Time to Stand Up Against Gun Violence

The Rev. Al Sharpton, President of the National Action Network, wrote a thoughtful opinion piece in the NY Daily News last Sunday entitled "Every Stray Bullet Comes Closer to You and the One You Love."

There is growing concern about juvenile gangs and gun violence in New York City. According to recent data included with the piece:

• There were 149 shooting victims under the age of 16 in NYC in 2008;
• There were 21 murder victims under the age of 16 in NYC in 2008;
• There are overall 403 homicides so far in 2009, compared to 570 in 2004, and 1946 in 1993;
• Approximately 60-65% of homicides in NYC involved a gun;
• Approximately 70,000 people are injured by a gun in America, with over 50,000 injured in an attack; and
  
• A mere 1% of gun dealers are the source of 60% of crime guns traced nationally.

With crime down to historic lows overall in NYC, there is an opportunity now for us to work collectively to make our public spaces and homes gun-violence-free. This would go a long way to protecting our most precious resource, our children.

For more information on this subject see:

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

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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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Eve Teasing and Counterinsurgency

This week, we sat down with Atul Goel, who is on leave from his job as an officer of the Indian Police Service (IPS) for two years as he pursues a Masters in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In his most recent posting, Atul commanded a force of 1,200 police officers in the Kashmir valley, heading up investigations of violent crime, government malpractice, and counterinsurgency-related crimes.

Atul, thank you for speaking with us. To start, can you tell us a little bit about the Indian Police Service and your role with this law enforcement body?

The Indian Police Service (IPS) is not a force itself but a service providing leaders and commanders to staff the state police and all-India Para-Military Forces. IPS officers are recruited and trained by the Indian government, after which they are assigned to police departments in various states to work in key leadership positions.

I have worked with IPS for 5 years, including a training period in which I spent one year in the academy and one year in the field, acting out all of the roles I would later command, from being the most subordinate officer (beat constable), all the way up. It took me 4 years to get into IPS. It is a highly competitive exam that is used throughout the federal government to recruit senior executives in foreign services, administrative service, policing, etc. The position requires somebody who is highly competent but also a generalist – obviously, we are taught law and forensic science as part of the training, but what is stressed is common sense and how not to be prejudiced against certain things. Additionally, we have to know how to deal with politicians, handle the common people's problems, and do personnel management.

Although my family lives in Delhi, I was sent to Kashmir, one of 100 IPS officers sent to that region. I was responsible for 1200 policemen most recently, supervising 7 police stations. Since Kashmir also has paramilitary forces, I also supervised 3 battalions of paramilitary forces (focusing on counterinsurgency problems, not hard crime). My region encompassed roughly 300,000 people, with a middle class population of roughly 40% and a lower income population of about 60%.

It is interesting to hear that you were responsible both for "hard crime" problems and for counterinsurgency issues. Can you give us a sense of what kinds of crime you most frequently dealt with in both categories?

Well, for hard crime, the most frequent issues were burglaries, low-level drugs (not cocaine or marijuana, but usually prescription drugs that people were taking illegally, like cough syrup), and eve teasing.

What is eve teasing?

You know, like Adam and Eve? It means making snide remarks about women -- Indian citizens can be booked for it and prosecuted. In fact, just before I came here, when the elections were happening, there was a case with this guy doing eve teasing from his car. Two girls were walking on a road, this guy was trying to make conversation, and the girls weren't responding to his small talk. So he crushed one of the girls under his car and she died. Also, there is a fair amount of mob violence. Because of certain political circumstances and the insurgency in the area, there are a lot of protests and they are not always peaceful ones.

And what about the counterinsurgency crimes?

Our biggest concern is about bomb blasts. In fact, last July, we had a really bad one, in which a family of people died (among the dead were four small siblings). This is the kind of thing we are always worried about, so we are constantly collecting intelligence, doing paramilitary prevention based on that intelligence, and investigating cases once a crime has happened. When a blast happens, you have to rush in, insure immediate relief, conduct autopsies in case there are any dead, and investigate the case (the level of insurgency-related violence has in fact decreased significantly over the last few years).

Really, the distinction between hard crime and counterinsurgency is not that clear-cut – once an event occurs in a place, it is a crime under your local penal code, so it becomes your duty to investigate. Sometimes, larger federal investigation agencies come in to take the case. Like that blast where four people died, that was investigated locally, but I used a special investigation team at my office level because it was slightly more important than the normal set of events. With counterinsurgency, it becomes really important, especially in terms of intelligence collection, that the officers who are working there at the police station have a good knowledge of the area (they have a good feel of what’s happening). We have an entire branch in the police that is just for collection of intelligence, but we are not going to separate the channels of information if there is relevance for other crime issues.

So what is the murder rate in your area?

