Dan Ratner

Mayor Emanuel – Let’s rethink the budget and really cure our violence problem

At my company, Public Good, we look for organizations that are effective at solving the world’s most important problems. We sift through one of the biggest databases ever compiled of nonprofit and NGO information and sometimes we make interesting discoveries. For example, we discovered that the most innovative and effective approach to ending violence has been developed right here in the City of Chicago. Like all great innovations, it sounds crazy until it sound obvious. The idea is treating violence like a disease epidemic.

Dr. Gary Slutkin, a widely respected doctor specializing in infectious disease, first noticed the relationship between the spread of violence and the spread of disease when he returned from Africa where he led a historic reversal of infection trends in cholera and HIV. The key is that the biggest predictor of violence isn’t economic hardship, poor policing, or easy access to guns: it’s other violence. If the cycle of violence and retribution can be interrupted the outbreak can be controlled.

Here in Chicago, Slutkin implemented the idea as a program called CeaseFire, and later replicated his results in dozens of cities worldwide under the moniker Cure Violence. His extensively peer-reviewed data shows reductions in violence in serviced areas starting within months of implementation and reaching 40-70% reductions in fewer than 3 years. It’s been hailed by the World Health Organization as a breakthrough.

So what does it look like? The idea is to find “credible messengers”, individuals with friends, family, and experience in a community blighted by violence. These individuals are given extensive training in de-escalation and conflict mediation and then visit homes, communities, hospital trauma centers, and other key locations. Many of the these “interrupters” are former gang members. Some have done time for violence themselves. They work to cool tempers and show that a cycle of violence helps no one. Because they’re part of the community and don’t wear a badge, they’re trusted and listened to in ways even the best police officer isn’t.

Despite the program’s manifest success here in Chicago and the warm adoption of its methodology by cities like New York and Los Angeles who have watched their rate of violence fall while ours rises, Chicago has cut funding to the program. It isn’t because we can’t afford it – CeaseFire estimates that a “fully funded” program for the city would cost approximately $25 million per year and would bring our level of violence down below that of our peer cities.

To put this in perspective, in addition to hiring 1,000 new police and investing heavily in training, Mayor Emanuel’s 2018 budget calls for a $20 million increase in police overtime to a total of $100 million. And, counter-intuitively, there is no good evidence to support the idea that increasing police staffing will reduce violence levels. So why not put a portion of the budget we are putting towards public safety into a proven, effective program that will make a difference? The State of Illinois has recently stepped up to cover around $5 million of the program cost so the overtime increase alone would cover the difference.

I’m certainly not arguing that a strong police force is not in the interests of the city, nor that funds for reform and training should be reduced. But I am arguing that withholding funding from a proven program that would saves hundreds of Chicagoans’ lives and save thousands more from grievous injury for the benefit of an unproven, more expensive alternative is clearly not the right answer. I hope the mayor will reconsider.

In a year without a lot to be cheerful about in our hometown, I was excited to hear that Mayor Emanuel is putting a real push behind the idea of high speed rail service from the Chicago loop to O’Hare. This is a really good idea for a few reasons but primarily because it will increase Chicago’s global competitiveness, take a big ding out of traffic, and bring a lot of economy that has sprawled into the suburbs back downtown.

If you are running a global business today, the fact of the matter is that you’ll have a lot of employees spending a lot of time on airplanes. We simply aren’t at the point where most interactions can be done virtually. And those hours really add up. Embarrassingly, not a single US airport makes the global list of best airports and right now Chicago doesn’t make the list even in North America. One big, often cited reason for one airport to outrank another is ease of transportation to and from it. This is one of things that always holds American airports back – we haven’t got anything like the Heathrow Express. Creature comforts are great, but efficiency and predictability are way more important (which is why I’ve previously argued for a service level agreement at customs, guaranteeing 95% of passengers get through in 15 minutes or fewer.)

