 On behalf of the McLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and the University of Chicago Trauma Center, I'm delighted to welcome you to our 2017-18 lecture series on ethical issues in violence, trauma, and trauma surgery. It's now my pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Secretary Arne Duncan, someone who hardly needs an introduction. A native of Hyde Park, Mr. Duncan came from a family of educators and graduated from the University of Chicago Lab School. He then attended Harvard University where he was co-captain of the varsity basketball team and graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in sociology. And Mr. Duncan then played basketball professionally. I hadn't known this for three years in Australia's National Basketball League while also working with children who are wards of the state. Arne Duncan's career in education started in Chicago where he ran the non-profit Education Foundation, Ariel Education Initiative, and then he went on to serve as the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools, a position he held from 2001 through 2008. In 2009, President Obama nominated Mr. Duncan as Secretary of Education. As secretary, he worked to pass legislation that increased the number of teachers in the United States and under Secretary Duncan's leadership, the Department of Education committed resources to improve nearly a thousand low-performing schools nationwide. When he left President Obama's cabinet in December of 2015, Secretary Duncan had no shortage of options. Currently, he works with the Emerson Collective, a major philanthropic organization. I'm sure Arne Duncan will explain how he made his choices, but the key decision was to use his extraordinary knowledge, talents, and experience to help his hometown, Chicago, address the level of violence in our city. Mr. Duncan's talk today is entitled, Reducing Violence in the City of Chicago. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Arne Duncan. Good afternoon, and I think you must have drawn the short straw as we are Prime Minister Trudeau. I'll tell you which one my daughter chose, it wasn't me. The issue of violence is not a new one for any of us, frankly, who grew up in Chicago on the south side or west side of Chicago. My mother all my life ran a tutoring program on 46th and Greenwood, which is less than two miles from here. In those days, 47th Street was the barrier between Middle Class, Hyde Park, Kenwood and North Kenwood Oakland, and going to her program from birth shaped me. My sister and brother have all tried to follow in her footsteps in various ways. My sister works actually at the university to help me train principals. My mother suffers from Alzheimer's now. I had to stop working a couple of years ago. My brother took over her program, and I tried to do my own thing to build upon the amazing lessons that we learned there. I probably started losing friends to gun violence when I was 12, 13, 14. Started to go out into the neighborhoods and play basketball, lots of different places. There are a set of guys who candidly helped protect me and gave me safe passage to different places, losing some of those friends early, I think shapes you and maybe scars you in some ways a little bit hard to talk about. But it's something that stays with you. As Dr. Segal said, I went on to run the Chicago Public Schools. That was an amazing privilege for seven and a half years. And lots of different issues you face and obviously driving academic achievement as a top of that. Thinking through labor management piece and keeping kids in school and those strikes is important, managing tough budgets. Those are all real issues, but honestly, those are all easy. We're really easy compared to the level of violence that faced our kids and our community. And I am not proud of this at all, but again, I was going to be canon on this. During my seven and a half years leading Chicago Public Schools, on average, we lost a student every two weeks due to gun violence. And going to those funerals, going to those kids homes, going to classrooms, there's an empty chair and trying to make sense of the senseless to kids. Sometimes high school, sometimes 10 year olds in fifth grade. Nothing was harder and it did not get easier time. In fact, it got increasingly difficult. Many of those kids are sort of a really odd thing. I didn't know while they were alive, but got to know their families really well after they were killed. And whether it was Starkisha Reed who was in her living room on a morning before going to school, was shot through the living room window by an AK-47 from 100 yards away, still staying in very close contact with her mother Denise. With this Blair Holt who was taking the CTA bus home 2.30 in the afternoon, going home from school. The guy jumps on the bus, starts shooting. He jumps in front of his friends. He's killed. His father actually worked for the Game Crimes Unit. His mother works for the fire department. And these are relationships that are now 10, 11 years, 10, 11 years old. There's a lot I missed about Chicago when I went to DC. And parts I've left about DC, happy to talk to that through as well. What I didn't miss was not going to funerals. During my seven years in DC, I think I went to three funerals. Two were back here in Chicago. Unfortunately, one was the Sandy Hook Massacre in Newtown, Connecticut where 20 babies and five teachers in a principal were killed and went to the principal, went to the funeral of that principal. So this is not a new issue. It's one that's plagued me. I would say haunted me all my life, very, very naively. When our family moved to DC, going back to 2009, I really thought Chicago was a rock bottom. I thought things couldn't get worse. And in hindsight, I was absolutely incorrect and things got a lot worse. So I talk about losing a child on average every two weeks during my seven and a half years. Last school year, so 40 weeks in school year, September to June. Last year in Chicago Public Schools, 59 kids were killed in 40 weeks. So that's more than a child every week. And these are kids that are in school. These are not the kids who have dropped down, not whatever. One charter high school that actually helped start 20 years ago, we're all a little older, North Londale College Prep. Amazing school, amazing graduation rate, vast majority of kids going on to college. That one high school last year had 17 kids shot. And I always say I've never been to Iraq, I've never been to Afghanistan, I've never been to actual war zones. But I wonder in those countries, is there a school where 17 kids have been shot? And it's state the obvious, it's not right, it's not fair. We're robbing kids of their childhoods. Our kids are living with a level of fear and trauma every day that's extraordinary. And they deserve something very, very different. Talk through some facts, again, these are not disputable. I'm happy to talk about my opinions in a minute. Chicago, as we all know, is the third largest city in the country. New York and LA are first. Chicago has way more homicides, way more shootings in New York and LA combined. So think about that. Third largest city, way more than one and two combined. Last year, 2017, we had 660 homicides. To be in line, I would love to get us to zero. That's probably a little naive on my part. So I keep saying, I just want us to be normal. Right now, we are just a crazy anomaly. For us to be normal relative to population, relative to New York's homicides rate, we would have to go from 660 to 92. That's the difference, that's the gap. So you guys can do the math there. There's something called the clear rate, which I'm obsessed with, which is the percent of crimes that actually get solved here in Chicago. Get cleared. If you shoot someone in Chicago, if you kill them, that has about in 2016, that had a 26% clear rate. So 74% of murders go unsolved. You literally get away with murder. If you happen to shoot somebody but not kill them, that has a clear rate of 3%, 4%. So 96%, 97% of shootings go unsolved. I'm working with lots and lots of men now who have been shot. I don't know if we have a single one where the shooter's been apprehended. We must have one, but I can't tell you today who that is. I know each homicide costs a city about $1.7 million in medical and emergency and police costs. So take out the human part, just the financial impact of this is extraordinary. 