit
from focused support systems, everyone—including the wealthy
—ultimately benefits from improved safety that has ripple effects
throughout the whole of society, from education and workforce quality
to economic and health-systems efficiency. 

To implement a public health approach to safety requires prioritizing
supportive investments in the communities suffering from the highest
rates of insecurity and violence. In the context of US histories of
racial segregation and exclusion that carries long-term consequences,
public safety depends upon “intensive care”––not more police
and punishment––for our most dispossessed communities to repair
the harm [[link removed]] that
the ongoing legacies of slavery, policing, redlining, and mass
incarceration have inflicted.

The public health model takes this into account with a holistic
approach. It considers how a wide array of economic, medical, and
social factors intersect and what in fact constitutes the biggest and
most fundamental threats to public safety. Interpersonal violence
can’t be stopped if we focus on it in isolation. 

A key change that we need to make to build more effective violence
prevention systems is to change the way we measure safety. Why does
this matter? Because policy is responsive to the metrics by which it
is measured––by officials, researchers, journalists, and the
public. Crime rates are clearly a woefully misleading metric for
measuring safety and guiding effective safety investments. So what
should the metrics for public safety be? 

Public health experts argue we should measure the success of violence
prevention policies via outcomes that connect more closely to root
causes of unsafety: rates of homelessness, poverty, employment,
hospitalization, emergency room visits, overdose, child abuse and
neglect, educational attainment, infectious disease rates (e.g., HIV,
STIs, hepatitis C, Covid-19, influenza, etc.), diabetes, heart
disease, and cancer, along with trends in overall life expectancy. And
to maximize returns on investment and to generate maximum safety for
everyone, we use public health principles
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prioritize addressing the populations in the bottom quartile in each
of these categories.

The Evidence for Investing Directly in People and Neighborhoods

One study
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that emergency financial assistance substantially reduced total
arrests—including a 51 percent reduction in arrests for violent
crimes. Another
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increasing youth employment (e.g., summer jobs programs) reduces
violent crime by up to 43 percent, with long-lasting effects.
Additional research
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that increasing access to affordable housing by building more
low-income housing units results in significant reductions in violent
crime.

Given that economic inequality predicts homicide rates “better than
any other variable,”
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should be unsurprising that data repeatedly show that addressing
economic inequality would make our society dramatically safer. Data
from 39 countries indicate
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even small decreases in inequality would reduce homicides by 20
percent and cause a 23 percent long-term reduction in robberies.

Addressing inequality and economic insecurity may sound utopian to
some, but we already have abundant policies that do this; they should
be scaled up. Unemployment insurance and other forms of guaranteed
income (i.e., social security insurance), for example, have been
shown many times
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reduce crime and violence. An important study
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that removing youth from social security insurance at age 18 led to
increases in crime by 20 percent over the next 20 years and increased
risk of incarceration by 60 percent. And, considering the overlap of
crime and violence risk with substance use disorders and overdose,
it’s important to consider these findings alongside another
recent study
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showed unemployment benefits brought major reductions in opioid
overdose deaths. 

What about the data
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environment and neighborhood design
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violence prevention? Recent studies in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and
Youngstown, for example, have all found that maintaining
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damaged houses
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reduces crime. In Philadelphia, a project to repair abandoned homes
was associated with a 39 percent reduction
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firearm assaults. The project returned hundreds of dollars for every
dollar invested in the program. In New York City, research
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that adding streetlights can reduce “index crimes”—including
murder, robbery, aggravated assault, and some property crimes—by
more than a third. Another study found restoring vacant land in cities
significantly improves local residents’ both perception of their
safety and their actual physical safety. Restoration projects reduced
firearm violence by 30 percent
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What about the data for non-police community safety interventions?
Research shows Safe Passage to School—which places civilian guards
along specified routes to keep students safe on their way to and from
school—reduced violent crime by 14 percent
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Chicago’s own Cure Violence model
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which takes a public health approach to circuit-breaking violence
interruption via street outreach and providing employment to
communities at high risk of violent crime
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significant reductions in violence. This violence-interruption model
has been replicated [[link removed]] in
other cities with noted improvements in safety. Similarly, the
violence interruption model introduced by Advance Peace
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violence in cities like Sacramento, Stockton, Richmond, and Fresno.
And research [[link removed]] on
hospital-based peer interventions for youth has found that such
programs significantly reduced the survivor’s risk of experiencing
future violence and of being arrested themselves.

What about the data for expanding healthcare access as a crime and
violence prevention measure? ​​In studies released last year
alone, one
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who lose access to Medicaid eligibility are 14 percent more likely to
be incarcerated over the subsequent two years. That goes up to 21
percent for people with histories of mental health diagnoses.
A second
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that increased access to healthcare and through Medicaid expansion for
formerly incarcerated people led to a 16 percent reduction in violent
crime. A third
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police arrests significantly declined after expansion of Medicaid
access, including a 25 to 41 percent drop in drug arrests and a 19 to
29 percent decrease in violence-related arrests. 

As I’ve summarized elsewhere
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multiple additional studies have convincingly demonstrated that
expanding healthcare and supportive social services is far more
effective for reducing crime and protecting community safety than
doubling down, once again, on the police model. Beyond numbers
alone, the public health model for safety
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an ethical basis for a government grounded in a commitment to caring
for its people rather than simply punishing them instead.

From my vantage as a policy researcher and a doctor who treats the
ramifications of violence every day, it’s clear that building safety
for Chicago will require following the evidence to focus supportive
resources—not more policing—on communities in greatest need.
Johnson has a plan to do this. Alderperson Rossana Rodriguez’s work
to build the Treatment Not Trauma platform
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which Johnson has embraced as a key piece of his holistic community
safety plan, reflects just the tip of the iceberg
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we—city officials, public health and safety experts, and our most
impacted communities—can do together with someone in the Mayor’s
Office who finally has the integrity to fight for what works rather
than what’s politically convenient.

_ERIC REINHART
[[link removed]] (@_Eric_Reinhart) is a
political anthropologist of law and public health, psychoanalyst, and
physician at Northwestern University._

_THE TRIIBE [[link removed]] is a digital media platform that
is reshaping the narrative of Black Chicago and giving ownership back
to the people. Our original works in journalism and documentary,
alongside creative writing and video, capture the multifaceted essence
of the Black experience in pursuit of truth and liberation. Visit The
TRiiBE [[link removed]] to subscribe or donate._

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