This matters not just for businesses headquartered in Chicago (and would certainly be a boost to companies like Amazon or GE when they consider locating here), but it also matters a lot for other key Chicago industries: tourism, hospitality, and conventions. We all know Chicago has some of the greatest restaurants, theatre, and entertainment available anywhere and we get more than 50 million tourists a year spending billions of dollars. And many of the jobs in these industries are low skill or entry level but with career paths, which is a major win in an economy increasingly focused on high tech and services.

One way to see directly what a difference better airport transportation would make is to look at Rosemont. Why does it have its own thriving hotels, conference center, offices, etc.? It doesn’t offer a better climate, better amenities, or even appreciably lower prices that downtown. It’s just way more convenient that taking a car ride that could take anywhere between 45 minutes and two hours, or trying to drag luggage (especially convention kits) on the Blue Line. A side effect of high speed service to the loop would be that a lot of that business could move back downtown.

Less discussed, but probably also top of mind for Kennedy commuters is the fact that this rail service would take some load of the highways and even off the Blue Line. That would lead to fewer delays, longer lasting roads, and less crowded el cars. It would also make it easier for O’Hare freight service, since it would need to compete with a lot fewer cars on the roads.

There has been a tendency to think of the high speed airport link as just a concession to rich businesspeople, but I believe it’s anything but that. It would be a major factor in boosting the economy and increasing the quality of transportation even for people not themselves going to the airport. It’s a worthy project and one we should pursue.

The more I have engaged with supporter-driven organizations – political and nonprofit – the more I am convinced that the way they interact with their supporters is fundamentally wrong. So much of it comes from the sales and marketing world.

Each organization seeks to build its own base. The less sophisticated ones treat this base as a simple sales funnel, an audience to be solicited frequently with the goal of raising more dollars. The more sophisticated ones go beyond that and try to engender genuine concern in their bases about the issues the organizations are addressing. They often build some kind of ladder of engagement to get people to care, but that ladder too often represents a simple sales funnel: the only goal is for each piece of communication to get a user to level up or get out.

All of this is reflected both in the culture and tools of these organizations. Tools for nonprofits and tools offered for campaigns are essentially customizations of corporate CRM tools. But the problem of supporter engagement is fundamentally different than a sales funnel for a variety of reasons.

Many have written thoughtfully on this topic, notably Marshal Ganz, and may of my coworkers from Obama for America. In various places we implemented ideas of snowflake organizing – the notion of a semi-hierarchical structure that devolves down from headquarters through regional, state, and city levels to ultimately create action through neighborhood teams. Each neighborhood team is large enough to do meaningful work, but small enough to create accountability.

But one thing that each of these organizations have in common is that address the big, hairy issue in people’s lives. While there are multiple elected offices in the United States, none has the power to motivate people like the presidency. And while there are multiple community issues that need to be solved urgently, none are as holistic as people’s livelihoods. It is hard to get people to engage continuously around worthy but less all encompassing issues whether they are congressional elections or food banks.

This makes me question a fundamental idea of all supporter engagement. That it should be owned.

Let me pick that apart. One common thread in all of the supporter engagement approaches that I’ve seen is the idea that they roll up to an organization with an agenda and fixed leadership. Ultimately, that is a big constraint. What if, instead, the organization could be federated and self-governing, more like Bitcoin than like Salesforce.com?

As a thought experiment, consider how it might work.

First, you would form a legal entity. Fortunately, US law allows for a legal entity without ownership. It’s called a nonprofit. Since nonprofits don’t have owners, they are controlled by a board of directors. If the organization had bylaws allowing those directors to be directly elected by a constituency, we’d have a framework for a participant-managed organization where power could be transferred much as it is in government.

Second, the organization’s structure, bylaws, and voting could all be modeled in a software tool. Much like the snowflake model, their would be neighborhood teams and a hierarchy, but unlike the snowflake model, each layer of the hierarchy would be elected by the members of the layer below it. So the ten or so people on a team would elect a captain, the captains in a city would elect a city manager, the city managers would elect a county representative, the country representatives would elect state representatives, and the state representatives would elect the slate of directors (or might themselves be the directors) and a chief executive.

