April 10, 2008

Mayor’s Press Office
312-744-3334

Mayor Richard M. Daley today announced collaboration with the University of Chicago to study and understand youth violence and develop strategies to prevent it.

“At the very time that we’ve reached historic lows in homicides and violent crime, this needless violence against our children goes on,” Daley said in remarks delivered at the University’s School of Social Service Administration, 969 E. 60th St.

“Like every Chicagoan, I’m outraged that violence continues to take the lives of our children. Our schools, police, community and religious organizations have taken many steps in the last several years to protect our children. But, clearly, as a city we must do more to make our streets, sidewalks, schools and parks safe for them,” he said.

As the violence continues, Daley said, all Chicagoans must ask themselves what more they can do to prevent it.

“Every Chicagoan must continue to rise up in anger against the gang bangers and drug dealers who don’t respect or value life. They need to report crimes and criminals. They need to turn in illegal guns. Community silence means only more death and despair,” the Mayor said.

Daley said the study team will examine the root causes of this violence as it seeks to determine what new steps can be taken to prevent it from happening.

They will ask questions such as: What are the factors in the home that are important to understand? Which programs work and which don’t? What new strategies can we implement to reduce and prevent violence against children?

The study will involve some of Chicago’s and the nation’s leading scholars in the fields of crime, public policy, economics, sociology, public health, youth development as well as family and education policy.

Once the group has developed a series of intervention policies in the next few months, they will be implemented on a pilot basis throughout the city, using private funding to be secured by the University of Chicago, Daley said.

It is hoped the first pilot program will be ready this summer, he said.

At the University, the project will be led by Jens Ludwig, Professor of Social Service Administration, Law, and Public Policy, and a leading authority on crime and social policy, and Associate Professor Harold Pollack in the School of Social Service Administration, faculty chair of the Center for Health Administration Studies, and a prominent public health policy researcher.

They will lead a team of University and national scholars, who will work with the City to develop interventions to reduce youth crime within a research framework designed to provide the most scientifically rigorous evidence possible on effective solutions.

“We have two main goals for this project,” Ludwig said. “One is to help steer youth towards productive activities like schooling and work, and away from behaviors like crime and gang involvement that put youth at elevated risk for violence victimization or offending.

“Our second main goal is motivated by the fact that gun involvement makes youth violence substantially more dangerous – we want to reduce the likelihood that guns are involved in those violent events that do occur,” he said.

Daley pointed to numerous steps the city has taken to protect our children, including strengthening enforcement of the city’s curfew, installing safety cameras in public schools, adding additional police patrols near schools and creating the KidStart and After School Matters programs, which have involved hundreds of thousands of children in constructive activities.

“We can’t accept violence, even against one child. Keeping our children safe is Chicago’s challenge and our shared responsibility,” the Mayor said.

“I’m concerned that we live in a society that seems to downplay the importance of parental responsibility and underestimates the positive impact that a responsible adult – whether a parent, grandparent, or others – can have on the direction of a child’s life.

“This is a complex challenge. We owe it to our children to get to the bottom of why the violence happens in the first place and what more we can do to keep them safe,” he said.

The other members of the study team are:

University of Chicago scholars on the project include: Jeffrey Grogger, the Irving Harris Professor of Urban Policy at the Irving B. Harris School of Public Policy Studies; Jonathan Guryan, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Business; Steven Levitt, the Alvin Baum Professor of Economics; John List, Professor of Economics; Thomas Miles, Assistant Professor in the Law School; Charles Payne, the Frank P. Hixon Professor in the School of Social Service Administration; and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, Assistant Professor in the Harris School.

Other researchers are Philip Cook, the ITT/Terry Sanford Professor of Public Policy Studies at Duke University; Jennifer Hill, Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University; Brian Jacob, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Education Policy at the University of Michigan; Tracey Meares, Professor of Law at Yale University; and Dennis Rosenbaum, Professor of Criminal Justice and Psychology at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Daley was also joined at the news conference.