Faith & Law Enforcement Leaders Working to Reduce Violence

There is a growing movement in criminal justice and faith-based communities to address the epidemic levels of violence impacting young males of color in America’s inner cities. This movement is driven not just by faith alone; it is also being driven by a growing body of research that suggests that we have very simple and powerful ways to end the epidemic of inner-city gun violence.

Last week I attended and presented at the RECAP (Rebuilding Every City Around Peace) conference in Washington D.C. This first national gathering of faith leaders, leading academics and law enforcement leaders was the brain-child of Reverend Jeffery Brown, Executive Director of the Boston Ten-Point Coalition. He was joined by several distinguished presenters including: Former New York and Los Angeles Police Commissioner, William Bratton, Anthony Bragga, Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and David Kennedy, Director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College in New York City. The keynote address was delivered by Acting U.S Deputy Attorney General Mary Lou Leary.

Reverend Brown described the important role of churches in the black community: “Faith-based institutions have always addressed issues of life and death in the black community”. “Churches are not powerless” when dealing with issues of violence. They can “raise funds, access volunteers and generate a belief in God and faith in the future”, according to Brown. He described the essential role of faith-based institutions as “advocates for fairness and justice”.

Acting Deputy Attorney general Mary Lou Leary highlighted the important efforts undertaken by the U.S Department of Justice to address violence and strengthen public safety. “Violence is not inevitable,” said Leary; “We owe it to our kids to collaborate and work together”. She highlighted a few figures to demonstrate the challenges facing African-American youth and their communities: While African-American youth comprise 16% of the population, they are over half of the population arrested, and A recent study in Texas found that African-American students were three and a half times more likely to be suspended and arrested on campus. She acknowledged that too often “for young black victims the services are simply not there.” The DOJ is funding anti-violence efforts through its Office of Juvenile justice and Delinquency Prevention and currently funds over 370 local reentry programs under the Second Chance Act.

Fredirck Bealefeld, Commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, highlighted the successful homicide reduction effort in Baltimore, a city that has struggled until recently to address street violence. “We operated under the false belief that the community wanted us to make more arrests for drugs. When we arrested 108,000 persons in a community of 640,000 we had 269 murders”. In 2011, Baltimore had the fewest murders since 1977 event though arrests were cut in half. How did they do it? According to Bealefeld, “we reprogrammed the Department by saying we are fighting a war on violence not a war on drugs.” The police worked with clergy leaders to bring together churches and focus police resources on the most high risk individuals for violence. The police also worked to send a strong message of deterrence to high risk persons: “we tell high risk persons that if they don’t change we are going after their whole set (gang)”.


What could this mean for New York City?

There is continued debate about the relationship between police and communities of color in New York City. While New York City's crime decline is a true success story, there still remains a significant disparity in public safety between neighborhoods of color and the rest of New York City. Across the country in cities like Chicago and Baltimore new strategies for violence reduction and community policing could offer lessons for us here in New York. The relationship between police and the communities they serve require trust and a willingness to work together. Aggressive policing that indiscriminately targets racial minorities destroys trust and the legitimacy of law enforcement in communities of color that need effective public safety services. The work of researchers like David Kennedy and Tracy Mears and Anthony Bragga, as well as courageous clergy-leaders like Reverend Brown are providing an important set of tools in our national public safety tool kit. What is needed now in New York City is the will to deploy these tools. Imagine a year were no one died from gun violence in New york City.

Christopher Watler is the Project Director of the Harlem Community Justice Center

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Artistry in Service of a Gun-Free Brooklyn

Our sister project, the Crown Heights Community Mediation Center, has just posted pictures of a stunning mural that promotes peace in Central Brooklyn. An area ravaged by the gun trade and its resulting violence, Crown Heights has recently been selected for federal funding to initiate a "Ceasefire" program targeting violent offenders, building community collaboration, and bringing guns off the streets. This mural is a powerful representation not only of a deep-seated will to see the violence end, but also the variety of great talents (artistic and otherwise) that this community will marshall to address gun violence.

As their website indicates, the mural is painted on the side of a school across from the Brooklyn Children's Museum, and was and painted by sixteen youth artists and two adult painters over the summer. This piece of public art is a product of collaboration between the Mediation Center, the American Friends Service Committee, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Groundswell Community Mural Project, Assemblyman Karim Camara, and the Damon S. Allen Foundation.

Here are some photos of the details, as they are intricate, lovely, and thought-provoking. See all the pictures here.