75% of the violence is concentrated in 15 neighborhoods. We know where they are, South and West sides. It's not Hyde Park where we are. It's not Lincoln Park. And 75% of the victims and the perpetrators are young black men 17 to 24. So the profile of those shooting and being shot is identical. It is one and the same. And it is often literally the same person. So those are facts. I'll sort of now move to what I believe, my thoughts about those facts. I think we're in a state of crisis and I think we are collectively failing our kids. There's nothing about any of this that for me feels acceptable or right or just. Secondly, I think we value different lives differently. And we can say that black lives matter. We can say that brown lives matter. But I promise you if the majority of folks being shot were more my complexion and not Dr. Rogers, something radically different would happen. If there was 100 or 200 people who worked downtown who were being shot, who worked in those office buildings, something very different would happen. So in words for me a little bit cheap, I look at actions. And for me as a city, our actions say that black and brown lives matter less than lives of folks that look like me. Third, I believe we can't arrest our way out of this. I think mass incarceration has been a disaster, again, particularly in African-American, Latino communities. Throwing a lot more folks in jail, I don't think it's worked. And we're trying to come at this in a very different way and I'll walk that through. Fourth, I think to solve this, we all have to look in the mirror and challenge ourselves and do some things in some very different ways. And frankly, make ourselves uncomfortable and sort of talk through what that means. But if we continue to point fingers or lay blame or look for somebody else to solve this, I think it's too hard, it's too complex. We all have a little piece to play and hopefully our collective efforts will lead us to a very, very different place. Lots of times people come up to me and say, fantastic, you're giving guys a second chance. I actually have come to believe that for the, I would say the vast majority of our guys were basically giving them a first chance, that they never had a first chance. And that all the systems, their own families, school system, the churches and non-profits and social service agencies, everybody almost took from birth, let them down and let on a path, put them on a path that led to this violence. It's fascinating to me again, every guy's story is different, but many, not all, many have some real similarities, some real commonalities. Many of our guys at age 13 or 14 became the men of their home. And mom was an alcoholic or on crack, dad was locked up or gone. And they had, they found themselves having to get money for food, having to get money to help mother pay rent, having to get money for clothes. Lots of them are actually older siblings, they have younger siblings they have to care about. And when they hit that point, there was one person hiring. And that was the guy in the corner. And all of us in safe spaces and comfortable places like this, we were absent from their lives. And I always say on snowy days, on cold days, on rainy days, that job opportunity is always there. I've never heard of a guy in the corner saying, we can't take another worker. You know, we're full, we're fully employed. There's always space for someone to be a lookout, for somebody to hold something, for something to do something. And this work is very, very humbling and really learning not to judge. It's a little bit hard, maybe folks don't understand. I believe many of our guys made a rational choice because there wasn't another rational choice. So I'm the eldest of three, grew up in middle-class Hyde Park, two great parents. I never had to make these kinds of choices. But had I had to fend for my brother and sister as well as me, I can't say I would have made a different choice, a better choice if I didn't have one. The youngest guy who told me, he said, he started selling drugs at nine years old. He said, Arnie, it's really hard to sell drugs at nine years old. I'm like, I bet it is. He wasn't a bad guy. He wasn't trying to be al Capone. He was trying to survive. Now the guy told me, all right, he's got sick of hearing my mother cry at night. And I had to go do what I had to do to help relieve some of that stress. Finally, I believe, and this is not my words, all the folks have said this is while we are failing and while we're in a state of crisis, I think in every crisis there's an opportunity. It's actually a huge opportunity. Actually, I'll get to why I'm actually very, very hopeful and optimistic. But for me, the opportunity here is twofold. First, because it is so violent now, because it is so tough, our guys are looking to get out. They're tired, they're tired of being shot at. They're tired of police chasing them. They're looking to make a change. And the second reason this always blows people away is there's a myth that all these drug dealers are making lots of money. Our guys are not getting rich. And I'm sure there are some guys in Chicago getting rich. I haven't met any of them yet. I'm sure they exist. But our guys are risking their lives and getting locked up and getting shot for peanuts. And I started coming home three, four years ago and talking to guys on the street and going to juvenile detention center and going to Cook County Jail. And I always just sort of asked, we all have a price. What's your price? What's the grand bargain? If we were to provide some jobs, what would it take to get you out of life? I've done this dozens and dozens and dozens of times. And it always came back $11, $12, $13 an hour. It's peanuts. It's absolutely nothing. So we lock guys up at Cook County Jail at $55, $60,000 a year, quite happily. Don't think twice of that. But the thought of employing men, these aren't boys, men $25, $30,000 a year somehow that's a step too far. We can't conceive of that. And so for those reasons, because it's so tough, because no one's getting rich, guys are looking at our lives out of the lifestyle. And we're just trying to meet them where they are. I'll quickly summarize what we're doing. And again, we're a tiny, tiny piece of trying to have an impact. And lots of people have been doing this work a long time before I came back to Chicago. And we're trying to learn from them as fast as we can. We started in September of 16, so 16 months ago or so. We now have six cohorts of guys we work. We're trying to work with cohorts of 20 or 30 guys together. We provide jobs. We're doing home deconstruction. We're doing neighborhood beautification. We've done some fashion stuff, done stuff in the forest preserves. We surround our guys with life coaches. We have amazing life coaches, many who have come from this life, who have come out the other side to help. Our guys have tremendous needs in terms of trauma care, substance abuse. We've had a whole set of guys get high school diplomas. We're working with them. And now we have two guys that started