it's a digital age
USE INTERACTIVE, digital-age MEDIA
TO MAKE CHICAGO SAFE
When it comes to public safety, digital-age Chicago is mired in the industrial age. It's not even thinking of using its digital-age media to connect Chicagoans to make itself SAFE.
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Numbed into accepting wartimes levels of violence as a hard, unalterable fact of Chicago life, like brutal Chicago winters, Chicago has been unable to look past decades of ruinously failed industrial-age tactics of violence reduction.
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Over the years, Chicago has lost sight of the very possibility of safety. Sensationalized, If-it-bleeds-it-leads soundbite coverage of police and gang violence and City Hall dysfunction in Chicago's digital-age media have misinformed, disconnected or alienated Chicagoans from their leaders, their police and each other.
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Years ago Chicago could have used its interactive media to deploy, connect and coordinate all six of its digital-age public safety resources for the purpose of making itself SAFE:
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public safety - police, COURTS, prisons
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public health - mediCAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL
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PUBLIC OFFICIALS - CITY HALL, STATE & FEDERAL GOV'TS
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PUBLIC SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS: UNIVERSITIES, FOUNDATIONS, NEIGHBORHOOD GROUPS
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the public - 2.7 MILLION chicagoans
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public communications system (cHICAGO'S media)
Here's the thing. Public safety in a digital age isn't just a public safety (police) or a public health (medical and sociological) problem.
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It's also, and equally, a public communication (media) problem.
Simply put, public safety requires the input and involvement of the general public. In Chicago, it's a matter of informing, inspiring and mobilizing all Chicagoans to make Sweet Home Chicago SAFE for all residents. Not some or even most. For ALL.
Happily, Chicago's media are FULLY EQUIPPED to mobilize all Chicagoans (city leaders and police included) to make Chicago SAFE. And media that do a good job of helping Chicago make itself SAFE will profit handsomely.
CHICAGO MADE ITSELF VIOLENT.
CHICAGO CAN MAKE ITSELF SAFE.