Broadly, the organization would engage in a few tasks: setting policy, directing action, and raising and distributing money.

Anyone on the network would be about to push ideas up vertically (so a team captain can send things to the city manager, the county manager, etc., hypothetically all the way up the chain) or down to everyone who is “below” them in the hierarchy (so a state representative could message everyone in the state). Broadly, this would apply not just to messaging, but to authority generally. Anything can be suggested up, anything can be decided and directed down.

This same structure would apply to policy making. It could be as simple as a wiki with cascading editorial rights. And it would certainly apply to information distribution and actions people could take. For example, the organization could decide to support a slate of candidates for office (not just a single one). Then the network would take action in support of those candidates even though individuals would be free to dissent.

On the issue side, the network could decide at each level of the hierarchy what issues matter to them and adopt organizations relevant to those actions. For example, the Chicago group might be most concerned about combatting violence while the Los Angeles group might be most concerned about immigrant right. These priorities could change, but they’d change democratically and people could have confidence that through their own involvement they could make the case for their own issues.

Smaller actions could work through such a network as well. Neighborhood watches, alley cleaning, even school board meetings could be coordinated.

One critical facet would be that teams could also connect regularly in the real world and they’d get some sort of credit for their level of engagement. It is simple enough to pick a spot in each neighborhood (the local Starbucks or McDonalds) and a time every week or few weeks for such meetings to occur.

If a network of this kind could gather momentum, it would ultimately become a highly democratic but autonomous civic network. Organizations and candidate could effectively put their cases to the participants and, if they prevail, get a meaningful level of support even though each person may not be able to contribute much individually. The organization could also take meaningful actions between elections and between fundraising cycles: town hall meetings, calls on policy issues, and so much more.

The key point is that the network isn’t owned. It isn’t locked into a single person, a single cause, or a single organization. It should be self-healing (unlike a campaign when a candidate leaves office), perpetual, and provide ways for people to make a difference. It could also be a binding layer for communities.

The software to support it is easy enough to build and maintain (I built a prototype while I was thinking through this that I might opensource.)
I curious about if people think such a network might work in reality?

Since I had the opportunity to work on President Obama’s 2012 campaign, it may be taking me longer than most to process the fact that the inauguration of the 45th president has just taken place. I’m trying to buy in to President Obama’s optimism about the future, but as he said, the future is in our hands only if we work for it and only if we organize for it.

With this in mind, since election day Genevieve and I have worked with a team of amazing volunteers to build RISE. Our goals are to create coordination among groups with an agenda of resistance to the most toxic incoming policies and to address many Americans’ real economic insecurity. We know that the country benefited hugely under President Obama with 8 years of economic growth, wages which are finally rising, a government budget in primary surplus, and so much more. But we also can see from the fact that the 45th president was elected that there’s a long way to go.

People no longer feel like the American Dream is working for them. Though wages are finally growing, middle class incomes have stagnated for a long time. We have huge issues around the impact of automation, climate change, and globalization. But we need answers that take us forward, not ill conceived ideas that try to take us back to a nostalgic history that wasn’t real, sustainable, or good for many groups of people like women and minorities. RISErs have many ideas for this and will work to engage new voters and persistent non-voters as well as the progressive base on these issues. We will do it by engaging thought-leaders and by listening to people’s individual concerns by building a permanent grassroots movement. We are also a political organization and will work directly to support like-minded candidates and policies as well as to oppose regressive ones. Our structure is a hybrid of tech startup and permanent campaign.

If you are as disturbed as I am by the direction the country has taken, please come and check out what we’re doing. RISE is only 60 days old so it’s a work in progress, but to be successful we need your support, your contributions, and your ideas. We need you to help us spread the word. Help us shape RISE and help us be a powerful voice for both resistance and change.

Genevieve is also touring the country to build support. Sign up to find out when she’ll be in your area (Cleveland, Philly, Milwaukee, Detroit, SF, and Denver are all coming soon.)