college in January, which is fantastic. We're going to track that going forward. But for me, it's the combination of jobs plus the wraparound services. And without the jobs, guys might want to get out, but they still got to make a living. Without the wraparound services trying to deal with the trauma, trying to deal with all the different issues, you're not going to get there. We talk a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder. This is present. This is current. It's every single day stress disorder. And a million crazy anecdotes, but just a couple of them. One of our guys, for him to go home each day, he circles his block three, four, five times. And he knows every car. He knows every alleyway. He knows every person. If something looks out of place, he just keeps driving. He keeps driving. And you think about that every single day. All I'll see for myself, when I go home from work, I just go home, park, go in the house. That's his daily ritual. That's his routine, because that's what he has to do to stay alive. Think about living with that kind of pressure. Same guy, not coincidentally. We're having transportation issues. We're going to put all our guys in a van to go to work site. Seems a lot more efficient. Made sense. He's like, Arnie, I know what you're trying to do. I can't get in that van. Why can't you in the van? He's like, I'm not safe in that van. I'm a sitting target. And people who are looking for me, if they know I'm getting picked up in that van, I can't move. And I'm like, you're right. I understand. Different perspective, not how I thought. But he knew what he had to do to survive. But that stress is extraordinary. We're going to go deep in two neighborhoods this year. Rose and Pullman out South, North Londale West. We're building a city-wide group of players to work in those 15 communities and try to start to think about scale. This is about individual transformation with guys. What's about can we have neighborhood reduction of violence at the community level? I tell our guys, our team all the time, let me just have a small team working with the guys hands on it. Yes, it's amazing to see individual guys move. Obviously, I've done education all my life. I love guys getting their high school phones going to college. But that's not our goal. If we do that and violence doesn't come down in the city, then I think we fail. We fail. Let me just talk quickly through why I'm hopeful and then sort of an ask and then open up for questions. The biggest reason I'm hopeful is our young men themselves. And I encourage you, any of you to come out and talk and share and hang out. Dr. Rogers came out and did an amazing job, very personal talking through. And if you want to comment when we're done, I'd love to hear your thoughts. But I always say, our guys are not the problem. They're the solution. And our job is to empower them, to listen, to walk with them, to stay with them. Transformation is not linear. We have good days. We have bad days. We have amazingly inspirational days. We have heartbreaking days. But our guys are going to lead the city where we need to go. The employment piece is huge. Right now, we have more jobs available than guys ready. We have guys now working in law firms. Deloitte, a conservative accounting firm, is about to hire one of our guys. We have guys working in construction and culinary and hospitality. And as we start to scale and work with more guys, those numbers are going to switch. But right now, so far, the business community has been extraordinarily responsive in helping us. We have amazing community partners, non-profits. Of the six cohorts, our team, we just ran the first one, every single other one. We're working with community partners, churches, non-profits, social service agencies. They've been in these communities 30, 40 years. They have a depth of relationships that we're never going to have in building their capacity to do their work. And it's so interesting, while they've all been in these communities for ever and done great work, they will tell you that this is often one step of a degree of difficulty, one step beyond what they've done. And that they haven't had the ability or capacity to really reach the guys most at risk of shooting or being shot. And we're trying to stay very focused out right in that population. There are lots of young men, young women who need jobs, need help, need to go back to school. That's fantastic work. We're partnering with folks doing that. That's not what we're about. We're trying to work directly with those most at risk of shooting and being shot and empowering community partners to play there. Two more reasons for hope, and then one ask, and I'll stop, is there's, I think, again, lots of myths about how many active shooters there are here in Chicago. And I'll be very honest, there are lots and lots of people carrying guns, because they don't feel safe, and because they frankly feel the police don't protect them. The number of active shooters, Superintendent Eddie Johnson, talks about 1,500. I think it's a little higher, call it 2,000, call it 2,500, call it 3,000, pick a number. But I just think about a city of our resources, our business community, our philanthropic community, our anchor institutions. Think about as a city, if we could take 1,000 guys, 1,500 guys a year, employ them, provide them life coaches, provide the wraparound services. Those numbers don't scare me. When I worked in DC, I worked with much bigger numbers, bigger scale. I would love to get to 10,000 guys in Chicago. We don't have to do that. We don't have to do that. If we got to 1,000, which we're going to try and do over the course of the next year, 1,500, 2,000, we could make a remarkable dent in this. Let me talk about ambition then and ask, and then we'll open it up. 2016 was a horrific year. 2017 was a little bit better. Down 15% is a city, and we should celebrate those successes. I just want to talk about what our collective ambition needs to be. For us to go from 660 to 92, if we get 15% reductions each year, that takes us 10 years. The math doesn't work. We lose a whole other generation of kids. So as a city, we have to raise our ambitions. And this is challenging. Nothing easy about this, and we may absolutely fail. We need to think about reducing violence every year for the next five years at 25%. That's what it's going to take. And otherwise, we're chipping away at the margins, and that's all fantastic, but I just don't think we can afford to wait 10 or 15 or 20 years. I don't think it's fair to our kids. The number of kids that tell me they can't go outside anymore, they can't play, they're literally locked in their homes. It doesn't make any sense. I spent all my childhood running around playing ball everywhere. Our kids can't do that anymore. So I want us all to think about, what would it take for us to do differently to have 25% reductions for five, six years in a row? If we do that, we change the landscape fundamentally. That's got to be our ambition. That's got to be our dream. That's got to be our collective goal. We all have to hold ourselves mutually accountable to getting there. And the final thing, I just always try and think about what folks can do to help. I'm so proud of what Dr. Rogers and his team is doing to build the trauma center here that's been desperately needed on the south side. Our guys talk all the time about friends of loss because they're going to hospitals up north and literally die in that time. I'm a big fan of President Zimmer. He had other partners walk away from creating the trauma center, and he stayed with it and didn't have to do that. It's not a cheap endeavor. I know it hasn't been universally welcomed by the community. Probably some folks in here