Ineffectively?  Nearly six decades of violence reduction efforts in Chicago have failed to reduce violence.  Disastrously so. In 1992 Mayor Richard M. Daley said bluntly that "Chicago has lost two generations of young people to gangs and drugs." "Adults," he told a group of YMCA youth aldermen, "have failed to solve the problem. Because adults don't understand it." 

Since then, strides have made towards understanding the problem in the areas of police reform and youth outreach.

Notably, the City of Chicago's VIOLENCE REDUCTION DASHBOARD addresses violence with a "trauma-informed and holistic community-based approach to support the people and places most impacted by violence:" 




















Chicago's treatment of violence as a public health matter is saving lives. Many lives.  Significantly, it demonstrates from a historical perspective Chicago's rapid evolution away from its industrial-age treatment of public violence as an unmitigated threat to society towards the idea of public violence as, in part, an actual creation of society.  The  next step in this digital-age evolution will affirm and realize the democratic idea of the human capability for self-government. Far from striving merely reduce or eliminate the negative of citywide violence, it will strive to create and maintain the positive of citywide safety.

To this end, this next step, facilitated by Chicago's digital-age public communications system, will take the radical step of making all Chicagoans, city leaders included, both responsive and accountable to each other in making Chicago a safe place to visit, work, play, worship and raise a family in. 

If this step seems beyond human capability, consider where Chicago stands today with respect to its violence. In 2022, the total of generations of young Chicagoans lost to gangs and drugs has risen to three and is counting fast to four, with billions of taxpayer dollars spent annually in Chicago's failed attempt to merely reduce a problem that most Chicagoans long ago came to accept as a hard fact of Chicago life, like brutal Chicago winters. 

It should be said that in 2021, two traumatic events - COVID and the aftermath of George Floyd's murder - contributed to creating what many Chicagoans, especially Chicago's police, now speak of a as a citywide breakdown of law and order.

But the upside to citywide violence is the emergence of the need for a citywide solution to violence. Coupled with the fact of the existence of Chicago digital age media, it points to the idea of Chicago SAFE tactics developed in real time with ongoing public input and dialogue between citizens and City Hall.

There is no denying that mainstream media that comprise Chicago's public communications system have long had ample resources to inform and empower all Chicagoans (city leaders included) to realize the universally desired goal of making Chicago SAFE.  What has be lacking in the I Will City has been the will do so.

All this said, the decision to use Chicago's media to make Chicago safe rests not with City Hall but, obviously, with the owners and managers of Chicago's public and commercial media. Happily, these media are responsive to their audiences and are, to a degree, accountable to them. 

It should now be obvious to these owners and managers that people of Chicago - all 2.7 million residents - constitute an untapped Market of the Whole of all Chicagoans who yearn for safe neighborhoods and/or who have a material stake in Chicago's safety, be it reputational or financial (e.g. property taxes).