In “Chicago’s Real Crime Story,” the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal argues that the current response to the city’s youth violence will prove useless if it ignores “the disappearance of the black two-parent family.” The journal cites Barack Obama’s work as a Chicago community organizer in the 1980s, saying, that “his organizing targets are almost all single mothers. He never wonders where and who the fathers of their children are.”
Chicago School Superintendent Ron Huberman's plan for ending youth violence includes counselors and social workers in the most dangerous public high schools. He wants to create a “culture of calm” in the schools by retraining security guards and by de-emphasizing suspensions and expulsion in favor of “peer mediation.” Nothing new there, says City Journal: in 1998, Chicago schools announced plans to train students to be peer mediators and to engage in conflict resolution. There is nothing in Huberman's plan that hasn't been tried before, to no apparent effect. What’s lacking in these neighborhoods that we didn't notice before?, asks City Journal: family structure.