don't think it's a great idea. Tragically, it's desperately needed. While I think that's a good thing, I think it's insufficient. And if all we do is stitch guys up and save their lives and then send them right back out into those environments, they're coming right back, or someone they shoot is coming right back to you. And I just want this community, again, that's so smart and so committed that's rooted in the south side of Chicago to think about continuing to come out into the streets and the need for social workers, the need for substance abuse counseling, the need for trauma care. Domestic violence is a real issue. It's interesting to me that's like a gateway to some of this other violence we deal with. The more folks of your skill set and your expertise can move outside of the walls and move outside the safety of Hyde Park and come into Anglewood or North Laundale, Woodlawn or Rosen. There's no shortage of places and start to meet guys where they are and talk and mentor and work. I think you'll be blown away by their commitment, by their intelligence, by their passion, but also by their pain. And I don't want to blow through that. And if we can help them get past that pain, we move to a very different place. And again, if we're just stitching guys up and sending them back, that for me doesn't get there. It's a cliche. I really believe that hurt people hurt people. And we're working with a lot of hurt guys. And if we can help to heal them, they are, again, not just transforming themselves, they're starting to pull down violence in the entire neighborhood. One last quick story and then it'll open up, just amazing folks, but there's one guy who was, his group has been for years, frankly, creating a lot of the violence. They've been doing a lot of the shooting out where we are. And he's a little older. Most of our guys are 21, 22, they're younger. He's 29 and seeing some things. And he is a child and wants to live for that child. And that changes guys thinking as well. But he, about a month ago, went unarmed, went over to the, call him the ops, went over to the rivals, lift up his coat, showing no weapons. Said, shoot me if you want, but would like to try and talk about a peace, the truth. That stuck for the past month. And there's been a precipitous decline in that little battle where it's been 15, 20 years and countless bodies have dropped because of that. I asked him what the root of that conflict was. And he has no idea. No one knows. It's just retaliation, retaliation, revenge, revenge. And I said, you're doing, you're leading what we're trying to do. And what can we do to support you? What can we do to help you? The one thing he asked for was for a park for little kids on his block. That was his mentality. They have a torn up park that no one's responsible for. You know, this is symbolic for me, not going too long. No one owns it, city won't clean it. So they actually hire the drug addicts to cut the lawn and do that because they'll work and they'll do anything. For me, that absence of structure, that absence of supports, those absence of resources didn't ask for a thing for himself. Ask, could we help him build a park and rebuild a park? And we're gonna try and do that and maybe I'll invite you guys out to come help rebuild that park this spring. But that's the kind of mentality out there. This is a guy who honestly has done a lot of harm. He's done a lot of damage. None of us can turn back the clock. None of us can change what we did yesterday. But there are a lot of guys just like him who want to change themselves and more importantly, want the communities to change. And again, if we can meet them halfway, if we can walk with them, I'm convinced. I'm convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt over the next couple of years we can move Chicago to a radically different place. So I'll stop there. Happy to take any questions you might have. Thank you so much. There's some microphones. Tony? Yeah, yeah, sit down. Yeah. While you're getting seated, Mr. Duncan, I want to thank you for joining us, but also the work. I, you know, with David Crump, we came down to Roseland. It's probably, it was summer. So it was six months ago, seven months ago. And I was struck by something one of the young men said, which is, you know, he was going to cognitive behavioral therapy and he said, I didn't realize Ashley was hurt. I didn't realize that Ashley was going through psychological trauma. And I wish I'd had this earlier. And one of the challenges that I sense is we don't really have a, being a student of history, a martial plan. There's not an overwhelming strategic plan aligning all of the merited resources to tackle this really complicated, complex human tragedy. What's a way forward from your position for a martial plan for the city of Chicago? First of all, I agree with you. I think that's accurate. As a city, I think we have one been fractured. Secondly, and I'm just always honest, maybe too honest, I think we've been paralyzed by this. We need to feel overwhelmed or we feel helpless. And as I said before, the numbers for me aren't that overwhelming. And we are definitely, all my life I've seen, you know, I've worked in education. For me, that's the prevention side. I'm now working on the intervention side just so I feel there's a crisis. I would love to get back to the prevention side at some point in my life, but for me, you can't neglect the crisis. But we know, schools know, probably starting at age 10, 11, 12, who are, and it's not just young boys, the young boys and young girls who have been through the worst situations. And we don't reach out to them. And I'll give you a real concrete example and won't use a name, but he's talked about it publicly. One of my best staff, one of my best teammates is a guy who led one of the gang factions for a long time, was shot six times himself, inflicted a lot of harm in the community. Much of that started when he found his mother dead at the hands of her boyfriend, domestic violence. She lost her life. And he said, when that happened, no social worker showed up and knocked on his door. And he just from that point on, tried to inflict as much pain on others as he was feeling. And he's now doing amazing work with us and it's a huge part of the solution. But there's a gap of years there where he did a lot of bad things and had someone been there. So lack of a plan, lack of a willingness to reach out when things happen. We've had one of our guys killed. Tragically, there were young kids in the car when he was shot. We gotta take care of those young kids or else we just perpetuate the problem. And so we're trying to corral lots of folks, city folks, met with state folks today. Can we come together, archdiocese and start to have a vision, execute a plan against it. And if we do that, that would, I guess it's closer, it puts in the ball game, puts in the ballpark. Doesn't say we'll necessarily succeed, but it puts us in a very different spot than we've been in the past five, 10, 15 years. My name's Tom Decker, my company Chicago Green Insulation. I'm a spray foam insulation contractor after a career in the not-for-profit world working in the inner city with troubled kids. And after 20 years of recognizing that my kids weren't getting jobs because they had learning disabilities and they had criminal involvement, I decided to stop being angry about it and become an entrepreneur hiring those same young people. So I've talked to Rahul the last couple days about opportunities to collaborate. The one thing that I would add beyond everything that you've said is how we can take a polyurethane foam insulation on creating ultra-energy efficient sub-$100,000 owner occupied homes so that we can plan a flag on a block