- Precambrian Video Games
- Aug 19, 2002
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The Ezra Klein show had a great interview on violent crime a few weeks ago. Here's the transcript (yes, it's too long to put into one post).
I bolded some bits that I found particularly interesting, though I didn't finish reading it and skimmed over some parts. But you can take a guess that much of the tl;dr is that it's nowhere near as simple as the lovely reactionary talking points Vorik keeps vomiting out. I'm pretty sure that other people have posted articles recently about how most of the increase in violent crime is gun-related, and it's obviously bullshit that "defund the police" is to blame compared to a COVID-induced breakdown of already threadbare social services and cohesion in cities especially.
quote:
EZRA KLEIN: I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey, it is Ezra. So while I’m on paternity leave, as you know, we’ve got this all-star team of guests, but this week — this is the week I am particularly excited about. Not to overhype it, but Rogé Karma has been with the show since July 2019, a long time now back when I was doing the podcast at Vox.
His official title is staff editor, but there isn’t really a title they can describe how much he contributes to the show. So much of what you think is me being good at my job is Rogé being good at his. So I am very excited to hear what he does with the mic this week.
ROGÉ KARMA: It’s really hard to overstate just how powerful a force violence can be in people’s lives. Violence, it doesn’t just take lives. It traumatizes children. It destroys community life. It entrenches racial and economic inequality.
But violence isn’t destructive for people’s lives. It can also be catastrophic politically. It can result in the kind of punitive tough-on-crime policies that have devastated Black and Brown communities for decades, and that makes what’s happening right now truly worrying. Last year the United States experienced a nearly 30 percent rise in murder.
That’s the single biggest one-year increase since we started keeping national records way back in 1960. Homicide shot up in basically every major city in the U.S., and they’ve continued to rise well into 2021. And if the state and local races across the country earlier this month were any indication, this violence is going to be a defining issue in future elections.
Patrick Sharkey is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, and I’ve come to think of his 2018 book “Uneasy Peace” as really the book for making sense of this moment. Often this violence is treated as if it came out of nowhere, but Sharkey’s core argument is that the relative peace on American streets on the eve of 2020 was far more fragile and far less stable than is typically understood.
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It’s not just that last year was unprecedented. It’s that American society was already a tinderbox waiting to explode. At the center of Sharkey’s thinking is what I’ve come to refer to as the dual realities of American policing. On the one hand, there’s really robust evidence that police are effective at reducing violent crime. But in Sharkey’s view policing is also an inherently unsustainable way of dealing with violence, one that tends to undermine whatever peace it achieves for many reasons that we discuss here.
The good news is that police aren’t the only institution capable of addressing violence, and this is where Sharkey’s work is truly distinct. He’s done some of the most rigorous empirical analysis showing that community organizations were central to the great crime decline of the 1990s and 2000s, and he’s developed a compelling community-based vision of public safety as a result — one that tries to tackle the problem of violent crime without relying on the tools of state violence to do so.
That last point is an important one. There’s a deeply frustrating tendency in this conversation to downplay either the harms of violent crime or the harms of police brutality depending on your political leanings. The reason I wanted to have Sharkey on the show, among other reasons, is that he starts from the position that individuals, families, communities can only truly flourish when they feel safe, when they feel safe from both violent crime and state violence. And he builds a model of public safety on top of that insight.
So this conversation begins with the current murder spike and the dual realities of American policing. But a huge part of it is about what this alternative public safety model could look like, about what it would mean to try to address violence without relying so heavily on police and about all the thorny difficult questions that that raises.
As always the show email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. My conversation with Patrick Sharkey after the break.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Patrick Sharkey, welcome to the show.
PATRICK SHARKEY: Thanks, Rogé. It’s good to be here with you.
ROGÉ KARMA: You’ve called violence the fundamental challenge of cities. Tell me about that. Why is violence so fundamental?
