1. Send questions, comments, suggestions about the above piece here.

2. Some interesting questions are answered here.

3. I'm working on this FAQ.

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• You can take our poll, sign our petition, and spread the word here. Our goal is 10,000 signatures by December 31. 
• Got something to say? Send us an email.
• In coming weeks we'll submit a proposal to Mayors Emanuel and Daley, Chicago media, foundations, policy experts, civic groups and venture capitalists. Responses to this opinion piece and to our proposal will be posted here.

5. Here are links to our other sites and to some posts at them:

Here, with occasional updates, are our archival posts

1992: Mayor Daley Speaks 

"Chicago has lost two generations of young people to gangs and drugs. Adults have failed to solve the problem.
I challenge you to formulate a drug policy of your own."   

- Mayor Richard M. Daley to 50 Chicago YMCA Youth Aldermen, March '92

MAYOR DALEY'S CHALLENGE TO CHICAGO STUDENTS
March 1992. Addressing fifty YMCA Youth Alderman at the old Bismark hotel, an angry Mayor Daley noted the absence of media at this event for young leaders and charged Chicago media with "glorifying trouble makers and neglecting problem solvers."

Daley then told the students he wanted to talk to them about gangs and drugs. "Chicago," he said, "has lost two generations of young people to gangs and drugs." He then said that "adults have failed to solve the problem" and challenged the fifty YMCA Youth Alderman "to formulate a drug policy of your own."

• Added October 2008 : Since 1992, Chicago's media have replaced sensational coverage with what might be called "grief coverage" about innocent lives lost to gang violence. This is an improvement. But story after story about Chicagoans killed by stray bullets while sitting on their front porches or in their living rooms does nothing to solve the problem. Chicagons want it solved.
• Added 2012: A 1992 Sun-Times op ed piece by Steve Sewall summarizing Mayor Daley's 1992 speech.

1996: the West Drug Area Shutdown Program

WORD FROM THE FAR WEST SIDE: CHICAGO'S DRUG DEALING CAPITAL 
June 1996. THE WEST SIDE DRUG AREA SHUTDOWN PROJECT. So how do you create such a media? First, choose a vital issue. We chose the life-and-death issue of gangs and drugs. Then find some media that are not afraid to tackle it. We found several, notably the The Austin Voice , the feisty community newspaper that broke the story of the "Austin Seven ," the biggest Chicago police scandal of the 1990's. Here's some background on this bi-weekly free-distritution community paper: in 1997, The Voice was credited with exposing seven 15th District police officers who had been shaking down drug dealers. Yet the paper is equally hard on drug dealers: Austinites relish its front page photo galleries of grim mug shots of gangbangers framed in cartoon formats celebrating Hallowe'en or April Fools Day.

May 1997. Next, consult the community and develop a sensible strategy. To this end, we teamed up with The Austin Voice and popular talk show host Cliff Kelley of WVON radio. We listened to Austin residents and pioneered a bold new concept: media-based community policing. Basically, this strategy is CAPS (Chicago's Alternative Policing Strategy) reinforced by radio, TV, newspapers and the Internet. To succeed, citizens and police would need to implement it together - a difficult undertaking, given the depth of citizen mistrust of police in Austin. To test the waters, we convened a meeting of community leaders and newly appointed 15th District Commander John Richardson. We wanted to see if Austin police and citizens could work together on what everyone agreed is Austin's worst problem: out-of-control street drug dealing. As it turned out, Commander Richardson would do some testing himself. At the meeting, he challenged the community leaders to develop a list of all of Austin's public drug dealing areasand said 15th District police would do likewise. In two months, community leaders and police would meet again to compare lists.

July 1997.  To everyone's surprise, the lists, when compared, were nearly identical. This was a great trust builder. Citizens and police then formulated the West Side Drug Area Shutdown Project, which they launched at a big community meeting of 300 Austin residents held at a local church. At the meeting, Commander Richardson said he was preparing a Top Ten list of drug areas for closure. Soon The Voice front-paged photos of the Top Ten areas along with an elaborate precinct-by-precinct list of all 71 public dealing areas in Austin. Citizens were encouraged to contact The Voice and WVON radio to verify police progress in keeping the top ten areas drug-free.  The strategy was and is simple: to reduce juvenile arrests by using media to empower the communtiy to help police banish drug dealers from the streets, one or more drug dealing areas at a time. Here's the official Austin list of 71 drug areas as it appeared in The Voice in November, 1997.

15th (Austin) District Drug List

January 1998. Three other West Side police districts - 25th, 11th and 10th - picked up on the success of the Shutdown strategy in Austin and began implementing their own versions of it. The Shutdown strategy is scalable. Once adapted by the city, it would banishing public drug dealing from all 25 Chicago police districts, district by district. Here's the 25th District list that appeared in The Voice :

25th (Grand Crossing) District Drug Area List 

2001: A Brief Update

WHAT'S HAPPENED SINCE 1998?
WE'VE COME A LONG WAY - AND WE HAVE A LONG WAY TO GO
July 2001. The downside: Chicago's far West Side remains the main distribution area for drugs in the Chicagoland area, due largely to its proximity to Chicago's affluent western suburbs. And Austin's gang/drug problem is larger than the problem of street dealing. You could wave a magic wand for drugs in Austin to vanish overnight and next day you'd still have thousands of young gangbangers with little schooling and no way of surviving - plus thousands of addicts with no drugs. And you'd have all this in a community where male unemployment already runs over 20%.          

The upside: there are lots of constructive ideas for rebuilding communities that have banished drug dealers; we have developed some ourselves. In terms of concrete achievements, the Shutdown Project worked wonders. It successfully pilot-tested civic media under the most challenging conditions. With a budget of zero dollars, Shutdown was and is the most effective anti-drug strategy Chicago has ever seen. (Harris Bank did generously donate $2,500 and hosted one of our community meetings for 150 people.) Here's how we:

Mobilized citizens and influenced policy makers

Attracted media coverage

2001: Quick Austin Update

ANOTHER CHILD BOOKED, ANOTHER LIFE LOST.
JULY 2001. This human tragedy continues to play out in staggering numbers as police book Chicago children by the tens of thousands despite a citywide decline in crime. In Chicago's far West Side neighborhood of Austin, 15th District police recorded 14,000 arrests in 2000, mostly of juveniles. That's a full 10% of the total of Austin's 25th police district population of 144,000.