of poverty and blight and start to create generational wealth and how home ownership plays a role in that. Now thanks so much for your leadership and look forward to continuing those conversations and again it's sort of obvious that these neighborhoods are not eight neighborhoods there's lots of resources, these are neighborhoods of massive disinvestment but they all have a bunch of abandoned buildings, a bunch of homes and so it's a huge amount of work we're doing as home deconstruction and if we can start to get those homes back online and ultimately have our guys live in their sweat equity that changes everything, that changes everything. Not to go on too long on this, these are all generally very tough guys, lots of tough lessons I've learned, about a third of our guys are homeless. I just sort of assumed because they were tough guys they had a roof over the head and it's nowhere, it's just, it's not true. So the desperate, we're doing a bunch of stuff for housing and we're failing, we're not doing nearly enough and so the need for stable homes for guys to be in to talk about it, all this other stuff is a desperate need that is largely on that right now. Please. Okay, hi. My name is Emily, I'm a school social worker. I was just wanting to know if you could talk about the destabilization of communities through school closings and the expansion of charter schools where we know violence is prevalent in those areas and how you're working to invest in public community schools to help the families of the folks that you're working with. Well, I'm just a big fan of good schools and whatever form or fashion that might be I'm a little bit pragmatic there and so it's a complicated issue. There are a bunch of schools that were closed in these communities, we're in DC. In a perfect world, you don't do that. I will say that no educator I know ever wakes up saying I want to close a bunch of schools and I think what folks have not been honest themselves is the intersection between these two things. Schools close when there's a lack of population. Manly high school, school I used to do a ton of work with, I hadn't been there in 10 years. Manly high school has space for 3,500 kids. I went there three weeks ago, they have 140 kids in that school. So I don't wanna go, it's not the education debate. I do believe kids should have a choice and I think kids and families should have a choice of picking the best school for them. For me, the bigger issue, that's an issue we can talk about. For me, the bigger issue is percent of black families we've lost from Chicago because of the violence and it's been this tremendous reverse migration of black families going back down south because they don't feel their boys are safe and that's a very, we've lost hundreds, so we can talk about charter, which is a tiny percent. We've lost 100,000 in terms of black population going elsewhere because we don't keep our communities safe and so for me, the biggest thing, if you wanna keep schools open, if you wanna repopulate, is we have to make our communities safer. I gotta lose some other questions, thank you. Mr. Duncan, thanks for coming out. I wanted to know, how do you identify the qualified shooters and once you do, how do you get them to participate? I'll put my man Billy Moore in the spot. So I just saw Billy, I know he's here. Billy's one of our best life coaches. He is a deep personal story, which he can share and not share, but I talked about six cohorts of guys. He works with an amazing group, Iman, just west of Englewood. Talk about how we identify who comes into the program. We'll put, basically. Stand up if you want to. You know, I'm getting used to Arnie putting me on the side the time we're around. It's just in the back. I didn't saw you come down here, so. Let me talk about a personal story that I had. Maybe about a year ago, I was driving in one of the neighborhoods on the south side. Oh, I'm sorry. They call Surcon City, which is on 73rd and Blackstone. And as I got up the block, I had 10 at Wendell's. I seen about four young men standing in the middle of the street. And it didn't look good. As I got up close to these young men, I noticed they had guns drawn. So I just said a prayer. Hope they, you know, didn't think that I was somebody they was looking for. I was able to continue to go where I was going. But when I got to the end of the block, I knew right then and there that I couldn't leave without turning back to go say something to these young men. Because I know that had I went home and turned on the news that night and heard about a little kid getting killed on that block, I knew I couldn't live with myself. And the first thing we think about when we see these tragedies is that somebody need to do something. But that's somebody is you. A lot of us don't get a chance to get in front of a shooter before he then pulled the trigger. So that was my opportunity. So I came back around the corner and had an opportunity to talk to the guys. I rolled my windows down and they were still posturing. And I asked them if I can talk and they was like, sure. So I asked them how old were they? Two of them was 15, one was 17, one was 18. So I relayed my story and I believe that experience is not always the best teaching. Sometimes other people mistakes. You get the benefit of not going through what somebody else went through. To me, that's realism. So I told them when I was 16, I actually shot somebody and they died and I went to jail for 20 years. I said, you don't get a chance 30 years later now to stand in front of a young man and tell them about your mistakes because if you kill somebody today in Illinois, you're going to wait for life. So for you, young man, that's 15, 16, 17, you're going to go away for at least 100 years. You're not going to live that long. And it's a tragedy because you have so much life in front of you to just throw your life away by taking a life for someone else. So my work right now is to try to save as many lives as I can. It'll never add up to that one life I took. But if I have an opportunity to be able to address a young man who's standing there with a gun, who don't have any hope, no one has really invested anything in this young man to give him a sense of value, then that's what I'm going to do. And that's what our program is designed to do. We have a program at E-MOM, where we teach young men three vocational trades, electrical, HVAC, and carpentry, as well as life skills. We instill hope and value in these young men. A lot of these young men, that's all they need. So, that's what we do, and hopefully we can help turn these young men around, transform their thinking, and get them a better way of living. So, Mr. Duncan, Mr. Duncan. We have amazing life coaches in every program. I don't say this lightly, Billy, maybe our best. He's got one guy in the program at E-MOM who was shot 13 times. We're identifying people word of mouth on the street, referrals, Cook County Jails, and a great job of feeding folks to us. So, this is very, very organic to answer your question directly, how we identify. This is very street level. Okay, Mr. Duncan. My name is Brother JR Fleming. I'm from Cabrini, my name is Brother JR Fleming. I'm from Cabrini, Green. I've been an activist in Chicago for 20 years. Going from Cabrini to Congress, to the White House, to the United Nations, right? Talking about the demolition of public housing, the correlation between the school closing, and how it was gonna increase violence in the city of Chicago. So I'm gonna do a shameless plug. There's a book called High Rises that talk about the fate of American public housing. I put emphasis on housing because a lot of folks you talk about are homeless, right? There's a lot of homeless people living