PATRICK SHARKEY: What I mean is that the very idea of city life breaks down when public spaces carry the threat of violence when cities are unsafe. So if we think about cities as places where public life is prioritized over private life, where people come together in shared spaces, whether they’re subway cars or playgrounds or theaters or baseball parks — whatever it might be — that idea of shared collective space starts to break down when there is the threat of violence. So people start to retreat from the subways, retreat back to their homes, keep their kids inside. Collective life starts to wither away. So I argue that violence is a fundamental challenge of cities, because nothing about cities can work, the idea of cities doesn’t work as long as people are worried about venturing outside their homes and going into public space.
ROGÉ KARMA: I think when we normally think of cities, now at least, we think of yuppie urban professionals, sort of, college educated elites, but you specifically focus in your work on how violence affects the most marginalized, on the relationship between violence and inequality. So can you talk to me about what violence and its effects actually look like in people’s lives?
PATRICK SHARKEY: I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve lived it. And if you haven’t lived in a violent environment, I think it’s not possible to fully understand what it’s like to have a family member shot or killed or to live amidst the chaos of police sirens and police tape and blood on the pavement and everything that comes with the horror of violent crime. What I’ve done is I’ve gathered more and more evidence of how violence reverberates around communities, how it affects everyone within communities with its most pernicious consequences on the most disadvantaged segments of the population.
I started down this line of research really because of one study I carried out where I was trying to assess how children are affected when there’s a specific incident of extreme violence in their neighborhood. So this was done with data from Chicago, and I found that children who took a standard test of cognitive skills right after an incident of violence in their neighborhood looked as if they had missed about two years of schooling compared to kids who took the same assessment just before an incident of violence. A homicide had occurred in their neighborhood.
So the impact was so large that I thought it was wrong. So I replicated the study. And the second time I did the study, the impact was even larger than the first time. And that finding now has been replicated in dozens of studies since in different contexts and countries, and the research that’s been done, and it’s kind of built off that finding, shows that violence clearly doesn’t make children less intelligent, but it occupies their minds.
It makes children less able to focus, to concentrate. It affects their school attendance, their sleep, their levels of stress hormones. And it alters their trajectories. So that’s what I started with. I was looking at the consequences of violence for children.
As I did more research, I started to think more broadly and carry out more research on the consequences of violence across entire communities. And what I found is that violence doesn’t just have a direct effect on young people. It undermines community life. It makes families less willing to invest in neighborhoods, less willing to raise kids in a neighborhood. It makes teachers less likely to remain in a school district. It makes business owners less likely to set up shop, so there are fewer jobs available. It makes residents retreat from public spaces like parks, playgrounds, libraries, community centers.
So I’ve said already that urban inequality creates the conditions for violence, but violence amplifies inequality. It undermines community life. It undermines the very idea of city life.
ROGÉ KARMA: And that makes the current wave of violence even more worrying. In 2020, the United States experienced a 29 percent rise in murder, the single biggest one-year increase since we started keeping national records in 1960. And this increase wasn’t driven by a handful of outliers, right. The number of homicides shot up in basically every major city in the United States. Give me a read of what’s going on here.
PATRICK SHARKEY: There was a huge increase in gun violence, in particular, and I think it will take more research. I hate to say it, but it will take more research to figure out exactly the set of factors that had the biggest impact. But there were a few major shocks that the whole country went through, and the first was obviously the pandemic when the country locked down in March of 2020.
So it wasn’t just about individual hardship or loss of life or sickness that went with Covid-19. It was also that the institutions that provide the foundation of community life started to shut down. I mean schools, but I also mean libraries and community centers and parks and playgrounds in some cases.
These are the institutions, these are the places that bring people together, that bring people out into public space. And again, I’ll say this over and over, but when people retreat into their homes, when they feel like they’re on their own, then communities become vulnerable to rising violence. So there was first the shock of the pandemic. Second was and relatedly was a rise in the prevalence of guns. So more guns were purchased last year than at any point in the history of the country.