It's really pretty low, absent counterinsurgency issues, perhaps two murders registered per year. The murder rate is generally pretty low in India, as compared to other countries. Our crime is mostly for economic reasons, in my opinion. Burglary, for example, people stealing mobile phones. Last year, one murder case was the crushed girl and there might have been one more.

Including the militancy, however, the murder rate is pretty high. As I mentioned, with the mob violence: there was one day when six people died in our jurisdiction. Although gangs are not really a problem -- we don't have the culture of gangs in the same way that US does -- there was a case where a family of five was murdered. The person who did it was 600 miles away, in another state. You know, there are these tribes, groups of people who, under the British system, were classified as professional criminals. Since one is born into this group, the entire male adult population of a village could be part of these "criminal tribes." After independence, the government reorganized this group of people, but the 5 murders I mentioned were committed by a gang of people from these "criminal tribes." I don't agree with this terminology, but just to give you an understanding of the issues at play.

I would imagine that there would be a certain amount of gun trafficking in the area. Is that correct?

Yes, there is a lot of gun trafficking in Kashmir, most of it done from Pakistan. In fact, we had this one murder case in which a son killed his father. So as to divert the attention of the police, he got a hand grenade (which are easily available in Kashmir) and planted it near the dead body, to make it seem like it was a militancy-related crime. There is a lot of shifting between militants and crime. There are some cases in which the guns that are meant for militants go towards committing of routine crimes and in some cases regular crimes have been given the color of militancy. People sometimes go into others' houses to steal stuff, with toy guns, behaving as if they are militants. They don't do any physical harm, but maybe they steal a mobile phone or some other valuables.

What are you hoping to do moving forward?

Getting into the police service is a big gamble, because you might not get through past the test. It's a big stress job with lots of power and perks, but a lot of educated Indians see the opening of the economy and moving are to private sector. A lot of people take this exam because one of best ways to serve the people and change the way the country functions, since you get into a powerful role. I hope that an education at Harvard will give me the skills and the credibility required to contribute meaningfully to the manner in which the criminal justice system in general, and policing in particular, is perceived by people in India.

One of my objectives would be to get rid of the sense of fear or shame that an ordinary Indian feels in approaching the police for a bonafide service. We should be able to project the image that the police is a just like any other public provided service and that it exists to serve the people. What policies will get police to be more people-friendly?

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Six Degrees of Separation, Guns & Gangs

By: Christopher Watler
Upper Manhattan Reentry Task Force Coordinator

I am blogging this week from the National Community Prosecution Conference in Los Angeles sponsored by the National District Attorney's Association and the Center for Court Innovation.

I just left a riveting presentation by Mark Kraft, Deputy Director of the National Gang Targeting Enforcement and Coordination Center (TECC). Mark began by making the point that most criminals are drawn together by the commodities they have in common--i.e. drugs and guns. Law enforcement can use the tight network of criminal relationships to improve their investigations. I was surprised to learn that often, guns confiscated by law enforcement are not traced. It was also interesting to learn that 87% of gangs are local groups, not the major nationally-known gangs.

Mark challenged the audience of community prosecutors to "do more with other people's resources." For example, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms does gun traces that are a free service for local law enforcement and can yield information not just on the original purchaser, but also on prior crimes involving the gun.

Unlike illegal drugs, the bulk of the gun market is legal. Guns are legally manufactured and distributed in the United States. Gang members use this fact to their advantage to engage in trafficking. For example, a large number of illegal gun buys occur with "straw buyers" -- individuals with clean records who are paid to buy a gun for a gang member. These straw buyers receive compensation that can range from $100 to a six pack and a tank of gas. The illegal buyers traveling to "source areas" (states where gun purchases are less restrictive) from the "market areas" (usually urban, high-crime areas with tougher gun laws) can get a group of straw buyers to make individual purchases on one trip. In one case highlighted, straw buyers were a group of single moms from one housing development that received diapers in exchange for purchasing the guns for the traffickers.

Mark offered a few strategies for law enforcement:

1. Trace all guns. Guns can be great "informants."
2. Train cops to debrief every gang members caught with a gun and document these interviews. Information from these interviews may help support probable cause opportunities later on.
3. Document admissions about gang involvement.

4. Take pictures of tattoos.
5. Work to make straw buying as taboo as other major crimes. Illegal guns are used in rapes and murders, but most straw buyers would never engage in these behaviors.
5. Collect ballistics evidence and store it properly for later comparison with guns retrieved from other crimes.

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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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NY Times Finds Murders Higher In Warmer Weather

According to a New York Times' analysis of homicide data from 2003-2008 murders rise in the warmer months. Perhaps this is not news to most New Yorkers, but the article is interesting. Click here to read the article. We also liked the interactive map.

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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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