in family, a lot of overcrowded house, so that's the problem, right? United Nations can solve our problem. The White House can solve it, Congress can solve it. We decided to take over vacant homes, fix them up, and move homeless women and children. I'm in a group called the Anti-Vixen Campaign. People focused on us housing the homeless folks, versus the training that the young men and women were receiving. You say that you run a similar program training young men on deconstruction. However, you know, in this political city, where the political gangbanging is more dangerous than the gangbanging going on on the streets. Because that gangbanging denies resources, right? The political gangbanging that goes on in this city is of special interest group, particularly the union, who have a historical record of discriminating against African American young men with backgrounds, right? They have a historical record of not hiring us, right? So how do you propose to get these young men, once they got these skillset, into a union that have sown its racist behavior, with the data of subcontracts to African American contractors, with these so-called project labor agreements that keeps us out the union? Let me try and answer, okay? We got some other questions. It's a great question. I don't have easy answers on it. What I will say again, I'll always give credit where credit is due, is we now have a couple dozen, not enough, we have a couple dozen employers who are thinking about hiring differently. And to be clear, our guys don't just have backgrounds, they have felony backgrounds, and most have violent felony backgrounds. So I don't know if Deloitte has ever hired someone with that kind of background before. But they're trying, and we'll see whether it works or not. We have a guy in a law firm now. And what we're trying to do is, again, not lay fingers, not lay blame. We understand that that's Deloitte and others taking on some risks they wouldn't have done to pass. But this is a guy we found on the streets that go work at Deloitte. This is a young man who's been with us for 16 months and just passed his high school diploma last week. And he's shown through his behavior that he's ready to take that step. So for us, our goal is to try and meet employers halfway, to say we will work with young men to try and get them in a spot where they can be successful. Let me be really clear, this can't be charity. These young guys are smart, they're resilient, they have amazing skills. Some have been CEOs on the street. Those skills translate to other settings. And so we just want them to think about a very different talent pool to help their companies be successful. Hi, Arnie, Kenny Newman, how you doing? Good, good, good. The inmates that you've been interviewing for what, the past couple of years now? Did you find that a lot of them are sufficiently the guys in their 20s and 30s? Are they suffering from PTSD? Like they've just come back from Iraq or Afghanistan? Do these people in prison are getting out? Do they need as much mental therapy as a soldier? The similarities between our guys and guys coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq are real and profound. A lot of our guys are warriors. It's a different battle, it's a different fight. To be clear, I said earlier, for me it's not PTSD, it's current, current stress disorder. And it is extraordinarily powerful in debilitating. And we have full-time counselors, we have some amazing guys working, but I know we're not doing enough. I was curious if you could talk a little bit more about the clearance rate in the city of Chicago and whether you thought- Sorry, talk about what? The clearance rate in the city of Chicago and whether that was tied to the rise in murders or whether there's independent problems with the Chicago Police Department that need to be addressed. Yeah, that's a great question. And I'm far from an expert. So this is a very unqualified opinion. What I will say is the Laquan McDonald video in my mind pulled the scab off a decades long level of mistrust, distrust between the community and the police. Our clearance rate is a tiny percent of what happens in other cities. The level of distrust between the community and police is hard to overstate. And that's a painful thing for me to say. Our guys generally hate the police. And I understand that they're on different sides of the law. We've brought in police and had amazing conversations, really powerful conversations. We role play, we switch spots. It's fascinating. And this, let me be very, very clear, this does not begin to be a condemnation of all police by any stretch. But the number of kids I talked to in school who are 12 or 13 who already hate the police, not just our guys who are older, younger kids, that feels for me very, very different than what I remember it in the past. And so rebuilding trust is one of the hardest things to do in life and it's very, very difficult. But at the macro level, at the micro level, finding ways for the police and the community to share, to start to rebuild trust when there's so much distrust. For me, that's the only way we'll start to get to a clearance rate. And to be clear, if someone kills someone, I think they need to go to jail. We can't allow that to continue to happen. Where there are no consequences, that's like the wild wet, that gets scary and that's very much, I mean, our guys are really smart, that they see that. Let me just give you one quick counter example and just an amazing police officer happens to be a woman, maybe not surprisingly, out in Rosin, where we're working, where she has relationships with all these guys on the street and she's tough, she will lock up, if they're doing something, they know that. But if a baby doesn't have pampers, she gets pampers for them. When a baby's born, who literally doesn't have a car seat to go home, she goes and gets the car seat. She has a daycare center run out of her house. I was with her last night at 111th and State, talking to a set of guys who were thinking about retaliation for something that happened and rather than just locking them up, rather than waiting them to do something, she wanted me to go talk to them and see if we could move them in a very different place. Officers like that are transforming things and finding ways to empower them, have them reach more. She's extraordinary. That's just one quick example from last night. My name is Eric, from the United States for a few years. When I first came to the United States and I was born in Africa, by the way, the same day as Barack Obama, almost at the same time. So yeah, to make kids born in a very different place, somewhere at the same time. When I first came to the United States and I was born in Green, I saw misery in Africa. I saw many countries at war. What has been happening to the African community in the United States is a tragedy. It's a crime against humanity, because it's been going on for a generation. So we cannot just focus on a group of kids causing trouble there, external factors like you learn in sociology. We didn't talk about poverty. After slavery, segregation, discrimination, and now still segregation and poverty, I ended up coaching black kids south side. No parents, so they're in jail. So yeah, if you look clearly, I do believe that there's no magic solution here, but there's something that can be done. They have no gun factories. Where do they get these guns? So they're external factors here. They're the second amendment and also the politics, politician, okay? So what I wanna say here is there's no, without any comprehensive immigration, the 25 millions illegal immigrants in the United States. I don't know how many Chicago, some good one, and some of them are criminals. And