And as early as March and April, there’s really good research from people like Jens Ludwig and Jeff Asher showing that police started seizing more and more guns despite fewer arrests in the early months of the pandemic. And so the prevalence of guns creates the conditions for more violence.
And then lastly was the set of protests that spread across the country, the protests against racial injustice and police brutality in response to the murder of George Floyd. And when there is this kind of high profile protests against police brutality, then interactions on the street can start to change in multiple ways. First, police can change their behavior. They can choose not to get involved in incidents where they have any discretion, and that can lead to a rise in violence. But secondly — and this is the important change that I think doesn’t get enough attention — residents can begin to check out. They can stop calling the police for help, to stop providing information, to stop going along with the way things worked before they watched what happened to George Floyd. And so both sets of processes can lead to a rise of violence.
And so all of these processes came together last year, and it’s very difficult to out which were the most important. But they came together, and they resulted in a situation where I think a lot of Americans had the feeling that they were on their own. There was a sense of normlessness, disconnection, what sociologists call anomie that pervaded public life, and I think this created the conditions for violence to start to rise.
ROGÉ KARMA: One of the possible causes that you didn’t mention, and then I think is important to at least reference here, is that there’s a tendency on the right to blame this spike on blue city governance or police defunding or progressive prosecutors, right. I was just looking at a Morning Consult poll from earlier this year that found that 74 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of independents thought that defunding the police was one of the major factors contributing to the violence increase. So is there any merit to those explanations?
PATRICK SHARKEY: There’s no merit to those explanations for what happened last year. Police budgets had not fallen when violence started to rise last year. And violence rose to equivalent degrees in cities run by Democrats versus cities run by Republicans. So what happened last year was not about defunding the police.
ROGÉ KARMA: I think there’s a real tendency, both on the left and the right, to view this spike monocausally, to look and say it was the pandemic; it was the lockdowns; it was the protests; it was guns. But something that I think you’re getting at and that I’ve come to see more and more is that a lot of these different drivers of violence seem like symptoms of the same basic disease. You talked about anomie, and I see it as a pretty profound legitimacy crisis for the criminal justice system, especially in the communities most impacted by it. And there’s good evidence to back that up, right.
In 2020, Black Americans trust in the police dipped to an all-time low. According to Gallup, only 19 percent of Black adults said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in police. For the criminal justice system as a whole, that number was just 11 percent. So you started getting at this earlier, but what happens when communities lose faith in those systems?
PATRICK SHARKEY: Yeah, so I rely heavily on the ideas and the work of ethnographers, particularly a researcher named Monica Bell, who has done some of the best work on this exact question. And she uses a term that she calls legal estrangement, and it’s based on her work in Baltimore. And what Monica argues, and what she shows in her work, is that longstanding mistreatment and hostility between police and residents creates this feeling of alienation where many people in low-income communities of color see themselves as outside the purview of the laws, unprotected by the state on their own, not full citizens in their city.
And getting back to the question about what drove the rise of violence last year, I think this was a big part of it. As the institutions of collective life shut down, as after-school programs shut down and schools shut down, a growing sense took hold that people were on their own. And in New York City in the early part of the pandemic, enforcement of social distancing rules was almost entirely focused on people of color. This is a symptom of what was going on.
So millions of people bought guns, and a few months in the pandemic when the nation rose up in protest and police departments responded in lots of places with just brute force, I think that feeling was reinforced. So there is something deeper here that has been growing for a long period of time and has become more visible in the past five or six years that underlies what we saw last year.
ROGÉ KARMA: Let’s step back and talk about that for a minute. For many people, I think, it felt like this violence came out of nowhere. America went from experiencing its most peaceful era in decades, the product of the great crime decline to a sudden explosion of violence.
But you make a really different argument in your book, that on the eve of 2020 America was essentially a tinderbox waiting to explode. So tell me about that. How would you describe the public safety status quo in America on the eve of 2020?
PATRICK SHARKEY: Well, what I’d say is I wrote my book on the decline of violence from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, and that period, around 2014, was one of the safest years in the history of the country. But it’s a serious mistake to focus exclusively on the benefits of the crime drop when more than 6 million people are under the supervision of the state, whether they’re in jail or prison or probation or parole, when something like one out of five Black men who were born in the late ’60s would go to state or federal prison at some point by middle age and one out of 1,000 Black men will be killed by the police.
So there is something missing in talking exclusively about the decline of violence, and the conclusion in the book was that the fall of violence did have its greatest impact on the most disadvantaged communities in the U.S., but the dominant methods that we’ve relied on to deal with violence in this country, which includes aggressive and sometimes violent policing, intensive surveillance targeted toward low-income communities of color and, of course, mass incarceration, these methods have created an enormous amount of harm. They undermine community life, because they remove people from their families, from their neighborhoods. They weaken communities, because young people often don’t feel welcomed in their own neighborhoods. And the dominant actors switch. They become police and parole officers, rather than parents and coaches.
So the core argument, the core conclusion of the book is that the crime drop had enormous benefits that were targeted on the most disadvantaged communities but that the methods that we have relied on for decades to respond not only to violence but to all of the problems that come when you have extreme urban inequality have created this version of uneasy peace, have left us in a situation where we have low levels of violence but no one is content. And it’s fragile and it’s precarious, and we saw that borne out over the past few years.
ROGÉ KARMA: I want to hold on that, because I think that is a really important idea, this idea that policing is an ultimately unsustainable tool for dealing with crime. It’s also a counterintuitive idea, and so I’m wondering if you can expand on that and particularly talk about some of the mechanisms here. When you say that the methods that we’ve relied on historically to deal with crime in America are unsustainable and produce this sort of fragile uneasy peace, this tinderbox that’s waiting to explode, what are you talking about?
PATRICK SHARKEY: So this goes back decades, and it goes back to the way that in the U.S. we have responded to the broader challenge of urban inequality. There were set of changes that took place in policy decisions going all the way back to the 1940s when urban economies began to deindustrialize and employment opportunities in central cities started to shrink. The federal government made several large scale investments in suburban areas through the highway system, through subsidies for home mortgages. This provided a mechanism for central city residents to leave and to avoid rising property taxes, but it also allowed firms to escape the grip of big city unions to take advantage of a labor force outside the city and land outside the city.
At that moment, central city neighborhoods lost tax revenue. They also lost political influence. Funding for infrastructure collapsed, schools crumbled, parks, playgrounds, public housing complexes were not maintained. Poverty became more concentrated. Joblessness rose.
And when all of these things happen, when central city neighborhoods are abandoned, left on their own, when poverty is concentrated, when institutions start to fall apart. This creates the conditions for violence to rise. So it’s really important to kind of situate the problem of violent crime within this history.
This didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s not a mystery why some neighborhoods are consistently dealing with high levels of violence. These are the neighborhoods that have been areas of disinvestment for decades, areas where institutions are starved of resources, where residents are less likely to come together to solve collective challenges, and as a result, these are the neighborhoods that are vulnerable to violence. So we had this long period of abandonment where resources were extracted from central city neighborhoods, and then we responded with this policy regime of punishment. And I put these two together to describe the dominant approach to dealing with violence over the past 50 years, this dual strategy of abandonment and punishment, which has put us in the situation that we see today.
ROGÉ KARMA: I think the long-term divestment in predominantly low-income Black and Brown neighborhoods is an incredibly important part of the story here that way too often gets overlooked. And so I want to come back to that. But I think this is where you’ll run into the argument. Sure, it’s great to talk about root causes, but at the end of the day, we need to address the violence happening right now.
And policing is one of the most effective tools we have for doing that. And that’s true, right. The evidence that policing does reduce crime is fairly robust. But you make the argument that at the same time policing reduces violence in the short-term, it can also make communities much more vulnerable to violence in the long-term. Can you talk about those dual realities of policing?
PATRICK SHARKEY: The first thing to say is that there’s a large body of evidence that makes very clear that when you have more police on the street, there is less violence. So police are effective at reducing violence, and that evidence comes from a range of different empirical approaches, usually taking advantage of natural experiments that lead to periods of time where there’s more police on the street or funding that becomes available to bolster police forces. So the empirical work shows very clearly that in a given neighborhood or city, if we add more police to the streets, there will be less crime. But it is not designed to tell us anything about the harm that arises from having more police on the street.
So people like Alyasah Sewell and Amanda Geller and Joscha Legewie have all done really strong work showing how living in an area where there is aggressive policing, where young people are routinely surveilled and stopped by the police weighs on young people’s minds, hurts them in school, leads to psychological distress. In some communities, young people live the lives of as suspects, and it does enormous damage. So there’s a very clear conclusion from the literature that the effects of policing are not only to reduce violence, but they also generate these other consequences.
And what I would say more broadly is that the dominant methods that we’ve relied on to deal with violence, which includes aggressive policing but also includes this broader project of mass incarceration, they run counter to the basic ideals of what it means to be a citizen in the U.S. And they’ve created growing resentment as more and more people have watched the videos of their fellow citizens being killed by police officers and have come to the conclusion that they’re not seen as full citizens of a state. They’re not protected by this institution that is supposedly there to preserve their safety. This was visible all the way back in 2014, when I started writing. A decline of violence that relies on the institutions of punishment, one that does not build stronger communities, one that doesn’t deal with the larger challenges of extreme inequality, is never going to be a sustainable way to create safe but also strong neighborhoods.
ROGÉ KARMA: And I think this brings us back to the current crime wave, because one thing that happens when that resentment builds up and builds up over time is eventually it just bursts. We saw this in 2014 and ’15 in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, and we saw it across the country last year in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. And there’s pretty good evidence from Roland Fryer and others that violence tends to increase in the wake of these protests against police brutality.
And that fact is typically wielded as a way to shift blame for the current violence on protesters, to warn that any efforts to scale back policing will result in huge waves of violence. But you’re making a very different argument, that this pattern is actually an indication that we need a new model for dealing with violence. So can you talk a little bit more about the relationship between protests against police brutality and violence and the conclusions that you draw from that relationship?
PATRICK SHARKEY: The central conclusion that I make is that when we rely on one institution to dominate public space, which we’ve done with law enforcement for the past 50 years, and then that institution, police officers, step back from that role, then it creates a conditions where violence can rise. And so there’s more nuance in what actually happens in the aftermath of high profile protesters. There are shifts in behavior that arise from police, and we saw evidence of these shifts in behavior.
So as gun violence was skyrocketing in New York City, arrests for guns plummeted after the protests where violence really started to spike. So police can choose not to get involved. Police can choose to step back from their role and make a statement either because they’re worried about getting in trouble and being the next viral video or to make a political statement to make the point that, OK, you’re going to protest what we do. We won’t do anymore. We’ll step back. We’ll stop doing our job.
But the second set of processes are equally important, and they involve residents. And in the aftermath of high profile protests when residents have this sense that they are not seen as full citizens of the state, residents sometimes start to check out. They can stop calling the police for help. They can stop providing information to police. So both of these processes can lead to a rise in violence in the aftermath of high profile protests.
This doesn’t mean that protests lead to violence. It means, again, that when we rely on the police to dominate public space and control public spaces by force and then the police step back from that role with no other institutions that step up, then we can see a rise in violence. And that last point, that we don’t have a set of institutions across the country that are ready to step in and play a more central role in controlling violence and in supporting residents, in advocating for their neighbors —
so when I look at this — and we’re going to get to the policy implications, I know. But when I look at the situation that we saw last year, when I look at the rise in violence, it brings me back to this point that this is not really about the police. It is about the absence of another set of institutions in our cities that can play a more central role in looking out over public space, making sure everyone is cared for, advocating for their neighbors. We don’t have an institution that acts on the basis of well-being. We have an institution that we have relied on for a long time that relies on the mechanism of punishment and force. And so that is an unsustainable way to deal with violence.
