“This summer, 30 rising high school seniors spent a day immersed in Chicago’s efforts to fight crime and violence. The University of Chicago Crime Lab, which has informed the city on effective ways to prevent crime with evidence-based interventions, kicked off the first day with a workshop on its research.

The students then visited the Cook County Criminal courthouse where they observed a judge delivering a 70-year sentence for murder; took a tour of the city’s Office of Emergency Management to observe the intricate camera system that covers Chicago’s streets; and visited the 911 Call Center...”

“During his junior year of high school, Matthew Brewer would get to skip school one day a month and go somewhere he had never been. He remembers shaking hands and snapping a photo with Mayor Richard M. Daley at City Hall.He remembers a very intense discussion about race at the Chicago Community Trust.

And he remembers realizing that many of the white students participating in the program, called Future Leaders of Chicago, had never been around black students much less had a black friend…”

“Matthew Brewer grew up in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood of Chicago. And for most of his childhood, he didn’t have much reason to leave it. “The world wasn’t much bigger than the South Side to me,” he says.

That changed in 1997, Brewer’s junior year of high school, when he became involved with a program called Future Leaders Chicago...”