DECEMBER 2009. Welcome
to our archival website, online from 1996 to 2002. It's
ancient, with tons of broken links, but interesting, with lots of
content. Among other things, it covers the West Side
Drug Area Shutdown Project, a partnership with WVON Radio and The Austin
Voice that helped West Siders identify and shut down street
drug-dealing areas in two West Side police districts - the
15th (Austin) and the 25th (Grand
Crossing). We currently we
maintain two blogs: Seeding Civic
Media (Obama-era civic media platforms) and America's
Choice (our monster proposal for Internet-enhanced,
civic media network TV). For information,
contact Steve Sewall.
ill
Our
problem-solving civic media formats exist to help narrow gaps in Chicago
and America
between
young people and adults and citizens and government.
"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
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 10% of the total of Austin's 25th police district
population of 144,000.
MAYOR DALEY'S CHALLENGE
ACCEPTED 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." (He
had in mind the full week of sensational media coverage of the killing of
11-year old gangbanger Robert "Yummy"
Sandifer by his own gang.) It was then that Mayor Daley
challenged fifty YMCA Youth Alderman "to formulate a drug policy of your
own." Added October 2008 : Since 1992,
Chicago's media have replaced sensationalism with "grief coverage" of
innocent lives lost to gang violence. But story after
story about Chicagoans killed by stray bullets while sitting on their
front porches or living rooms does nothing to solve the problem. Chicagons
want it solved.
WORD FROM THE FAR WEST
SIDE: CHICAGO'S DRUG DEALING CAPITAL June 1996. 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.
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 :
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 minor wonders. It
successfully pilot-tested the civic media concept under the most
challenging conditions. With a budget of almost zero dollars, Shutdown was
and is the most effective anti-drug strategy Chicago has ever seen. (
Harris Bank generously donated $2,500 to host
one of our community meetings.) Here's how we:
HUGE! . . . yet hidden in plain view . . . THE MARKET FOR THE MEDIA OF THE
FUTURE
October
2008. For years, Chicago
newspapers and local TV stations have been losing audience share to cable
TV and the Internet. And for years they have tapped only the surface
of the massive demand for interactive media
experiences that has fueled the growth of the Internet. Today,
crime is on the rise in Chicago America enters a global recession. Chicagoans hunger for a voice in
solving theproblems that threaten their lives and futures. This
hunger fuels the market for an
interactive civic media. It's a MARKET OF THE WHOLE of ALL members of a
community, local, state or national. We see this citizen-participatory
media as the future of media and the future of democracy as well.
BUILDING A PROBLEM-SOLVING CIVIC
MEDIA
Looking back: Two CCMP projects
- a student petition and a draft bill for Congress - advanced the
interactive the civic media concept in the mid
1990's:
RESULTS! RESULTS! RESULTS! THE KEY TO CIVIC
MEDIA: LESSONS FROM THE SHUTDOWN PROJECT Open a marketing textbook and
you'll read that the business of media is to deliver customers to
advertisers. Open a civics textbook and you'll read that America, once a
nation of citizens, is now a nation of consumers. Our political leaders no
longer even remind us that America's radio and broadcast networks belong
to the people by Federal Communications Commission charter and are leased
to radio and TV station at no cost in the public interest. Well
then: are citizenship and consumerism incompatible in America today? For
decades, our leaders have accepted that they are. But today, as Americans
seek direction in a world that is re-shaping itself overnight, citizenship
and consumerism may prove to be complementary: with survival itself
hinging on a new balance between them. To succeed, a problem-solving
commerical media must make real progress towards viable long-term
solutions. The Shutdown Project has done just
that. It pioneered a viable and comprehensive strategy for dealing with
gangs and drugs. And by assembling a network of media network
that reached all
Austin residents via radio, TV, print media and Internet
, the Shutdown Project also went far towards
demonstrating the feasibility of a MARKET-DRIVEN CIVIC MEDIA serving communities at
local, state and national levels.
