As I told you last week,
the staid and conservative Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago’s
latest and more liberal ideas on taxes and crime reduction have caused some
folks to sit up and take notice, including Illinois Senate President Don Harmon.
“I think that the Civic
Committee is approaching major problems with a very different perspective,”
Harmon said.
Harmon suggested the
business group’s recently hired president Derek Douglas as a possible reason
for the change. Douglas is an African-American who worked for the Obama
administration as Special Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs, and
then the University of Chicago as Vice President for Civic Engagement and
External Affairs.
Harmon also seemed
impressed with how the Civic Committee was willing to put itself in the
firing-line, particularly on the crime issue and its insistence that Chicago
must institute police reforms.
Crain’s Chicago Business and others have whacked the influential group’s crime plan, which
relies primarily on violence prevention, targeted investment and hiring,
because it didn’t specifically call for hiring more police officers. The group
wants to reduce Chicago’s homicide numbers below 400 a year within five years.
Last year, 695 homicide victims were tallied by the city’s police department.
A recent Crain’s editorial
ended by saying that if the Civic Committee “is going to issue a business-minded
prescription on issues of law enforcement and reform – and if it is to truly
reflect the sentiments not only of downtown businesspeople but their
counterparts in neighborhoods hit hardest by violence – then it should also
call for a fully staffed police force.”
The Civic Committee’s
most prominent member supporting its crime-reduction plan is billionaire James
Crown, and he told me he didn’t see the editorializing as “hostility.”
Instead, Crown said,
it’s “something we have seen along the way, which is people have got in their
heads that ‘this is the problem’ or ‘this is what we need.’ And it’s usually a
very short phrase or answer. ‘The problem is guns.’ ‘The problem is jobs.’ ‘The
problem is the schools.’
“The frustration we have
had in those conversations is they’re right, but it’s not the whole answer. It
requires many elements, many factors, some of which are immediate, some of
which will take years before we have really addressed this problem
satisfactorily.”
As far as the specific
criticism about additional police hiring, Crown said, “There are people who
will look at the understaffing of the police department relative to open
positions or history and say that is a problem. And it might well be, and we’re
very supportive of the police department and want effective policing, and we
may well join in the observation that Crain’s has been promoting. But
there also is evidence that police departments with many fewer officers per
100,000 residents are very successful. Why?”
Good question.
The Civic Committee’s
President Derek Douglas was also asked about the Crain’s editorial and
related attacks on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight” program: “We were a little
disappointed to see that, because the suggestion was as if we were against
adding police, or increasing police, which we never said. What we said was the
approach we want to take is to sit down with the leadership of CPD, sit down
with the city, understand what is their strategy, what are their needs, how
much do they want to grow and get behind that. So as opposed to us dictating,
‘you need to do X, Y and Z,’ it was more of a collaborative approach to hear
from the police themselves, ‘Here’s what we’d like to have, we’d like to add
more of this, we’d like to add more of that,’ and then have the business
community find ways to support it. So, it’s just about the way you come at the
issue.”
Even with the somewhat
conciliatory approach, it’s clear that things have changed.
Harmon is right. The
Civic Committee has evolved from a standard businessperson group issuing
standard businessperson demands which echoed standard pro-business
publications, editorial pages and pundits, to taking a much more nuanced,
holistic approach to actually solving very difficult, perhaps intractable
problems.
Douglas, I think, said
it best when he talked about a “collaborative approach” that focused on
listening. There are way too many unilateral screamers on the crime issue in
particular, and far too few people who want to take the time to listen, learn
and collaboratively find a path forward.
While I don’t know how
long this approach will last (the Civic Committee’s membership being what it
is), I wish them luck.
This article appears in Juneteenth 2023.
