![]() ![]() 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.įirst, violence is not just a matter of interpersonal violence. Johnson has embraced a public health model for public safety backed up by actual evidence. 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 to produce safety. This fear and the public distrust-along with devotion to guns-it breeds makes everyone less safe. A public trained to feel always fearful and unsafe, and to falsely believe crime is always rising, even when crime is in fact at historic lows. Dramatically worse life expectancy, racial inequality, and quality of life compared to peer nations. So, what has it given us? The world’s largest system of incarceration. It has been the longest, biggest, and most expensive social experiment in the history of the United States. This reactive paradigm for safety policy has been given trillions in US federal and state dollars since the 1970s. Research indicates that without mass incarceration, the number of people in poverty in the US would fall by as much as 20 percent. Incarceration disrupts families and employment, worsening poverty for individuals, families, and whole communities. ![]() Incarceration then causes and intensifies poverty. More policing drives more incarceration, regardless of underlying conditions. The police model of safety that Vallas has made the centerpiece of his campaign is full of destructive feedback loops like this. ![]() Researchers found that, in the 1990s, funding from the COPS program, which provided $7.6 billion in federal grants to hire thousands of additional police officers, had “ little to no effect on crime.” The United States Government Accountability Office own estimates indicate that additional police officers hired from 1993 to 2000 drove only 1.3 percent of the large decline in overall crime during that period. ![]() 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. A Washington Post analysis, for example, found no correlation between spending on police and crime rates. Data indicate that additional police do not make a substantial impact on crime. To answer that, we need to first acknowledge what doesn’t. So what does the evidence show works to actually make communities safe? 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. I’ve been at bloodstained street corners the morning after. I’ve spent nights in emergency departments with families devastated by shootings. Like many of my friends and patients, I’ve been violently assaulted at gunpoint. I have also spent a decade living and working as an ethnographer on Chicago’s South and West Sides. I am a physician and public health and safety researcher. 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. The police model around which Vallas has built his campaign, with backing from Republican donors and the city’s incendiary police union, considers public safety as first and foremost a matter of “ crime.” 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. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |