Chicago Spent Millions to Help ‘People Who Cause Harm’

‘Trauma Reducing Book Clubs’ and acupuncture for criminals.

Chicago commemorated the Juneteenth weekend by shooting 39 people and leaving 6 of them dead and surpassing last year’s relatively mild 5 dead and 16 wounded weekend. According to politicians and the media, crime is down in Chicago. According to reality, 861 people have been shot and 207 people have been killed so far this year and we haven’t even reached July.

(Editor’s note: it’s now 864 people shot and 208 killed. It’ll be higher when you read this.)

Mayor Brandon Johnson (pictured above) responded to the weekend massacres by declaring a ‘Transfemicide State of Emergency’ even though none of the people shot were transgender and the only transgender man killed this year was killed by his boyfriend, and calling for a $100 million Department of Gun Violence Prevention even as Chicago faces a $1.3 billion budget deficit.

The $100 million Department of Gun Violence Prevention campaign had been advanced by radical clergy, including Obama mentor Father Michael Pfleger, an associate of other Obama allies like Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, as the solution to Chicago’s problems.

But what would that $100 million actually do?

The Biden administration had created a White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, that the Trump administration shut down, to largely push gun bans, but Chicago can’t do that.

Dozens of media stories have been filed pushing the permanent $100 million Department of Gun Violence Prevention without ever describing its function or how it would do anything.

The real goal is to take the Office of Violence Prevention championed by Mayor Brandon Johnson and make it a permanent institution in Chicago. This would implement the agenda of police defunding by treating its non-police strategies as equivalent to the police department.

So what does the Office of Violence Prevention and the various non-police alternatives to which Chicago politicians have already allocated $100 million to, despite the massive budget deficit and the looming pension bomb, actually do? ‘Trauma Reducing’ book clubs.

There’s no actual information about what ‘Trauma Reducing Book Clubs’ are or how they stop weekend shootings, but they’re packaged alongside ‘Self-Expression Creative Writing’ and Acupuncture as ‘Wellness Oriented Services’ even though the only ‘puncture’ that stops a shooter before he opens fire uses lead.

But the Office of Violence Prevention isn’t providing the book clubs, creative writing and acupuncture to victims of violence anyway, but to the perpetrators because it’s part of the Office of Violence Prevention’s Chicago Torture Justice Center (CTJC) whose services are provided to ‘victims’ of “police torture and other residents who report being traumatized by law enforcement actions.” In short, acupuncture and book clubs are for the criminals who get busted by police.

The Office of Violence Prevention also boasts Services for People Who Cause Harm (PWCH) also known as violent criminals or more specifically domestic abusers. PWCH vaguely describes the wife beaters “as individuals who are actively causing harm to their intimate partner.”

The rebranding of domestic abusers as “Services for People Who Cause Harm” is part of the larger trend of police defunding and ‘restorative justice’. Earlier this year, the Illinois Domestic Violence Hotline announced that it was also launching a hotline for domestic abusers.

Much as burglar alarm companies generally focus their marketing on homeowners rather than burglars, Jennifer Rosenkranz, the head of a domestic violence non-profit arm, explained that,

“We realized that the area of working with people who cause harm was underinvested and there was a lack of innovation in that space.”

It’s unknown if any book clubs or acupuncture is involved, but a similar operation in New York City which helped kickstart programs for ‘people who cause harm’ involved typical ‘restorative justice’ elements such as sessions focused on “trauma-informed healing” and accountability.

Its premise, like that of all pro-crime ‘restorative justice’ programs, was that police were the real enemy, not the abusers. Under New York’s DeBlasio administration, the forerunner of Mamdani, a report argued that there was debate about compelling “the state to treat intimate partner violence as severely as violence between strangers” especially in “communities of color and queer communities, to whom the system represented more of a threat than a sanctuary.”

The Left had taken a full turn from feminism and argued against protecting battered women.

Back in 2021, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot had already been spending $500,000 on ‘Services for People Who Cause Harm’ offering “culturally appropriate non-mandated services for adults who cause harm within intimate-partner relationships” to be culturally sensitive to criminals.

“Our efforts to reduce gender-based violence throughout our city must not only respond to victims of violence and their needs, but the individuals and trauma of those who cause harm,” Lightfoot had argued.

This was in keeping with the central premise of pro-crime ideology that everyone had been paying far too much attention to crime victims and not nearly enough to the feelings of the criminals or ‘People Who Cause Harm’ who are really the victims of ‘systemic racism’.

5 years later, there’s no sign that catering to ‘People Who Cause Harm’ has done anything except harm. By 2025, domestic violence homicides were actually up 33%. Catering to ‘People Who Cause Harm’ was, like all pro-crime policies, leading to harm to victims of crime.

(The Chicago Police Department however conveniently erased its domestic violence statistics.)

After millions of dollars spent, domestic violence now accounts for 1 in 4 crime victims in Chicago. Most of the victims had taken out protective orders against their future killers, even as Chicago’s radical city government was wrecking the police department that might have saved their lives and instead spent millions helping their killers while also offering acupuncture and book clubs to the criminals who they claimed were really the innocent ‘victims’ of ‘police torture’.

Pro-crime policies always work, not by reducing violence, but by creating far more of it.

When President Trump proposed sending the National Guard to Chicago to stop the constant shootings, Illinois Gov J.B. Pritzker gave a press conference in which he complained that, “If Donald Trump was actually serious about fighting crime in cities like Chicago, he… would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence crime-prevention programs.”

Chicago is proof that every penny that goes to so-called ‘prevention programs’ should be cut. Not unless taxpayers want to keep funding book clubs for criminals and funds being shifted from the victims of domestic abuse to the perpetrators of domestic abuse by pro-crime radical leftists.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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