Tag: Crime Fighting Plan

Mayoral transition plan for transportation echoes priorities of advocates, including 20/10 mph speed limit

Last week, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s transition team released a sweeping 223-page report of policy recommendations across multiple sectors, including transportation. 

The transportation subcommittee that penned the corresponding section of the report is comprised of transit agency representatives, community stakeholders and advocates, including members of Active Transportation Alliance, Access Living, and Better Streets Chicago—three of six organizations that banded together as the Safe Streets for All Coalition, which formed to amplify the call for safety for people on foot and bikes in the months leading up to the mayoral election. The subcommittee is chaired by state representative Kam Buckner, whose mayoral run featured the most progressive and comprehensive transportation platform of the nine candidates. 

The resulting twenty pages of transportation recommendations in the report reflect the priorities of a group committed to transforming our current car-centric roadways into a safer, healthier, more equitable system for all. An introductory context section acknowledges how the combined damage of transit disinvestment, destructive highways and a concentration of industrial freight in low-income Black and Brown neighborhoods has saddled residents with poorer health outcomes and less connection to the necessities of life. It also acknowledges the blow Covid-19 dealt to public transportation in ridership and revenue, and the urgent need for new, consistent sources of funding to restore and improve Chicago’s transit system.

Read more HERE

2023 Mayoral Transition Report HERE

Baltimore City Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan

Baltimore City is wrestling with multiple public health crises: the global COVID-19 pandemic and local epidemics of gun violence and preventable overdose deaths. Since 2015, Baltimore has seen more than 300 homicides per year—the overwhelming majority of which were gun-related. In 2020, there were 954 opioid-related overdose deaths in Baltimore.

Historically, Baltimore has over-relied on the 3Ps – policing, prosecutions, and prisons – in an attempt to reduce violence and strengthen community safety. This strategy has not only failed to yield long- term results, it has also come at an extremely high social cost to many of our most vulnerable communities.

Never before has Baltimore developed a holistic public safety strategy, one that aims to treat gun violence as a public health crisis and operationalizes what Baltimore residents want to see from their City government. Furthermore, the City has never developed a multi-year plan to reduce violence in a sustainable way over time, not just for a year or two.

mayor.baltimorecity.gov/sites/default/files/MayorScott-ComprehensiveViolencePreventionPlan-1.pdf

QPP 48: Jeff Asher on Gun Arrests

This is an interesting podcast from Professor Peter Moskos’s website. Moskos and Asher and then Brandon Del Pozo (all PhDs) discuss the increase in firearm arrests from police stops. It is cool just to listen to Moskos and Asher discuss different thoughts, concepts, and ideas and then Del Pozo add in his perspective as he joins in at the end of the podcast.

Here are a couple of my thoughts as I listened to the podcast:
What methods were used to get the guns off of the streets? Self-initiated Field Activity (SIFA), Vehicle and Traffic Law stops by officers, was it searches incidental to arrest, and was citizen contact made because police were alerted by type of a shot detection equipment?

What kind of guns are being used?  Were Legal or illegal guns being recovered? Is the gun issue a supply issue or a demand issue? Was the gun a Newly purchased gun?  What was the length of time from purchase to use?

Asher noted several times that there was limited data from police departments regarding crimes. Jeff also noted that it would be difficult to get specific data about the guns recovered. I think if some of the police departments devised a program of prisoner debriefings for all gun arrests where a specific script is followed (at least to cover the data that is needed) it might be possible to develop a more fuller picture of the gun crime problem.

This podcast can be access HERE