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Teenagers With Guns

A sad story has emerged from the Bronx this week, in which a 15-year-old girl from the Morrisania neighborhood, Vada Vasquez, was shot by a 16-year-old boy with no criminal record. The young man, Carvette Gentile, was one amongst a group of young men awaiting to enact revenge on another boy as a result of a fight inside Riker's Island Jail, and has admitted full responsibility.

"According to [Police Commissioner] Kelly, all of the suspects except for the shooter have a long criminal record. 'They were handing off the gun from one to the other, we believe they were attempting to get the weapon to the shooter, Carvette Gentile, because he had no criminal record,' Kelly said." (NY1 News)

This tragic story demonstrates that gang networks continue to facilitate close connections between jail facilities and street life -- and that there need to be other options for 16-year-olds like Carvette, who go from no contact to full contact with the justice system as a result of their participation in gang activities. This boy-child likely had no idea what he was getting into; now, a girl just one year younger than he is in an induced coma as a result of his actions.

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Unique New Plan to Reverse Violence in Chicago

Earlier this month, Derrion Albert, a young honor role student in Chicago was beaten to death with a wooden plank, apparently after stepping into a massive fight between two groups of neighborhood youths. As we have reported previously on this blog, the murder rate in Chicago is quite high -- and Derrion's death has (unfortunately) provided even more of a galvanizing force to address and quell the violence.

The New York Times recently reported on a new initiative underway in Chicago to use statistics and probability to identify likely victims of gun violence. Funded by the federal government at a price tag of $30 million, this plan involves targeting the 10,000 young people at highest risk of becoming victims to the tide of gun violence in the city's south side. Having conducted a survey of 500 victims of violence, the Chicago Police Department has devised a system of predicting the characteristics of potential victims -- and then flooding their lives with adult attention, giving them paid jobs, and providing a community advocate on whom they could call any time of day or night.

As the Times article reports:

"The students at highest risk of violence, by statistics, are most likely to be black, male, without a stable living environment, in special education, skipping an average of 42 percent of school days at neighborhood and alternative schools, and having a record of in-school behavioral flare-ups that is about eight times higher than the average student.

Attacks have typically happened beyond a two-hour window from the start and end of school — that is, late at night or very early in the morning — and blocks away from school grounds, where neighborhood boundaries press against one another.

Within the three dozen or so schools where 80 percent of the victims in the study attended classes, the plan calls for a rethinking of the security philosophy so that policies favor mental health strategies and prevention over policing and punishment. And officials are becoming more strategic about providing safe passage to school by increasing police enforcement and by keeping tabs on gang and clique activities in real time as their turf wars hopscotch around school catchment areas."

There is, of course, some concern that 10,000 students will be consuming $30 million of resources; and some people from these communities beset with violence are skeptical that anything will work. But Ron Huberman, the new chief executive of the and a former police officer, is convinced that targeting small numbers of students will yield large-scale results.

What do you think? Does this kind of plan represent the best use of crime data in action? What are some of the potential consequences of this initiative -- and do you think it will bring the peace that Chicagoans are looking for?

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Here's another good article from the Chicago Tribune about the young people who were involved in Derrion Albert's death.

And here is a CNN report featuring short video clips of the beating. Please be forewarned: it is quite disturbing.

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Guns, Legitimacy, and Social Networks

On average, 14,000 guns per year are recovered from the streets of Chicago.
Let's repeat: 14,000.

Some other facts to consider:

• In New York, the homicide rate is about 9 homicides per 100,000 people. In Chicago, it is roughly 18 homicides per 100,000 people (2008 data).
  
  
• About 80% of Chicago's murders involve an illegal firearm and most are in some way connected to gang-related disputes.

Andrew Papachristos, a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts and a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, has begun making sense of these facts by examining social networks and gun offenders' perceptions of legal authority. At a presentation to Harvard Law School today (and in a paper due to be published shortly), Papachristos found the following:

"gun offenders (just like noncriminals) are more likely to comply with the law when they believe in (a) the substance of the law, and (b) the legitimacy of legal actors, especially the police. Moreover, we find that opinions of compliance to the law are not uniformly distributed across the sample population. In other words, not all criminals are alike in their opinions of the law. Gang members -- but especially gang members with social networks saturated with criminal associates -- are significantly less likely to view the law and its agents as a legitimate form of authority. However, those individuals (including gang members) with less saturated criminal networks actually tend to have more positive opinions of the law, albeit these opinions are still overall negative."

What does this mean?

