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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The Economist: Bringing Drug Dealers Into the Fold

Thanks to our friends at Change.org for pointing to this recent article in The Economist about a unique intervention in High Point, North Carolina.

As you may know, there are been some recent efforts to re-think the way that local jurisdictions deal with low-level, quality-of-life crime. In High Point, the police department decided to work with community leaders to identify the top 16 drug dealers in the crime-challenged West End neighborhood. Once identified, the police built up a solid case of evidence against each of them over the course of some months. After arresting and prosecuting those who engaged in violence, the police "invited the rest in for a chat."

Confronted with evidence of their criminality, these individuals were forced to choose between ceasing their drug dealing or facing prosecution. At the same time, community service providers were on hand to offer jobs, training, or other responses to service needs.

As the article notes, it seems to have worked. The approach is currently being replicated in other jurisdictions under US Department of Justice funding, so hopefully we'll have a fuller body of evidence about this innovative tactic in the next 2-5 years.

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Involuntary Committal for Public Drunkenness

The NY Times had an interesting video this week about a new initiative in Anchorage, Alaska to address public drunkenness. After a number of deaths this summer, the state passed a law that allows police officers to take people with chronic drinking programs to treatment even without their consent. This is a controversial new program -- see the video here.

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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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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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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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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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Proving a Point

Here's an interesting story from the Criminal Justice blog at Change.org on one of Philadelphia's candidates for District Attorney. Michael Untermeyer, who most recently was in private practice in the city, has donned an electronic monitoring device to make a point about mass incarceration.

You can track his movements (including the time of his most recent cell phone call) here.

His argument is that non-violent offenders could be more cheaply supervised using such tracking devices, instead of being incarcerated. Change.org does a good job of evaluating this tactic and adding some other perspectives.

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"Outbreaks Near Me"

You may have noticed that we're a little obsessed with technology, and especially the iPhone, at Rethinking Reentry.

It was hard to pass, therefore, on this story about a new iPhone application, called "Outbreaks Near Me." With all the hysteria about H1N1 (Swine Flu), this app provides users with a way of tracking outbreaks of the disease near them. Users can even upload "outbreak reports" with pictures and descriptions.

Creators at Children's Hospital Boston and the MIT Media Lab admit that the current version isn't able to weed out fake reports from real ones, but say that the tool has real potential if it is adopted among a wide swath of the population.

The thing we're pondering, of course, is whether this kind of application could have other uses, particularly in problem-solving justice. Putting aside the issue of access to technology for the moment (we are well aware that most reentrants don't have the means to acquire and maintain an expensive iPhone), of what use could this technology be in criminal justice circles?

• What if employers could post jobs to the application (a "jobs outbreak!") and reentrants could find open positions and (more importantly) find employers friendly to people with criminal records?
• What if parole officers could post their own reviews of local service providers for their colleagues to see? Or share information about a recent spate of relapses in a certain neighborhood for other law enforcement officials to be aware of?
• What if service providers could get real time information about reentrants who are new to the neighborhood (hmmm, we'd have to make sure this is legal ...) so that they could better target them for services and support?
• What if reentrants could post reviews of stores, service providers, faith institutions, or other community stakeholders who helped them out (a "good will outbreak!") and would be willing to help others returning to the community?

Any of these ideas would make the process of return certainly more efficient, and with the possibility of pictures and video, perhaps enriching for the technology consumer.

As always, if you have any ideas, we'd love to hear about them! How might this technology be useful in your criminal justice pursuits?

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No Federal COPS Funding For New York City

U.S Attorney General Eric Holder and Vice President Biden announced 1 Billion Dollars in funding distributed under the Justice Department's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (C.O.P.S). In total, 1046 jurisdictions recived funding out of over 7,000 that applied. Funding will be used to increase or maintain police manpower.

Unfortunately, New York City was not selected. In fact New York ranked lower behind such crime hotbeds as Sparks, Nevada and Pine Bluff, Arkansas. News accounts indicated that New York City's "low crime rate and stable budget" were major factors in the decision.

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