When it comes to police reform, the powers that be in Chicago have been negligent in their response to the demands of the people of this city and this nation. People across the country are calling for systemic police reforms now. The resounding voice of the people in the streets is, “We will not accept this anymore!” In Chicago, we’re not new to this plaintive cry, unfortunately. We have the longest standing movement for community control of the police in the country, stretching back to the 1969 police murder of Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party. Yet our city is lagging every other major city with respect to announcing much needed reform, including New York City and Minneapolis.

Take the Pledge to invest in our youth.

Take the Pledge to invest in our workforce.

Take the Pledge to invest in our communities.

Take the Pledge to invest in eliminating racial inequities in employment.

We have all been following the national protests regarding systemic racism and police brutality sparked by the death of George Floyd, who died while in the custody of Minneapolis police officers. Last week, nine out of 12 members of the Minneapolis City Council – a veto-proof majority – announced that they support dismantling the city’s police department. Lisa Bender, the council president, said, “our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period.” She added that the council members are committed “to end policing as we know it and recreate systems that actually keep us safe.”

Racism rears its head in many ways, but one of the ways it silently expresses itself is under the narrative of integration.  Our ancestors fought hard and persistently to grant us all the right to live and shop wherever we wanted, but the result behaves more like assimilation than integration. Integration is the unification of two or more things. In economic terms, this would mean that retailers would spread themselves across various zones based solely on their consumer market and profit margin.  In simpler terms, economic integration means the equal exchange of goods and services.

What do the Green Bay Packers and the Bank of North Dakota (BND) have in common? Both are public options – and stand out amid their privately-owned competitors.  The Packers are very profitable, they win and win a lot, more than our Bears and the rest of the teams in the NFL. The BND generated 17 percent annual returns over the last sixteen years, beating big banks year after year. Both public options make healthy profits and give back to their communities, a potent combination missing from today’s extractive capitalism.

The Roosevelt Institute’s Felicia Wong said it best: public problems require public solutions. We could not agree more.