Editorial: Curbing violent crime is an all-hands-on-deck task. That must include corporate Chicago.

Chicago’s corporate community sparked a spate of depressing headlines last year. Billionaire Ken Griffin took the headquarters of his Citadel investment firm to Miami. Boeing relocated its corporate headquarters to Arlington, Virginia, while Tyson Foods shut down its Chicago office. And McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski ruffled City Hall feathers during remarks at the Economic Club of Chicago when he warned, “there is a general sense out there that our city is in crisis.”

Now, however, corporate Chicago may be giving Chicagoans a reason for optimism. .

The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago is a long-standing group of business leaders tasked with brainstorming ways to improve the region’s economic and social well-being. Last week, the prominent committee announced its newest endeavor, and arguably its most challenging — to make a serious dent in Chicago’s gun violence.

The benchmarks for success that the committee has set are lofty, to say the least. In five years, the group wants to bring down the yearly number of Chicago homicides to 400 from a recent peak of 804 in 2021. In 10 years, it wants that number brought down to below 200. The committee also is setting out to dramatically pare back shootings in the city, from a record high of 3,561 in 2021 to under 2,000 in five years, and under 1,000 in 10 years.

“We are clear-eyed about the challenges, but we also think it’s necessary to have a shared set of ambitious goals when it comes to reducing violence and saving lives,” says Jim Crown, chairman of the Civic Committee’s Public Safety Task Force.

Setting “ambitious goals” is a good place to start, but we are wondering why the city’s corporate titans did not get off the sidelines and into the fray before.

For years, we have been urging the business community to become engaged in solving the scourge of gun violence. No one expects the business community to ride in on a white horse and sweep the streets clean of crime, but there has always been a major role corporate Chicago can play in improving public safety.

Last year, we wrote about then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s efforts to revitalize the West Side’s North Lawndale neighborhood, a community besieged with violent crime and blighted by disinvestment and vacant lots. “But the task of revitalization can’t, and shouldn’t, be left solely up to City Hall,” we said. “Chicago’s corporate community must step up.”

In 2020, we praised Lightfoot’s Invest South/West initiative that brought public and private sector money to neighborhoods wracked by years of disinvestment. “Chicago cannot look solely to law enforcement to end the bloodshed,” we wrote at the time. “The mayor has to team up with the private sector to inject growth, opportunity and jobs into neighborhoods that have been left adrift for far too long. Banks need to step up and end lending disparities that foreclose on dreams of home-owning and entrepreneurship.”

And in 2019, we urged the city’s corporate community to “take on the role of change agent … Simply put, it’s smart business for the private sector. Banks and other corporate entities that pave the way for South and West Side small business owners to gain financing seed commercial development that creates future customers. Ultimately, that leads to a healthier local economy, a healthier Chicago.”

There’s good reason to feel optimistic about the Civic Committee’s new mission. To begin with, the group’s game plan makes sense. The committee plans to pour millions of dollars into scaling up community violence intervention programs, investing in under-invested neighborhoods and ramping up hiring in those neighborhoods. It’s been proven that violence prevention and street outreach programs work, so beefing up those efforts should indeed be a bulwark of any comprehensive strategy to combat violent crime.

Reinvesting in neglected neighborhoods cannot be a task shouldered solely by City Hall. Banks need to bridge the lending gap that denies South and West Side small businesses the access to capital they need to thrive. And businesses across the city can help through workforce development and hiring at-risk individuals. In the lead-up to the city’s elections earlier this year, we heard from a host of South and West Side aldermanic candidates who said one surefire way to combat violence in their wards is to seed job growth.

The committee is also smart to bring on board Robert Boik as its new vice president for public safety. Boik was the Police Department’s point man for ensuring that the department was on track in implementing the consent decree, the 2019 court order that maps out how the city must reform its police force. Lightfoot’s police chief, David Brown, fired Boik last year after Boik questioned Brown’s decision to divert to patrol duty members of Boik’s staff involved in crisis intervention training, a key element of consent decree reform. We suspect Boik will serve as a valuable resource for the committee, particularly as it liaises with CPD and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration.

The Civic Committee’s public safety task force hopes to meet with Johnson to talk about this new project as soon as possible. We think Johnson should put this meeting at the top of his calendar.

After the city endured yet another unconscionably violent Memorial Day weekend, Johnson said he was “committed to leveraging every single resource at our disposal to protect every single life in our city.”

The Civic Committee should be one of those resources.

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