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SO welcome!

HERE YOU WILL FIND

NEW, SAFETY-GENERATING USES

OF CHICAGO'S MAINSTREAM, COMMUNITY,

PUBLIC AND ONLINE MEDIA

FIVE AXIOMS INFORM THESE NEW USES

  1.  Digital age public safety problems require digital age solutions

    1. Chicago's current Violent Reduction tactics are holdovers from its industrial age, 

    2. In an age digital media, the buying habits, cultural choices and voting decisions of all Chicagoans are impacted and shaped by media.

    3. Yet no city planner has ever factored the power or resources of Chicago's media into any plan for Chicago's future, let alone any plan for the city's public safety.   

  2.  Digital age public safety is unachievable without broad public (citizen) participation

    1. As stated above, this is so owing to citywide distribution of the digital tools that have the power to make Chicago either safe or violent.

    2. Public participation in Chicago's Community Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program, for instance, has languished since its creation in the late 1990's because this citizen-participatory, safety-generating program has found no permanent and prominent home in Chicago's media.

  3.  Digital age public safety requires citywide TRUST and TEAMWORK

    1. Trust must be earned and mutual. Among citizens, police and City Hall.

    2. Mayoral candidates spend millions degrading each other in election-time TV attack ads, causing voter mistrust of City Hall presently rises with every election cycle.

    3. Efforts to limit or restrict TV attack ads are negative. Trust requires positive effort.

    4. Citywide trust hinges on the ability of local media to create rule-governed content and programming that earns the same high level of trust and respect that Chicagoans place in the rule-governed telecasts of their beloved sports teams. With trust comes teamwork.

  4.  Digital age media can profit handsomely using their resources to help keep Chicago SAFE.

    1. There exists in Chicago a Market of the Whole of all 2.7 million Chicagoans with a stake in the safety of their families, neighborhoods, businesses, public spaces and public transportation

    2. This large market - the largest of ALL Chicago markets - is untapped by Chicago's media.​

  5.  Citywide safety brings equal social and economic benefits to 2.7 million Chicagoans and to the city as a whole.

    1. It goes without saying that Chicago's six-decades failure even to reduce its violence has resulted in catastrophic losses in human life and treasure. ​

    2. Chicago's citywide commitment to safety, as it succeeds, will benefit the city enormously by reversing its current (and somewhat undeserved) status as America's poster child for urban violence.

The strategy of Violence Reduction - an ADULT-centered way of addressing crime - is a holdover of Chicago's Industrial Age. It has been both ineffective and counterproductive in addressing the city's primarily YOUTH-centered Digital Age violence.

For six decades, Chicago's industrial-age Violence Reduction tactics have backfired. They have worked to make and keep Chicago violent.

The tragedy is this: Chicago's network TV stations all along could have used their resources to connect Chicagoans of all ages and backgrounds with the city's police, public health professionals and City Hall for the purpose of MAKING CHICAGO SAFE .

But nothing remotely like this ever happened. Today Chicago's challenge is to belatedly exit the Industrial Age and enter the Digital Age in the field of public safety. This is no small task, for most Chicagoan, including city leaders and media, accept that Chicago's violence is inherently unsolvable, a hard fact of city life, like brutal Chicago winters.

 

Reinforcing this entrenched mindset is the dispiriting premise of Violence Reduction itself, that violence can only be reduced, never solved. 

But Chicago has every reason today to rouse itself from its six-decade nightmare of violence.

 

It can can do so by examining its public safety past and present with a view to creating a viable public safety future. Books could be written about this topic. But time is precious. As a short cut, check out our graphic history of

The Last 100 Years of

Public Safety in Chicago. . .

tand the Future as Well

Chicago Civic Media's Public Safety Proposals

Are Introduced Below.  Uniquely Chicagoan, They Are 

Of chicago's Past           In chicago's Present       For chicago's future

  MAKE CHICAGO SAFE

 

not just

LESS VIOLENT

 

as Chicago has been struggling (without success) to do

ever since the rise of heavily armed, drug dealing,

youth victimizing  street gangs in the 1960's.

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Yes indeed.

Chicago CAN make itself SAFE.

The SAFEST big city in America, as Lori often said

(and as Brandon and Paul should be committed to realizing). 

A SAFE city where you can go anywhere without fearing for your life.

A city where kids can walk SAFELY to school without fear of crossing gang lines.

A city where citizens, police and City Hall are listening to and learning from

each other in ways that work to make and keep Chicago SAFE.

A city where 2.7 million Chicagoans are working with

Chicago's overburdened police force and its

public health professionals to keep

SWEET HOME CHICAGO

SAFE

That's the 

DIGITAL AGE goal.

It's CITYWIDE SAFETY. And

Chicagoans have long had the

power of digital media to realize it. We've

just never this power effectively or productively.

Bear in mind that this power is distributed CITYWIDE

in the cell phones and computers used by all Chicagoans.

No longer does it reside with City Hall and law enforcement

alone. Digital age public safety is therefore a CITYWIDE task.

For Chicago to be SAFE, Chicagoans must communicate 

in the online and mainstream media that are the

lifeblood of all modern communities and cities .

And guess what.
The
media hub around
which Chicago's safety-generating
digital age media will self-organize is
the
SIX MAINSTREAM MEDIA to which
most Chicagoans still turn for
their daily local news,

sports and weather.

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This self-organization
will proceed informally and
efficiently, much as Chicago's sports
media have 
self-organized informally
and efficiently 
around the telecasts
of 
Chicago's beloved college and
professional sports teams. 

How will Chicago's
commercial TV stations profit
from safety-generating programming? 
They will do so by tapping the largest of all large
Chicago markets: the
Market of the Whole of all residents
with a stake in the safety of their families, neighborhoods and city.

That's every man, woman and child in Chicago. TV stations will at first
tap this presently untapped market experimentally, by trial and error, starting
starting small with brief news features but in time 
expanding their civic-purposed
programming to ambitious full, multi-month seasons of 
60-minute programs
(e.g. civic-purposed reality 
TV) that informs, inspires  and motivates City Hall
law enforcement and 2.7 million Chicagoans of all ages and backgrounds
to work together to 
make Chicago SAFE. These safety-generating
programs will be
profit centers for the TV stations that to
the best jobs of air programs that do two things well:
earn the respect and trust of their audiences
and generate low-cost or no cost solutions
to violence that actually help
Chicago make itself

SAFE 

A PREDICTION 

Given the alarming

and constantly deteriorating

quality of American political discourse

at all levels of government, Chicago, like

other cities, will continue to make itself

violent until it is using its digital

media to address its

violence as a

LARGE AND CONNECTED

DIGITAL AGE COMMUNITY OF

2.7 MILLION CHIGAOANS

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