This summer, Chicago reached a public safety and health milestone that signaled meaningful progress. Between May and August 2025, compared to the same period in 2024, the city saw a 13 percent decline in opioid-related emergency medical responses and a 36 percent reduction in homicides and nonfatal shootings, far outpacing the national trend among major U.S. cities.
These numbers are not coincidental. They are the result of a coordinated, data-driven strategy fueled by a 2024 announcement from the surgeon general declaring gun violence a public health crisis and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommended strategies to combat the increase in overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids.
The Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) adapted the incident command system (ICS), a standardized emergency management model, to address injury prevention across 27 neighborhoods via these co-occurring emergencies. CDPH piloted this approach in 2024 for reducing summer opioid overdoses, precipitating a 23 percent decline year-on-year during the summer. By deploying public health best practices and breaking down programmatic silos, Chicago demonstrated what effective governance and community partnership can achieve.
At a time when political rhetoric is casting doubt on public health impact and best practices, we must highlight what’s actually happening on the ground. Too often, Chicago is caricatured as a symbol of urban decline, a place defined by violence, disorder, or dysfunction. But those claims are neither accurate nor fair. The reality is that Chicago is proving what’s possible when the government aligns resources, communities are prioritized and public health is treated as a cornerstone of public service.
The city’s approach to injury prevention this summer offers a model for what is possible when coordination replaces fragmentation. It also shows how Chicago’s government can move beyond short-term responses to create lasting systems of accountability and collaboration. That is where good governance, not rhetoric, made the difference.
Good Governance
Historically, summer months, like in any big city, bring predictable safety and health challenges that tend to be more concentrated in disinvested communities. Responses to these surges have traditionally been segmented, resulting in uncoordinated efforts and missed opportunities for intervention. It was clear to CDPH that unified command systems like ICS could help integrate reactive crisis management and proactive, data-driven public health strategy.
By implementing ICS, CDPH was able to establish shared objectives, clear leadership roles and real-time data analysis. Each week, analysts reviewed neighborhood-level data to identify emerging hotspots, guiding rapid, targeted deployment of resources. Ten programs were consolidated under this framework to integrate prevention, harm reduction, response and recovery for both violence reduction and overdose prevention. These efforts did not rely on new programs; instead, they depended on best practices and coordinated strategy, turning separate initiatives into a cohesive, efficient system capable of responding in real time to the city’s public health challenges.
Targeted Prevention—Turning Data into Impact
Prevention was central to CDPH’s strategy. Using near-real-time emergency medical services (EMS) and Chicago Police Department data, along with emergency department surveillance, CDPH pinpointed and targeted areas of acute need. The department then conducted intensive outreach by credible messengers. For overdose prevention, that involves outreach workers going door to door and training bystanders in five Chicago West side neighborhoods, where around a third of all Chicago overdoses occur. For violence reduction, that means expanding community violence intervention hours as late as midnight around seven key dates historically associated with spikes in violence, including the Fourth of July.
City staff and partners also reached residents citywide through education events, in libraries, at music festivals and other pop-ups, distributing 10,480 units of intranasal naloxone and 2,920 gun locks to prevent accidental gun injuries. Simultaneously, on-the-ground outreach staff worked in these communities to interrupt violence and support survivors of violence with wraparound services to prevent reinjury or retaliation. By integrating these various prevention methods into the broader response, the department created overlapping safety nets that reached people in real time.
Sustaining the Model
The ICS framework proved that coordinated violence and overdose prevention, when overlapped through seasonal surges in the same communities, is efficient and effective. Sustaining this momentum now depends on stable funding and long-term political commitment. ICS is typically used for a short-term period, but maintaining these gains will require blending city, state and federal resources and keeping unified command structures in place year-round.
Chicago’s success this summer shows what is possible when governance is clear, resources are aligned and communities are prioritized. The success of these efforts should also be attributed to the federal funding provided to CDPH through programs like the CDC’s Overdose Data to Action and the American Rescue Plan’s resources for violence prevention. Yet real progress does not sustain itself; it requires continued investment and resolve. Chicago has a successful blueprint. Now it needs the commitment and funding to keep it in place.
Chicago deserves more than negative rhetoric; it deserves continued results.
Dr. Olusimbo Ige, M.D., MPH, is commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
