Pubdate: Sun, 27 Aug 2006
Source: Journal Gazette, The (IN)
Copyright: 2006 The Journal Gazette
Contact:  http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/908
Author: David Kennedy

VIOLENT CRIME RETURNS WITH A VENGEANCE

After A Welcome Decline, Cities Such As Philadelphia,
Above, Are Seeing A Resurgence Of Violent Crime.

NEW YORK   The United States is losing the war in Iraq; more specifically, 
Philadelphia is. This war is at home, in the city's 12th Police District, 
where shootings have almost doubled over the past year, and residents have 
spray-painted "IRAQ" in huge letters on abandoned buildings to mark the 
devastation.

It is a story being repeated up and down the East Coast and across the 
nation. In Boston, where the homicide rate is soaring, Analicia Perry, a 
20-year-old mother, was shot and killed several weeks ago   while visiting 
the street shrine marking the site of her brother's death on the same date 
four years earlier. Recently, Orlando's homicide count for this year 
reached 37, surpassing the city's previous annual high of 36 in 1982. And 
in Washington, D.C., where 14 people were killed in the first 12 days of 
July, Police Chief Charles Ramsey declared a state of emergency.

Not long ago, the United States was declaring "mission accomplished" on 
crime: Homicide rates were plunging, the crack epidemic was over, the 
broken windows were fixed. Now, preliminary FBI statistics show that 
homicides rose nearly 5 percent in 2005, and news from around the country 
suggests that 2006 is looking worse. Our many Iraqs at home are making it 
clear that the self-congratulation was premature. In reality, Americans 
were lulled into complacency about violent crime.

And two new factors have emerged: Some of the law enforcement tactics used 
to fight crime in recent years damaged the social fabric in many 
communities and contributed to more crime. More important has been the 
spread of a thug ethos   an obsession with "respect" that has made killing 
a legitimate response to the most minor snubs and slights.

The good news about crime reductions was real enough: In New York City, 
homicides fell an astonishing 76 percent, from 2,245 in 1990 to 539 in 
2005. Most observers   myself included   gave a good deal of the credit to 
the city's newly focused and entrepreneurial police department. In Boston, 
Operation Ceasefire   which I helped design as a Harvard researcher in 
1996   brought an unprecedented partnership of law enforcement, social 
service providers and community leaders into sustained face-to-face contact 
with drug crews; told them to stop shooting one another; and offered them 
help. Homicides plunged to lows not seen since the 1960s.

The national numbers followed suit, but not evenly. Although homicides in 
New York City dropped to a rate of about 6.6 victims per 100,000 people 
last year, Buffalo came down from a peak of 90 killings in 1994 but still 
had 63 homicides in 2003, for a rate of 22 victims per 100,000 residents. 
And Chicago fell from a 1992 peak of 939 homicides but remained stubbornly 
in the 600 to 700 range during the next decade, for a 2002 rate of about 22 
per 100,000 people.

Many jurisdictions made progress only to lose ground shortly thereafter. 
Philadelphia peaked at 420 homicides in 1996, fell to 292 in 1999, and 
climbed back to 380 last year. Boston's 1990s "miracle" ended abruptly as 
petty rivalries shattered the Ceasefire coalition, and killings increased 
from 31 in 1999 to 73 in 2005.

Meanwhile, gang and drug problems were showing up in smaller cities and 
towns, another disturbing and largely unnoticed shift. In 2005, 
jurisdictions with populations between 50,000 and 250,000 saw homicide 
increases of about 12.5 percent   far larger than the big cities.

Those numbers tell only part of the story. Serious crime is concentrated in 
certain areas within poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods. For people who 
live in the Trinidad area of Washington, in the Nickerson Gardens housing 
complex in South Los Angeles, and on Magnolia Street in Boston, the 
citywide statistics have always been meaningless. Their neighborhoods are 
war zones.

Unrealistic Optimism

The national sense of well-being about crime was unrealistic. Cities such 
as Boston let their successful strategies collapse. New York City's 
approach has not worked nearly as well in Baltimore, Miami and other cities 
that have attempted it. Key problems such as crack waned but never really 
went away. Many rural areas have been ravaged by an exploding 
methamphetamine epidemic, which we have been unconscionably slow to 
recognize as a national crisis. And the recent focus on terrorism has 
diverted attention from sure threats to vague ones, leaving police standing 
watch at highway overpasses while kids across town kill one another in drug 
markets.

"People are dying," Gary Hagler, the police chief of Flint, Mich., said 
bluntly in a recent plea to a Senate panel to restore cuts in federal 
funding for state and local crime prevention.

Beyond this, a subtle but worrisome shift is at work. Many factors drive 
crime   poverty, inequality, racism. But to those we should add the spread 
of a subculture once found only in the toughest urban areas: the culture of 
respect.

My research in Baltimore, Boston, Minneapolis, Washington and many other 
cities, along with that of colleagues at the University of California at 
Irvine and at Michigan State University, shows that in hard-hit 
neighborhoods, the violence is much less about drugs and money than about 
girls, vendettas and trivial social frictions. These are often referred to 
as "disputes" in police reports and in the media. But the code of the 
streets has reached a point in which not responding to a slight can destroy 
a reputation, while violence is a sure way to enhance it. The quick and the 
dead are not losing their tempers; they are following shared   and 
lethal   social expectations. It used to be that one learned how to be a 
gangster from another gangster. No more. Mass-market glossy magazines 
promote the thug life. Crips and Bloods have Web pages and profiles on MySpace.