can you do a quick question please? So without a comprehensive immigration policy because they take jobs, they work illegally too, low pay. So without a comprehensive immigration policy, how can you guarantee that anything can be done in the city that call itself a sanctuary city? Obama did something very good. Let me try to answer that, okay, can we get other questions, we run out of time here. No, no, just one thing, Obama did three good things. Obamacare. He did a few more than three, go ahead. Obamacare. Also, it took a lot of African-Americans out of jail and something also the groomers. So I think that more should be done about people who will be here illegally but not committing any crime to legalize all these people very, very fast. So there's a lot there, I don't can't answer at all and I can't guarantee anything. So I think you and I might disagree on immigration policy. I think there are a lot of amazing young people I'm very concerned about, dreamers, 700,000 dreamers who are trying to go to college who we lock out of opportunity, it makes no sense to me. That's that one. Secondly, the gun issue in our country is extraordinarily real and I appreciate you bringing that up. We have a greater percent of guns than vast majority of industrialized nation and let me be clear, I don't not cheer to challenge the Second Amendment. If people want to hunt deer or hunt moose or hunt whatever, I'm fine with that. I just have a problem, we hunt children. And I thought about when I left the administration working exclusively on the gun issue and honestly thought I couldn't win that one. Politicians left and right are in so inpox, so indebted to the NRA. That for me sadly feels intractable. And to very specific, when I ran Chicago public schools and we were losing black and brown children, I thought it was because the country didn't care. And I hate to say this, but I always thought in the back of my mind it would take white kids being killed for things to change. And then Sandy Hook happened, which was a massacre of white people and nothing changed, nothing changed. And so for me, that was just an absolute devastating blow that we don't care about any of our kids. So I personally, I never give up, but I didn't feel I could impact the gun culture and the availability guns. I'm always getting pragmatic. I'm just trying to give guys a reason not to pick up those guns. That's what I'm trying to do. Hi, I'm Heidi Picard. I'm a tutor in Charter Montessuary School in Englewood. I've been there for five years and I've been to some funerals as well. And so when I saw what you were doing, I got very excited about it. And I've listened to all the podcasts you've been on and listened to the whole thing. And I was wondering, I've looked to try to get involved, but I can't find where you would have on a website or something, how as an individual, you can become more active in what you're doing. The kids I'm working with now are like 12 years old and I'm worried, and they're mostly boys. And so I'm worried that they're gonna get to a point where we're gonna lose them. So I'm wondering how I can get involved in what you do to kind of bridge that for them and for me. No, first of all, thank you so much for the difference you're making every single day. And Englewood is seeing more than it shared tragedy. It's also seeing a pretty significant reduction in violence this past year, which is very encouraging. We need to see that continue. And hopefully you'll have to go less funerals going forward, not more. We've been a little slow on our website. We do have a website. We're gonna get some stuff and some information up there about how to help volunteer. We'd love to make that connection soon. Thank you. Emon is not too far from where you are and they're doing amazing work. So if you check with Billy afterwards, they have an extraordinary set of guys and we're thinking about a second cohort with them coming in the not too distant future. What do you have in the back, Chris? I have the OACY. It's in the Chicago Catholic League. And back in the time when I was in school, which is a while back, we had two divisions of basketball. And I know Arnie might enjoy this story because we had heavyweights and lightweights. And what I mean by that is, to be a lightweight basketball player, you had to be five foot nine and under. And that there was one class of basketball players and then the varsity or the heavyweights were above that. My point is that, would it be possible, Arnie, to set up a program and use a, I'll just use McCormick Place as a prize example. McCormick Place has all this space very rarely used in my opinion. So why can't you set up a program for a six foot and under citywide basketball league? What you're gonna do is you're gonna take 200,000 kids off the streets. You're gonna take another 50,000 kids. They're gonna come and watch those games because they're gonna be competitive games. And you're gonna get, and I say donate time and reduce crime. So what you do is you get, you would talk to about corporate sponsors. Well, anybody who shows up for the games gets a free meal. And let me try to respond. Okay, we got a couple of minutes here and try to get a couple of questions. First of all, those kinds of ideas, I think we need to try everything. And I think it's a really important thing. It's interesting to me how many of our guys didn't have a chance to be on a basketball team or football team, whatever. Obviously I'm a little biased towards basketball and sports, but drama, art, dance, music, chess, robotics, there's a whole series, you know, STEM fields. There's a whole series of opportunities that many of us has took for granted growing up that our guys have no exposure to. So whether it's after school stuff, whether it's summer stuff, you know, sports, we need to do a lot. I didn't talk about one thing we do with younger kids. We funded about 1,300 summer jobs last summer for teens and did a little bit of sports, but actually what we did was have the kids create their own peace programs in their communities, peacemakers and extraordinarily powerful stuff they were doing. So more positive outlets, more things for people to do, less free time, less time in the streets. We gotta do all the above and to Dr. Rogers point, we gotta do it at scale. We gotta do it at scale. So last summer, just quickly, summer jobs for Chicago, 30,000 city funding most of them, we funded 1,300. We had about 60,000 kids apply for summer jobs. So half the kids who wanted to work in the legal economy, we as adults, we as leaders, denied them the opportunity. That's on us, that's not on them. We're gonna take a couple more questions, please. Hi, I'm Miles Groger. So I've lived in Chicago for about 13 years now, both on North Side and Hyde Park. And we're all in this room because we recognize the issue and we wanna change it. But I keep thinking about all the people who aren't here. People who either see this as an issue that only affects those 15 neighborhoods where gun violence happens the most or who watch the media and think that this problem is so big that there's just no solution. And so my question to you is, how do we effectively communicate and incorporate the greater Chicago community to show them that A, this is an issue that affects everyone, right? And B, that there are solutions out there that can effectively reduce gun violence, right? Both in the short term and the long term. And what do you see the impact of doing, of taking those steps as being? Yeah, it's a great question. Again, none of these have been answered. So a couple of things. Again, I talked about the economic cost of this that we all pay. So forget the part or humanity part of this, just the money out of our checks, out