ROGÉ KARMA: I think for someone hearing this argument about the costs of modern policing, about the way it sows distrust in communities, the way that it makes communities more vulnerable to violence, the way it creates legal estrangement, the natural response people may be, well, sure, but that’s only true of bad policing, right. When police are doing their jobs correctly, those things shouldn’t happen. And if the problem is restricted to bad policing and bad policing only, then relatively simple things, like making it easier for departments to get rid of bad apples or hiring a wider diversity of officers or making police training better or adopting body cameras, right, that these things can fix the problems of bad policing and ultimately the problems that you’re talking about. So when we’re talking about these costs of policing, the harms that policing imposes, are we talking about policing in general, or are we only talking about, quote, unquote, “bad policing”?
PATRICK SHARKEY: It’s a great question, and I think there are things that can be done to improve policing and to change policing tactics and reduce the number of worst case outcomes. But I will say there’s a bigger issue here. So we have created this completely decentralized institution of law enforcement where there are 18,000 different law enforcement agencies operating mostly independently, mostly from local resources. And we have asked that institution to solve all of the problems that come with concentrated poverty.
This is remarkably unfair to law enforcement. It results in wildly divergent practices of policing, because police officers are asked to deal with a range of problems that go well beyond gun violence but include mental illness, addiction, intimate partner violence, self-harm, the foster care system. Police officers are not trained to deal with all of these challenges, and we don’t provide the supports, meaning social service providers other agencies that can assist with the homeless population, with the mentally ill, with addiction, with substance use.
And as a result, we treat every Department of Justice investigation as if it’s an isolated case, but it’s not. It is about the institution of policing and the spatial structure of inequality in the U.S. It is about the fact that every law enforcement agency operates on its own with its own funding stream that arises from local sources. That is the cause of the extreme inequality that we see in policing across the country.
ROGÉ KARMA: I think that’s a good bridge to talk about how we address this homicide spike. The leading answer right now, even among liberals it seems, is more policing. Cities are increasing their police budgets. Many lawmakers are pushing for additional officers.
And I think the argument you’ll hear from liberals on this is that, sure, policing is highly imperfect and inflicts all kinds of terrible harms, but the harms of violent crime are worse. Homicides are responsible for orders of magnitude more deaths than policing. And so I think the thinking goes if there is a choice between police violence and violent crime, then policing is ultimately the lesser of two evils, so we should choose it. And so what we’ve been talking about complicates that story. But the question I have for you is that the trade-off that we face?
PATRICK SHARKEY: I think there’s lots of evidence to indicate that it’s not a real trade-off, that it’s not the choice that we have to make. Back in the summer of 2015, I sat down with three graduate students, and we looked at as much data as we could find on what was happening in the places where violence was falling. And we saw the rise in police forces. We saw the rise in incarceration, but we also saw another trend. In the 1990s as violence was falling, nonprofit organizations were forming all over the country, organizations that were formed to deal with violence itself but also to build stronger communities, organizations that were dealing with addiction, mental illness, homelessness, housing.
And what we found is that the growth of nonprofit organizations in the 1990s stands alongside the other changes that we’ve talked about as a central reason for why violence fell. So in a typical city with 100,000 people, every 10 organizations that were formed to build a stronger neighborhood, to deal with the problem of violence reduce violent crime by about 9 percent. And this finding is reinforced by lots of rigorous empirical work evaluating the work of nonprofits using randomized controlled trials, looking at interventions like after-school programming, summer jobs programming. So we now have a body of evidence that makes it very clear that although the police do reduce violence, they are not the only actors that reduce violence. Community organizations mobilized at the local level have an equally or stronger impact on violence, but these organizations just have never been thought of as central actors, central institutions, in the effort to control violence.
ROGÉ KARMA: I think that causal analysis is really important as a proof of concept, but let’s get specific here in terms of what these alternatives actually look like. My understanding is that there are three main buckets of interventions that have a real track record of reducing violence. The first is basic social service provision, and I think this is a set of interventions that will probably be most familiar to listeners. Things like expanding Medicaid, access to mental health counseling and addiction services, all of these things have been shown to reduce violent crime.
