Chicago has much to learn about reducing gun violence from Los Angeles, and it now has a team of former L.A. officials to help it, former Education Secretary Arne Duncan writes in the Chicago Sun-Times. Duncan, also a former Chicago schools chief and now an executive with Emerson Collective and its violence-reduction advocacy group Chicago CRED, wrote that Chicago must spend far more on violence prevention while learning from L.A.’s turnaround under Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and his acolytes, one of whom, Charlie Beck, is now interim Chicago police superintendent.
Other former L.A. officials now working in Chicago include Susan Lee, now deputy mayor for public safety overseeing the new Office of Violence Prevention; and a trio of experts now at the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab: Sean Malinowski, who oversaw data-driven policing for Los Angeles; Maggie Goodrich, who helped LAPD comply with the consent decree, and Arif Alikhan, who ran the LAPD Office of Constitutional Policing. “Like Chicago, L.A. had a high-profile videotaped incident that prompted the city to act,” Duncan writes. “And like Chicago, L.A. eventually faced oversight of an outside monitor due to institutionalized racism in the ranks and illegal policing aimed at people of color. Unlike Chicago, however, Los Angeles has turned it around and today the city’s rate of gun violence is about a third of Chicago’s, though L.A. has 1.3 million more residents and fewer sworn officers.”