of our pocketbooks, going to billion plus dollars, crazy amount of money that could much be better be spent on schools or after school programs or whatever. We're investing absolutely in the wrong way. So that's one way to go at it. The thing I've tried to do, and I actually do, I don't do much of this anymore. I normally just bring our guys and have them talk and I ask the questions, is just to humanize our young men. And they are amazing young men and amazing stories and are way more articulate and thoughtful on these issues than I am. And I think there's this myth or the stereotype of who these guys are. Billy Moore killed a guy. He killed a guy. And he may be our best teammate. That's a really, really deep thing to think about. We have lots of guys like that. And I think understanding that any one of us in this room, we're judged by the worst thing we did in our life. None of us would be in this room. I sure wouldn't. We got to be judged by the body of our work and what we do not yesterday, but today and tomorrow and the next day and the next day. And I think if people understood our guys' humanity, that would move them to act. Hello, I want to... Sorry, where are you? I can't see you. Up here. Up here, my bad. Up here, Arnie. This is Mama Hood from Inglewood, famous Inky's mom. Yes. And I just want to know what is some of your next steps towards reducing the violence because you know that us moms over there in Inglewood and Chicago along, of course, working alongside partnered with Emon. We have an organization that's the ICANN Outreach Community Organization. And the ICANN stands for Communities Aware Networking. And out of our police department, we host every month one day of a COD day. And that COD provides resources to the community. We have the young people to come out to participate and volunteer. But I just wanted to acknowledge myself to you because you know, my family know you. We love you. My son, the men, the young men at Emon. And I let him know that I was coming down just to be a part of this event because I wanted to have a voice to represent not only the things that we're doing over there in Inglewood and Chicago long, but the things that you are doing. And we wanted to take our hats off and applaud you for tonight. So thank you so very much for reaching out to our community. My son has his number in his phone. My son was a gangbanger. He's not a gangbanger no more. He's becoming a carpenter. And I'm just very proud of him. So I wanted to acknowledge that and then just ask, what are some of your next steps? Because you know Mama Hood got your back. First, thank you for what you do every single day to make a difference and lots of easier things you could be doing with your time and energy. And this is personal for you as it is for so many of us. And your leadership is huge. Honestly, I think we're figuring this out every day and trying to figure out what the next steps are. For those that don't know, her son has a lot of influence. Her son knows a lot of folks there. And I think what I have to do, what Billy has to do, what others have to do is really follow Inky's lead and others lead and have him bring that next cohort of guys and start to stretch out. So we got a set of 30 there, that 30 become 100, can that become 200? He knows who needs it. And I think, again, rather than us having some master plan that we come up with, really keeping this at that ground level, keeping this at the street level, helping as he takes that next step and does that transition, could he become a life coach someday? Can he help out, do whatever? And our guys, I keep saying it, we're trying to help, but our guys, your son, they're the ones that are gonna lead the city where we need to go. And the better we listen and the more we empower them, the faster we're gonna get to a much better place. Last one, sorry. I got to catch a plane, I apologize. I got to move to your place. I'm Sam David. Oh, my God. Oh. I'm Sam David. You said that there needs to be more done to help solve this problem. And I'm just wondering, like I conceive of three different sorts of solutions. One is more money from the government budgeted to these kinds of causes. Another one is more philanthropy. Another one is just more people, more social workers working in these causes. But I'd just like to know, if you think that one of those solutions is sort of a priority, like more city money budgeted or more federal money budgeted, it seems to me like there's certainly not nearly enough money budgeted by the federal government to these kinds of causes and that that could make a huge difference. It seems like to me like that's kind of a limiting factor that more money could result in more social workers, more awareness and all that kind of stuff. So what do you think there's a priority for that one of those solutions is a priority in solving this problem? It's a great last question, not an easy one. So I'll try and answer as directly as I can. So all the work that us and other folks are doing from the private sector, ultimately I think should be done by the public sector, whether it's the city or the county or the state or the federal government. Again for me, the fact that we locked guys up in Cook County at $55,000, $60,000 and won't give a job for 25 to 30, for me just our priorities are just totally out of whack there. Having said that, I'm holding us accountable and our team, that we have to demonstrate efficacy. We have to demonstrate that we can reduce violence because if we can't move guys out, like if I can show the next couple of years that we're a piece of reducing violence, then I can go make a pretty compelling case to whatever political leader. But until we, you know, this is a little crazy what we're doing. Finding guys who have been shooting shot at and saying, we'll give you a job. Doesn't happen too often. We can take some risks that's hard to do in the political sphere. So ultimately, this can't be sustained from the private side, from philanthropy. We have to have public investment. But again, I'm not gonna ask that public investment for another year or two or three until we can demonstrate we're getting results. And if we're not getting results, then I can't make that case. That's one. Secondly, the police can't solve this by themselves. Like we cannot arrest our way out of this. And every time someone gets shot, and I see Porty Johnson, yes, please gotta do some things really better. But I get back, corporate America has to hire. We have to put jobs on the South and West side. The economic, the economic disinvestment has been horrific. And so for me, it's like every time he gets asked, I'd like to ask every CEO, what are you doing? What if every CEO hired one guy? One guy. If we would be there, we can get there. And again, that's scary. So there's not one thing we all, public investment absolutely, but this has to be private investment. And again, not as charity, not as philanthropy, that this is a fascinating talent pool of smart, intelligent, committed, resilient people who are gonna make our workforce better. We have guys with serious backgrounds in our team, and I tell you they've made me a heck of a lot smarter. There's no way we'd be doing, and we're making lots of mistakes every day. Let me be clear, but whatever little success we're having, we wouldn't have that if I didn't have that now as an expertise in our team. Other folks have to do that. So I think we all have to do our little pieces in that cumulative effort over the next couple of years. If we can sustain it, if we can do it at scale, that's when I think we start to transform what we can do as a city. I apologize, I have to erase and catch an airplane. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you.