Chicago’s People’s Plan for Community Safety
Clients: Chicago Office of the Mayor, Community Safety Coordination Center
Partners: Kearney, Zeno Group
Challenge: Violence in Chicago is a complex issue that is a symptom of underlying challenges of systemic racism, poverty, and social disinvestment. Shootings and homicides recorded in Chicago fell by 13% in 2023 as violence rates returned to pre-pandemic levels, but the number of people killed last year was still among the city’s highest over the past two decades. Communities also continue to suffer harm that extends beyond violence and disparately affects Chicago’s West and South Side neighborhoods; unemployment rates in some South Side communities are more than double the city average, and nearly a quarter of lots are vacant in some West Side communities.
Reducing and preventing violence now while ensuring a safer Chicago for generations to come requires significant collaboration across public, private, and community-based sectors. In the early months of the Johnson administration, they sought to develop a collaborative, impactful, and focused plan to address historic disinvestment, work toward healing communities, and make all of Chicago safe for everyone.
Our main client, the Deputy Mayor for Community Safety, leads the Mayor’s Office of Community Safety team and is responsible for coordinating and driving investments across City departments and sister agencies to address the root causes of crime and violence, as well as respond to crises through trauma-informed and community-based interventions.
Action: Since his appointment, we have supported the Deputy Mayor and his team with a series of projects centered around the “People’s Plan for Community Safety,” the City’s comprehensive community safety plan.
Convening stakeholders to develop a safety plan: From July through December 2023, we worked with pro bono partners to project manage cross-sector stakeholder convenings and develop a focused and multifaceted community safety strategy. Pro bono partner Zeno Group developed a comprehensive external communications plan to support the People’s Plan for Community Safety launch.
Advancing key initiatives of the People’s Plan: Our team supported implementation planning across 18 initiatives to accelerate progress amongst cross-sector teams. In addition, we helped develop a Youth of Highest Promise strategy, including an assessment of the current landscape and the development of strategies to engage this population. We also provided direct support to launch the Plan’s policing initiatives, which include advancing a police workforce allocation study, expanding alternate response models, and operationalizing community policing for all members of CPD.
Neighborhood investment analysis: To understand what purposeful new investment would look like, the City needed to understand the breadth of its current and previous community safety spending. Although individual City departments and agencies may track their spending by geography, the City’s system is not organized to track government investments at the community level as a whole. Pro bono partner Kearney helped the City develop a community-level understanding of its 2023 violence prevention and reduction spending to ensure that future investments are made equitably, effectively, and in line with individual community needs.
Summer safety planning: We leveraged lessons learned from the past five years to define a two-prong approach to summer safety planning: 1) a whole-of-government prevention approach with initiatives across all city departments and sister agencies, and 2) enhanced rapid response protocol for high acuity violent incidents such as mass shootings, teen gatherings, and youth shootings that leverages the Community Safety Coordination Center that we helped establish in 2021. This plan builds on interdisciplinary incident response protocols that we previously recommended between street outreach, City staff, CPD, and other service providers.
Result: The People’s Plan for Community Safety was released in December 2023 and includes 20 initiatives across three priority populations and seven place-based strategy areas. The investment analysis, which has been shared with leadership across City departments and agencies, will be used to advance the People’s Plan for Community Safety, which calls for targeted neighborhood investments that cut across departments and agencies in the areas of education, economic opportunity, housing, health, and environment. The analysis will help ensure that investments are made equitably, effectively, and in line with individual community needs. The city also saw a decrease in homicides for the third consecutive summer.
Connected Projects
The People’s Plan for Community Safety has made progress on initiatives, resulting in several projects across Civic Consulting Alliance’s Safety & Justice focus area, including alternate response, community policing, and advancing the field of Community Violence Intervention.
View projects that Address Violence as a Public Health Crisis→