Tragically, the code of the street has been helped by law enforcement. 
Profligate arrests and incarcerations, many aimed at drugs, have destroyed 
the village in order to save it. As crime has dropped, zealous enforcement 
has continued. A staggering 2 million people are now incarcerated in the 
United States, and about 5 million are on probation and parole. They 
disproportionately come from, and return to, the same neighborhoods. The 
Justice Policy Institute recently determined that a shocking 52 percent of 
Baltimore's black men ages 20 to 29 were incarcerated, on probation or on 
parole; nationally, the lifetime chance of a black man being locked up is 
one in three.

This enforcement breaks up families; it ruins the prospects of youths who 
now have little reason to finish school and take entry-level jobs, and of 
older people who find themselves virtually unemployable; it creates a 
street culture in which prison is normal and even valued; and it plays 
directly into community narratives that equate law enforcement and the 
white community with slaveholders and other historical oppressors. The 
"stop snitching" culture that recently made headlines has been brewing for 
decades, reflecting a conviction on the part of many that law enforcement 
is a racist enemy   even though staying silent means protecting violent 
predators.

Get Serious On Crime

So what do we do?

Above all, get serious. Everywhere I go, state and local officials feel 
abandoned by the federal government. While authorities talk about 
terrorism, people are dying on our streets. Poor black grandmothers didn't 
stand up after the World Trade Center attacks and say the world had just 
become a dangerous place; they were already living in a world that could 
turn lethal at any moment.

Loretta Brooks, the black director of parks and recreation in Rochester, 
N.Y., with whom I've worked on violence prevention, speaks with passion of 
her young granddaughter who, when she heard that Loretta was going to the 
funeral of a neighborhood elder, asked, "Who killed him?"

"Not 'What did he die of?" says Loretta, full of grief and anger. "'Who 
killed him?"

The federal government must return to its role as a real partner in 
conquering crime by providing funding and crafting effective approaches to 
key problems, such as drug markets, the methamphetamine epidemic, domestic 
violence, gangs and prisoners' re-entry into their communities. We should 
learn from the true successes of the past decade.

Two stand out. One is the organizational and operational breakthroughs of 
the New York Police Department, which has shown an unparalleled ability to 
stay focused and effective over more than a decade. How and why this has 
happened should be fully understood and the lessons made available to other 
jurisdictions.

The second success story is the approach in Boston 10 years ago that slowed 
the killing there. Those tactics have since proved themselves elsewhere and 
have been strengthened through explicit attention to street culture and to 
the barriers between law enforcement, communities and offenders. When 
police are frank about the limits of traditional law enforcement and about 
their desire to stop doing harm; when communities look offenders in the eye 
and tell them that they are doing wrong but are loved and deserve help; 
when old gangsters tell young ones that the code of the street leads only 
to grief, things change. I've seen it happen.

In March, I attended a Boston-style meeting where an ex-offender spoke with 
gang members on Long Island.

"I'm a walking miracle," the man told them. "I've seen people die in front 
of me, I've been shot before, I've played with guns, sold crack, sold weed, 
smoked weed. And you know what? I'm paying for it. I've been on paper since 
I was 14 years old: juvenile, federal, state. I'm done. I'm praying you're 
all done, too." After the meeting, the shooting between the gangs virtually 
stopped.

That's the message that could turn the "stop snitching" culture into "stop 
killing" movement.

==================

GETTING TOUGH ON CRIME

Do aggressive anti-crime measures really work? Jack Levin, director of the 
Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University in 
Boston, weighs in on crime-prevention techniques.

INCREASING POLICE PRESENCE: In the short run, it is often an effective 
strategy to place large numbers of officers conspicuously in high-crime 
areas. Better still is when police leave their patrol cars and walk a beat, 
increasing their visibility and their interaction with tourists and other 
pedestrians. In the long run, community policing   in which officers 
collaborate with residents in their crime-fighting efforts   can help stem 
crime in a city. Of course, a stronger police presence also results in a 
displacement effect: Criminals will simply move on to a new block. In some 
neighborhoods, police are still seen as the enemy or even as occupiers, 
almost as unwelcome as gangs and guns.

SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS: Locating cameras in crime hot spots does have a 
deterrent effect, but only when criminals know that they are likely to be 
identified and apprehended. It is therefore essential to publicize the 
presence of monitoring devices. Some object to the presence of cameras 
based on misplaced concerns over privacy and civil liberties. The only true 
downside to electronic surveillance is that   much like expanded police 
presence   it tends to displace crime to areas where cameras have not been 
installed.

CURFEWS: Imposing a curfew on teenagers is a politically expedient, easy 
response to spikes in crime. The only problem is the lack of evidence that 
curfews work. Adults tend to commit crimes in the dead of night; teenagers 
commit a disproportionate number of offenses in the afternoon   after the 
school bell rings and before Mom and Dad come home from work. It would be 
effective to place a 10 p.m. curfew on individuals older than 18, but not 
on the younger crowd.

ADULT SUPERVISION: Teenagers need adult supervision   in after-school 
programs, athletic programs, jobs and community centers. The afternoon 
hours are prime time for teenage crime and teenage sex. Teenage violence 
will be reduced permanently only when adults recognize the need to be fully 
involved in youngsters' lives. A community approach involving police, 
clergy, business leaders, probation officers, teachers, college students 
and parents working together to reach young people was responsible for 
bringing down the rate of teenage violence in Boston in the 1990s.

ASSISTING EX-CONS: Increasing numbers of prisoners who were incarcerated 
during the war on drugs in the 1980s are being released into the community. 
Most have no job skills and little hope for the future. As a result, they 
are rejoining gangs, sometimes in leadership positions. We need to reach 
out to ex-convicts with programs and policies that provide training and 
employment. Otherwise, they will commit more crimes on the streets of our 
major cities in the years to come.
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MAP posted-by: Steve Heath