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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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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A Nobel Prize in Economics … About Police Departments?

Usually, criminologists don’t pay that much attention to what economists are doing – or vice versa. This week, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prize for various disciplines, gave us good reason to reconsider the link between economics and policing.

Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to with the Nobel Prize in this category, was recognized for her contributions to the “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.” What does this mean? Ostrom has successfully demonstrated that commonly-shared property (such as fish stocks, grassland, or groundwater basins) is often better-managed by pools of users than by government structures or private entities. The idea is that local systems of users often develop subtle and refined regulations for usage over time, including practices for monitoring and enforcement that protect the resource, even when the benefits to users are only modest.

What does this have to do with policing?

One of Ostrom’s early projects tested the presiding assumption that police departments centralized at the city level created economies of scale that resulted in more efficient policing. To the contrary, Ostrom’s survey of 80 metropolitan areas found that small, locally-controlled forces are more effective than a large, city-wide controlled police force in meeting citizen demands for neighborhood police protection. As Ostrom noted in a later article, “For patrolling, if you don’t know the neighborhood, you can’t spot the early signs of problems, and if you have five or six layers of supervision, the police chief doesn’t know what’s occurring on the street.” This point was made in 1974, and almost twenty years later, police departments like that of Chicago decentralized their organizations to encourage officers to proactively identify and address sources of crime and disorder in their patrol areas. Community-based policing took root and now much of the federal funding provided by the Department of Justice for local crime issues requires locally-based teams of law enforcement agents and community partners to work together at the neighborhood level. (For more on this, check out the Project Safe Neighborhoods website at the Department of Justice.)

The basic idea is intuitive: that the people who own the resource are more likely to shepherd it wisely – this is as important an insight for crime and public safety as it is for environmentalism!

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Another Offspring of the Marriage Between Crime Data and the iPhone

"Warning: Stay alert. Do not get hurt."

That's what the iPhone said to me, in a very masculine voice, when I tried out the new application "Are You Safe? Sacramento." I had typed in an address recommended to me -- I don't live in Sacramento, otherwise the phone would have used GPS to identify my current location -- and discovered that, in that immediate vicinity, my "personal defcon" threat level was 2 (or orange, which is high), and that there had been 4 homicides, 27 assaults, 4 robberies, and 19 car thefts in this immediate vicinity in 2008. Additionally, I learned that a car had been stolen "about 0 ft. from here, on 05-22-2008. It occurred at 17:15, according to the record. If you are parking your vehicle you might want to think about finding a garage. You might be able to glean more context by examining the offense description: 10851(A)VC TAKE VEH W/O OWNER."

This, fine readers, is what is available to you if you live in Sacramento, Atlanta, Washington D.C., Milwaukee, or Indianapolis; you own an iPhone; and you are willing to pay $0.99. It is the union of publicly available crime data, GPS mapping, fancy application graphics (behold, the "threat meter"), and the long-standing human obsession with personal safety.

Its uses, according to the application makers, include:

• "Visiting and unfamiliar with the city?"
• "Debating whether to walk or take a cab?"
• "Headed to an area you haven't been to before?"
• "Not sure if you should park your car on the street?"

For outsiders to a neighborhood, it might be a helpful tool (likely, the people who have lived in the neighborhood for a while don't need a "threat meter" to tell them what crimes have been happening in the area recently). And to be fair, there's good reason to have as much data about any place as you can -- I wonder, however, whether there is an element of hysteria in this kind of thing. If this kind of technology takes root broadly, is it yet another way of stigmatizing neighborhoods that indeed have serious public safety concerns? Perhaps this application could be balanced with information about local block associations or dates for the next precinct community council meeting.

What are your thoughts about this kind of technology? Please comment!

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Literally Leaning Into Conflict

Today's NY Times has a compelling article about the Reverend Vernon Williams, a pastor who sees it as his mission to interrupt violent conflict in Harlem. Possessing himself a criminal record for drug addiction and guns possession, Rev. Williams has turned his life toward helping younger generations in Harlem.

In addition to presenting this very human story of tragedy and rehabilitation, the article speaks to an issue that the Harlem Community Justice Center has been working on for some time: gangs.

At least seven major gangs operate in an area bordered roughly by West 125th Street, West 155th Street, Fifth Avenue, St. Nicholas Avenue and Harlem River Drive, according to residents and community leaders. They include G.M.B., short for Get Money Boyz; F.S.U., which uses two profanities in its name; O.T.N., short for 129; and G.F., meaning GoodFellas.

While these may be the major gangs, there are a number of smaller, more localized "crews" that function very similarly, often in public housing projects. They are loose conglomerates of young men and women, and their more dispersed structure than traditional "gangs" has made it a much more difficult public safety program to address. For some time, the Justice Center has seen a need for some kind of coordinating body addressing these gang issues among police, community members, schools, and faith leaders -- much like the Upper Manhattan Reentry Task Force has done around the issue of adult prison reentry. This article highlights how successful the efforts of even one committed man can be -- perhaps a collaboration of stakeholders could take a page from his book.

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Looking at the Hyper-Local

One of the most amazing aspects of reentry in Upper Manhattan is how locally specific it is. There are extremely high concentrations of people returning to very small local areas in Harlem -- and this is generally the nature of criminal justice problems in urban areas.

Looking at the broader global context, Swedish public health professor and doctor Hans Rosling has put together a fascinating dataset displaying this same pattern in development. Arguing against the traditional perspective that there are "developed" and then "developing" nations, Rosling uses his data to describe extreme variations among so-called "developing nations." [See also his website to see more displays of world development data compellingly presented.]

The video below -- humorous and dynamic -- shows a presentation he gave through TED at the US Department of State this summer. His visual displays of development over time speak very clearly to the idea that all global phenomena have very specific local manifestations. An interesting idea to ponder in Upper Manhattan as well.

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Video: Buzz Cuts and Basketball

For those of you who have never been to Harlem, here's a taste of what its good citizens are like. Warning: this video has nothing to do with reentry. Enjoy!

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Reducing Neighborhood Poverty Increases Later Economic Mobility (Duh!)

A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Mobility Project found that residing in a high poverty neighborhood raises the chance for "downward mobility" by 52% for middle class African-Americans. Middle class African-Americans are more likely than than Whites to live in neighborhoods with a poverty rate over 20%. Pew reports that between 1985 and 2000 almost 66% of middle class African-Americans lived in high poverty neighborhoods, compared to 6% of whites.

Since Pew first began reporting data on the impact on economic mobility for persons residing in high-poverty neighborhoods there has been a debate about what policy approaches make sense. For example, nudging middle class African-American families to leave high-poverty neighborhoods for the sake of their children would increase risks for the poor children who remain.

According to an article in the Washington Post, the report findings suggest that place-based efforts to reduce poverty and improve outcomes for children may be the way to go. One local example of this is the Harlem Children's Zone. President Obama's Promise Neighborhoods policy initiative, mentioned in the Post article, seeks to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone model in 20 poor communities across the country. The good news is that reducing poverty improves upward economic mobility for African-American and Latino children in poor neighborhoods.

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