* 8/2/26 - A City that Works - Expanding on four ideas that could cut Chicago's shootings in half...........................
Buzz Sawyer
The four policy opportunities we focus on are:
Getting more public safety per dollar spent on community violence intervention (CVI) programs
Better harnessing the most important crime-prevention tool society has – public schools
Low-cost changes to neighborhood infrastructure
Getting more public safety per dollar spent on the Chicago Police Department (CPD)
Expanding on four ideas that could cut Chicago's shootings in halfA guest post from the University of Chicago Crime Lab
Chicago's homicide rate remains stubbornly high relative to peer cities Homicides per 100K residents  Today’s guest post is written by Jens Ludwig, Charlie Beck, and Chico Tillmon. We here at the University of Chicago Crime Lab recently published an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune outlining a set of four concrete, evidence-based strategies that whoever leads the city for the next four years could implement, at low cost, to improve public safety – perhaps substantially – over the next four years. In what follows here, we “show our work” and try to explain why we’re focused on these four things specifically, and why we think that adoption of these strategies would be such an important (and low-cost) way to make our city safer – much safer. What would a public safety plan for Chicago look like? If the city had unlimited money, the answer to that question would be easy. But we have the opposite of unlimited money. Like other cities, our budget got a big boost for the past several years from federal pandemic relief funding. That funding is now done. At the same time Chicago’s downtown, as in most cities, is still struggling to adapt to the work-from-home era. News stories regularly document struggling downtown office buildings around the country selling for 10% of their previous values. That is not ideal for any city’s tax base. We outline here a set of four concrete ideas that, with respect to public safety, can help the city do more with less. The key to getting more from less on the public safety front is to take greater advantage of an accumulating body of data and evidence about how to best prevent gun violence as discussed in more detail in our recent book Unexpected Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2025) that summarizes the key lessons we’ve learned at the Crime Lab over the past nearly two decades of work. What are those key lessons? While the media coverage over-represents shootings that stem from organized, hierarchical gangs fighting over drug turf, that’s not what most shootings are. They’re arguments, or retaliation for a past argument, that end in tragedy because someone’s got a gun. The data suggests the key is to inject a moment of reflection into these events, either by having a third party step in to interrupt things or else helping slow down people’s decision making. Not enough of that is being done here in Chicago, or else is not being done well enough – a problem that also creates an opportunity. The four policy opportunities we focus on are:
We take these each in turn. 1. Community Violence Intervention First let’s start with the big bet that Chicago has made on community violence intervention. CVI has become an umbrella term for a variety of things that enjoy different degrees of support from the existing research about their effectiveness: Evaluating the evidence on Community Violence Intervention (CVI) strategies  In some sense our recommendation for whoever runs Chicago from 2027-2031 is “help our local CVI sector do more of the things the data tell us work.” Below we discuss education, the built environment and different enforcement strategies; here we focus on “meta-cognition” programs, which are a CVI program component that, as noted above, has very good evidence behind it. Almost every CVI program has an opportunity to incorporate more meta-cognitive programming into many of the things they are already doing, which could have the effect of increasing – perhaps substantially – the public safety effectiveness of existing CVI dollars. For example, connecting adults to jobs programs doesn’t do much to reduce violence, surprisingly. But adding in programming on meta-cognition can lead to large changes in violence, as data from the READI program in Chicago suggests. Specifically, a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of READI by our University of Chicago Crime Lab team showed that program participants experienced a 65% reduction in arrests for shootings and homicides. As a side note on the READI results: Some observers have dismissed those impacts because of the degree of statistical precision (or imprecision) of the estimates; the odds that this sized impact estimate is due to change is 13%, higher than the usual 5% cutoff that scientists use for hypothesis testing. But while it is appropriate for science to adopt such a stringent, risk-averse bar for rejecting the scientific status quo – science should be conservative and update its understanding of the world only slowly, when the evidence is quite strong – this same convention for policy evaluation winds up strongly and inappropriately privileging the status quo. For purposes of making policy decisions, the right question is: “We have a policy that reduces gun violence arrests by 65% but with a 1 in 8 chance this effect is a fluke result; if the impact is real, the benefits to Chicago would be between 4 and 18 times program costs. Is that worth it?” We suspect that few Chicago citizens, when posed with this question, would say no. What would be useful for the next administration, whoever that is, to commit to?