Looking at a sample of 150 gun offenders in 54 Chicago police beats, Papachristos finds that "criminals" obey the law for much the same reasons that law-abiding citizens obey the law: they feel a moral obligation to do so and think that most laws are right, fair, and just. The difference, according to survey data, is about treatment by the police: most gun offenders do not believe that the police treat most people with respect. In fact, Papachristos and his colleagues found that respect for the police is the only predictor of whether gun offenders perceive the law as a legitimate authority. More than deterrence strategies or prosecutorial outcomes, what cops do matters a lot in offenders' perceptions of procedural justice.

Interestingly, gang members are actually more likely to believe in the substance of the law -- Papachristos wisely notes that there is a non-trivial respect for authority among gang members (think of the Sopranos if you need a pop culture reference) -- but their networks have huge influence on their favorable perceptions of the law. The more people in your network who are engaging in criminal behavior, the more you learn from those people about being a criminal. Papachristos' data shows that gang members whose network ties are more than 50% saturated with other criminal actors are more likely to engage in criminal behavior themselves. Additionally, the more you believe in the legitimacy of the law, the less likely you are to carry a gun. There are not very strong effects for social networks in terms of promoting gun carrying, but these effects are strong for specific, non-planned behaviors (like getting into a fight).

The conclusion we can draw here is that government entities seeking to encourage law-obiding behavior among gun offenders would do well to promote their own legitimacy in the eyes of the offenders. Policies targeted toward improving these perceptions (which might involve de-saturating networks of criminal influences or improving the police-community relationship) could have a perceptible impact on gun violence.

So why does this matter for reentry?

One of Papachristos' key conclusions is that successful reentry is really the problem at hand: he notes that two-thirds of the sample participants have prior felony convictions. The City of Chicago and the U.S. Attorney's Office Northern District of Illinois have implemented a Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) initiative, which is a federally-funded model for reducing neighborhood crime problems. One of the components of this initiative is regular "roundtable meetings," where returning gun offenders sit down with law enforcement officers, successful reentrants, and representatives of community agencies for a restorative justice conversation. After a message from police officers about the surveillance that will be conducted on them ("We are going to get you if you re-offend, and here's how"), ex-gang members share their turnaround stories and service providers are on hand to offer immediate connections to employment, mental health counseling, and housing opportunities. The results from these forums are promising: Project Safe Neighborhoods evaluations indicate that, as the percentage of active offenders in the neighborhood who attend the meeting increases, the neighborhood-level homicide rate decreases. Additionally, forum participants are less likely to re-offend for several varieities of crime when compared to several different control groups.

In the coming week, we'll be sitting down with Professor Papachristos to get a more detailed picture of gun violence in Chicago and the lessons to be learned for anti-gun violence projects in New York City.

What questions do you have for him?
Send them over and we'll do our best to ask!

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Stopping Gun Violence

Recent shootings in upper Manhattan have again raised concerns about gun violence. Just this week two bystanders were hit by stray bullets, including an 11 year-old boy. Last summer a shooting spree injured eight in West Harlem. The sad fact is that children are too often victims of gun violence. The Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence’s fact sheet, Children and Guns a Lethal Combination, presents a chilling picture of gun violence in America:

• The rate of firearm death in the U.S for children under the age of 14 is 12 times higher than in 25 other industrialized countries COMBINED.

• Firearm homicide is the second leading cause of death for youth between the ages of 1-19 in the U.S.

• In 2005, firearms were responsible for 52% of African-American teen deaths, and 17% of Caucasian deaths.

In the face of increasing concern about gun violence, we wanted to highlight efforts that have worked to reduce gun violence.

Newark, N.J: The Greater Newark Safer Cities Initiative, led by the Rutgers University Police Institute, has been working to reduce gun violence among the high-risk parole population. The effort uses a collaborative approach involving criminal justice agencies, local service providers and faith-based groups. The Initiative, targeting parolees who are at high risk of engaging in violent crime upon their release, has reduced returns to prison for violent crimes.

Boston, M.A: Boston Ceasefire focuses on reducing gang related youth violent crime through tougher, targeted enforcement and effective intervention strategies. In one year Ceasefire was credited with reducing firearm violence by 68%.

Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN): A gun violence reduction effort led by local U.S Attorney’s Office, PSN uses enhanced prosecution for gun crimes and collaborative evidence-based strategies that target chronic and violent offenders returning to the community. PSN also focuses on prevention through public media campaigns and school-based gun violence education.

Key elements of these efforts include: using data to guide decision making; a focus on raising accountability for high-risk offenders; collaborations involving multiple criminal justice agencies, community organizations, and faith-based groups; strong messaging about the consequences of gun violence; and a strong focus on outcomes that holds criminal justice agencies’ accountable for results.

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