But then there are a set of interventions that we can think of as more community-based. So these are things like violence interruption, cognitive behavioral therapy, summer jobs programs, all of which are examples of community institutions stepping up to engage those most at risk of violence with tools other than force.
And then lastly, there’s this bucket of really sort of counterintuitive interventions where relatively modest changes to the built environment can have shockingly impressive anti-violence effects. So can you just walk me through the sorts of interventions that fit into each of those buckets and the actual evidence behind them?
PATRICK SHARKEY: So there are a bunch of programs and organizations that have been evaluated with randomized controlled trials, and these get all the attention, because this is the gold standard for evaluation research. And so some of the conclusions from that work are things like cognitive behavioral therapy plus after school sports programs like, for instance, and in the Becoming a Man Program running in Chicago reduced arrest for the middle-schoolers who took part by 45 to 50 percent, so just these extraordinary benefits of taking part in this program. Similarly, with summer jobs combined with cognitive behavioral therapy or other youth programming, these programs have been evaluated in both New York and Chicago.
The Chicago version, Sara Heller evaluated and found that it reduced violence by 43 percent over the following 16 months after participation. And then you have a set of experimental programs that have done things like redesign abandoned plots of land or abandoned buildings. So this was a program in Philadelphia where plots of land were again randomly assigned to receive a treatment where they were redesigned and greened. And Charles Brandeis and John McDonnell and others have evaluated this work and found that in higher poverty neighborhoods redesigning abandoned plots of land places that used to signal that an area was not cared for, that was not maintained, when those plots are redesigned violence falls by up to 30 percent.
Improved street lighting around housing developments in New York City, Aaron Chalfin and several co-authors evaluated the siting of improved lighting around housing developments and found that they reduced nighttime felonies by over 30 percent. So this is kind of the evidence for the skeptics. This is the evidence that’s coming from randomized controlled trials.
What I want to make clear is that these are not the only programs out there. There has been work going on for a very long time in neighborhoods across the country that hasn’t been evaluated in the same way but that has generated extremely strong evidence of transformation at the local level. So groups like Save Our Streets in New York or Advance Peace in Richmond, California, the Detroit Justice Center — there are lots of these organizations across the country that have shown over a long period of time that they can play a central role in transforming their neighborhood and providing services and support to residents without the costs of policing.
So this work has been going on for a very long time. It’s just that it’s never been seen as a central approach, as a central strategy to confront violence. And that has to change. These organizations deserve the same funding, the same commitment that the police have received. We’ve just never given it to them.
ROGÉ KARMA: So I think people hear that list and the size of these effects, and it sounds almost too good to be true. But I think the pushback you’ll get here is: Can they scale? The evidence we’ve been talking about is largely from small, controlled, randomized controlled trials. Most of these interventions have never been tested on anything like a citywide level, and the success of a lot of these best of these programs, like Becoming A Man or READI Chicago or Advance Peace, it seems really tied to the fact that these organizations have incredible leadership, extremely talented staff, that they’re uniquely equipped to deal with the environments that they’re operating in, which is great. But scaling up that kind of success is extremely difficult. So I’m wondering how you think about that challenge moving forward.
PATRICK SHARKEY: I think it is extremely difficult. They can’t scale without years of planning. So there’s absolutely no reason to think that a different set of institutions can emerge and be immediately effective without being given the same commitment and the same resources that we devote to law enforcement.
So in my work, I’ve made the case that we don’t move toward this new model by targeting police budgets, by seeking to exact revenge against the police. When you rely on one institution to deal with the problem of violence and then you try to weaken that institution without first building an alternative set of organizations and institutions that are ready to deal with violence, then you’re going to create a destabilized community. You’re going to see a rise in violence.
