Mr. Andre — the President says he could make your city safe in one month. You stood up and asked for something built to outlast him. Build the department.

Dear Mr. Andre,

This is Orange June — the month I write letters about guns — and until two days ago I had never heard your name. I'm not from Chicago. I run a small paper from out of state. But your city had a weekend that I couldn't look away from, and when the dust settled, two very different answers stepped to two very different microphones. One of them was yours, and yours is the one I want to write to.

Here is the weekend, because it should be said plainly before anyone argues about it. Over Juneteenth — a holiday weekend, the kind a city is supposed to get to enjoy — at least seven people were killed and thirty-eight more were wounded across Chicago, by the Associated Press's count, in the span between Friday evening and Sunday. Friday night alone, a pair of gunmen opened fire on a crowd in Princeton Park and hurt around thirteen people in a few seconds. Seven families woke up this week to the worst news there is. That's not a statistic to me. That's the whole reason this month exists.

And then came the two answers. From Washington, by way of a Sunday-morning post, the President said he could make your city safe in one month if you'd only let him send in the military, and he spent the rest of the message blaming your governor for not calling to ask. From City Hall, you stood up with a priest, a former state's attorney, your aldermen and your county commissioners, and you asked for a Department of Gun Violence Prevention. One answer is a number on a clock. The other is an institution. I came here to tell you the second one is right.

Because here is the thing about one month, Mr. Andre. One month ends. Troops leave. The cameras that came for the occupation pack up and follow them out, and the gun — which never agreed to the one-month deadline — is still there in July, and August, and the Juneteenth after this one. You cannot surge your way out of a standing condition. The violence in your city isn't a storm that blows through and clears; it's weather. And weather is not met with an occupation. It's met with something permanent, something with a budget line and a door and a phone that's answered on the quiet days, not just the bloody ones. That's what a department is. That's what you asked for.

I say the same thing in every one of these letters, so I'll say it to you, too: the crowd is not the problem. People have gathered to celebrate since there were people. What turns a Juneteenth block party into thirteen people on the ground in a few seconds is not the joy and it's not the neighborhood — it's the gun that's in the mix now in a way it wasn't a generation ago. An institution that treats that as the standing fact of the matter, year-round, is closer to the truth of it than any one-month miracle shouted from a phone. You're not asking for a savior. You're asking for infrastructure. Good.

You should know who's telling you this, because it's a stranger, and not even a constituent. I take no one's money — no ads, no donors, nothing to sell you and nothing to ask of you. I don't have a vote in your council and I can't move your bill an inch. So understand that I have no angle here except the one this whole month is built on: I don't think the loudest answer should get to be the only one on the record. The President's one month will get the chyron. I wanted the department — the quiet, durable, unglamorous answer — to get a letter.

So build it, Mr. Andre. Not the version that survives one news cycle and dies the first slow week, but the real thing — funded, staffed, answerable, still standing when the trucks and the cameras and the one-month promises are long gone. Seven families this week needed it to have existed already. The next seven are counting on the people in that room with you to make sure it does. You asked for the answer built to stay. Now make it stay.

— Michael

Spotlight Dispatch · Orange June · Day 13 · June 21, 2026

michael@spotlightdispatch.com