The exact impact of this shift for the city on gun violence is somewhat hard to predict. While incorporation of meta-cognition or CBI programming can be quite large, as noted above, it is hard to know to what share of high-risk people in Chicago are currently being served by existing CVI programs, and what share of existing CVI programs are already incorporating such programming (and with what degree of intensity and fidelity). But just to illustrate:
That alone obviously doesn’t solve the problem of gun violence, but a 6.5% reduction at low cost (essentially just the cost of training and supporting CVI programs to all be able to do this with fidelity) in a city with thousands of shootings every year and hundreds of homicides would represent hundreds fewer families devastated every year by the serious injury or death of a loved one. This would be, in other words, an important contribution to public safety in our city. 2. Leveraging the Chicago Public Schools as our most important prevention program We believe there are opportunities to get more gun violence prevention from the city’s biggest and most important social program: K-12 schools. Research on Youth Guidance’s Becoming a Man (BAM) program and Brightpoint and YAP’s Choose 2 Change shows that it’s possible to substantially reduce violence involvement for teens through meta-cognition programs delivered in schools. The biggest challenge with these programs is scaling them up, partly for reasons related to cost – Youth Guidance, Brightpoint and YAP are best-in-class vendors, and so deliver high-quality programming, but that requires additional resources that in turn make it hard for schools to scale to every student who would benefit- which is to say every student, given that the leading causes of death to teens in America are homicides, suicides, car crashes and drug overdoses, all essentially “deaths of decision-making.” One way to scale these programs at low or no cost is to incorporate them directly into the school curriculum and have existing teachers deliver them as part of the regular school day. This is, for example, the goal of local non-profit Youth Guidance’s EVOLVE program for students who schools decide next extra help. But there are also ways to scale such programs to all students, to fully maximize the benefit to the city. For example, middle and high school students already have to take health class, yet there is substantial room for improvement in what’s taught. The CDC already encourages school systems to incorporate decision-making education into health education curricula. Since successful meta-cognition programs can be taught in just 3 or 4 weeks, this change would require carving out just a month of the existing school health curriculum to this content. How large of an impact might we expect from this? One reason we are cautiously optimistic about both the impact of this strategy and its feasibility for implementation is that a generally similar strategy was tried several years ago by the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center: Have existing detention staff get trained to deliver this sort of program to residents in the afternoon, during time periods when they would otherwise have just been watching TV. The JTDC is at least as complex a delivery setting as K-12 schools; after all, these changes inside the facility were an indirect result of a lawsuit against the facility by the ACLU of Illinois that led a judge to essentially take over the facility. Our randomized evaluation suggests this sort of program – delivered at little cost (just a week of staff training) – reduced recidivism by 20%. What are the potential impacts of this on gun violence in Chicago? Over time, a larger and larger share of the Chicago population that is at highest risk for gun violence involvement – call it people between the ages of, say, 15 and 35 – will have gone through local schools and experienced this sort of programming. Given that Census data suggest that roughly half of Chicago residents were born in Chicago, if we assume most of that group attended school in the area (public, charters or Catholic and other private schools) and the impacts are like those inside the JTDC then the net reduction in Chicago as a whole could be on the order of 10%. 3. Changing the Built Environment Third, the city could do more to capitalize on the predictability over when and where the arguments and retaliation that drives shootings will happen. For example, data from the University of Chicago Crime Lab shows that we can predict which 5% of blocks in Chicago will experience over one-quarter of next year’s gun violence. Data from other cities shows that neighborhood improvements like fixing up vacant lots and abandoned houses, better street lighting or cleaning up streets and sidewalks can get local residents out into public spaces, increasing the odds a neighbor is around to step in and interrupt an argument before it escalates. Each of these individual changes have shown to reduce violent crime or shootings by 20-30%. Chicago already has the capacity to do all those things – our departments for parks, streets and sanitation, and transportation. Those activities get distributed across the city’s 234 square miles in some opaque way that surely under-attends to the tremendous public safety value of prioritizing blight remediation on the most impacted areas. What would happen to public safety if we asked relevant city departments to prioritize fixing up 10 high-violence blocks a week, every week, for the next four years?
This low-to-no cost reprioritization of existing city services would give us a valuable public safety “double dividend” from city functions most people never associate with public safety. 4. Improved policing Finally, the same predictability of when and where shootings will happen suggest that police also have a tremendously important role to play in interrupting and preventing shootings. Police also have the uniquely important role of solving crimes; the failure to do that can lead people to conclude the only justice they’ll ever get is vigilante justice. The data show that even among cities with similar poverty levels and police budgets, there are big differences in how much public safety different police departments create. One thing the best police departments in America have in common is that they’ve fully transitioned into becoming modern organizations: hiring and promoting on merit, not favoritism; invest deeply in the quality of people running the organization; and empowering leaders to lead but then also holding them accountable. This all suggests there should be ways to get more public safety per dollar spent on the Chicago Police Department:
How much could these changes matter? The answer is potentially a lot. Our University of Chicago Crime Lab team carried out a study of violent crime outcomes in different cities as leadership changes in each local police department, controlling for police spending in each city as well as the sort of socio-demographic city characteristics that influence local crime rates. The difference between the very best functioning departments and the very worst are on the order of 80% swings in violent crime rates. Suppose that Chicago PD were at the median among police departments right now; the data suggest that getting CPD to be like the best departments in the country could lead to up to a 40% reduction in violence in the city. Such a change seems large, but consider the divergence we’ve seen in homicide rates across the three largest American cities since the peak of the crack cocaine epidemic in the early 1990s. Specifically in 1991, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York all had nearly identical homicide rates, just above 30 per 100,000. In the nearly 30 years that followed – right up to the COVID pandemic – the murder rate fell by nearly 80% in Los Angeles and 90% in New York City, drops that are often attributed in important part to (not entirely, but in important part) to management and leadership changes in both LAPD and NYPD. For those still skeptical of the potential for such large productivity changes from “merely” changing organizational management practices: Studies of the importance of management quality in the private sector finds that consulting interventions to improve firm management can create lasting improvements in productivity of 35%. Conclusion No one would claim that these are the only things we should be doing over the next four years to make Chicago better and safer. For example:
But a clear commitment to doing at least these four core evidence-based strategies over the next four years would represent an important step towards what Chicago could desperately use – becoming safer. Charlie Beck was chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and interim superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. Jens Ludwig is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago and Pritzker faculty director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Chico Tillmon is executive director of the University of Chicago’s Community Violence Intervention Leadership Academy. A City That Works is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. You're currently a free subscriber to A City That Works. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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