So the argument that I make is that we need to seek a better form of policing, and that is very clear. But at the same time, we need to start investing in a new model. We need to start investing in a new set of institutions that over time, with sufficient resources, can begin to play a more central role in looking out over their communities.
ROGÉ KARMA: I want to talk about a major city that has at least tried to do something like this and with some success I might add. When most people think of New York City’s approach to crime, they think of Rudy Giuliani and Bill Bratton. They think of this really brutal, broken windows, stop and frisk style of policing. But you’ve written about the ways that New York has been taking some pretty significant steps towards a very different model or at least was before the pandemic. So can you talk about how New York’s approach to public safety has changed over the last decade?
PATRICK SHARKEY: So what happened in New York, I think, is crucial to remember, because there were set of changes that took place from the start of the De Blasio administration through 2019 that represent what I think of as really a proof of concept that a different model to create stronger neighborhoods to deal with violence is possible. And it took several different forms in New York. So first it was a lighter touch style of policing and prosecution where the number of arrests plummeted, where stops by police officers basically ended as a central tactic of the NYPD, and more summonses fell and the jail population fell.
So people don’t realize this, but the jail population in New York has fallen to a level where it is closer to the levels in Western Europe than it is to the rest of the country in the U.S. And at the same time, there was a turn toward the community. And again, that took several different forms — the most notable ones being the emergence of what the city called the crisis management system, and secondly, the mayor’s action plan for neighborhood safety, both which focused on building, turning to the strengths of neighborhoods and residents to play a central role in responding to violence. And it’s important to go back and look at the predictions for what was going to happen by people like Ray Kelly, the former commissioner, Rudy Giuliani and others, who argue that if you end stop, question and frisk, violence is going to explode.
Well, when stop, question and frisk ended, violence kept falling. When the jail population declined, violence kept falling. And it fell to record lows all the way until 2019, and it showed very clearly that a different model, a new model that no longer relies on the institutions of punishment can build stronger neighborhoods and it can also reduce violence.
ROGÉ KARMA: And I think it’s important to point out here that this wasn’t just a small decline in crime, right? Gun violence in New York City declined by around 50 percent between 2011 and 2018. The city experienced what was essentially a second great crime decline at a moment when it was simultaneously scaling back the footprint of its criminal justice system in all the ways that you just mentioned. That’s pretty astounding.
So I want to talk more about what this effort actually looked like. Can you tell me more about two of those institutions you just mentioned, the crisis management system and the mayor’s action plan for neighborhood safety? What did they actually look like on the ground? What were the kinds of problems that those institutions addressed?
PATRICK SHARKEY: They did a range of different activities, but some of the actual programs put into place included interrupters who were out in the community making connections with residents, helping to diffuse conflicts, helping to interrupt patterns of reciprocal violence. But there were another set of actions that I think took on great importance in New York. So one was after a shooting took place in a given neighborhood, the city had these close connections with local leaders and residents and would organize vigils in neighborhoods where a shooting had taken place to make the statement that this is not tolerated in our community, that gun violence is not acceptable, that we will retake public space in our community.
Those kinds of efforts, which involve building trust between the city and residents and local leaders, were part of a broader system of shifts that represented in my mind a turn toward the community. And the mayor’s action plan was another form that this took where Liz Glaser was the director of the Mayor’s Office of criminal justice. And what she did is she dreamed up this program that came to be called NeighborhoodStat, where residents, local leaders, representatives from the city, representatives from law enforcement all came together in the same room to look at data, to look at what was happening in their neighborhood, what was causing problems in their neighborhood, what was leading to violence and then to take steps to deal with it to make sure that the Department of sanitation was accountable for dealing with a pile of trash that had accumulated outside a housing development, to make sure that residents were out recruiting kids to take the summer jobs that were being made available by the city.
So it was a whole set of changes that took place. And in that sense, I think it was a very meaningful shift in responsibility, a move away from the idea that the police were solely responsible for responding to violence and toward the idea that communities and residents should start to play a more central role.
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Dec 4, 2021 18:21
defund the police is a terrible slogan and also it already failed".