A perfect storm for Christmas - cutting murders

Last week New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu announced early results from their homicide reduction program. Unknown at the conference, this creates a fantastic new opportunity. It all starts with the following hypothesis:

Neighborhoods infused with SafeGrowth will help violence reduction strategies like Ceasefire to cut crime more effectively and longer than neighborhoods without.

New Orleans homicide strategy includes the Chicago-style Interrupters, blight reduction and other SafeGrowth-like programs. It also includes David Kennedy's anti-gang violence program called Ceasefire. It's this latter program that caught my eye.

New Orleans' Hollygrove neighborhood - photo Megan Carr

For years I've been a supporter of David Kennedy's Ceasefire. And David is still on the job in places like New York. Ceasefire tackles neighborhoods wracked by violence by calling-in gang members and giving them a choice between arrest and targeted sanction or job training, counseling, housing, and social help.

The message to gang members: We care about you because you are part of our community, but the violence has to stop! As Mayor Landrieu said at the press conference, "the laws of engagement on the streets of New Orleans have changed."

He credits Ceasefire with a big reduction in homicides.

ALEADY IN HOLLYGROVE

Here's the thing; New Orleans' Hollygrove neighborhood already had a huge decline in homicides when residents and AARP instituted SafeGrowth and other programs a few years ago. Murders declined from over 24 to less than 6 with no Ceasefire whatsoever.

That's not to slam Ceasefire - it's a good program. True, there has been some criticism that Ceasefire doesn't work or just fizzles out. But now we have the perfect storm for a researcher, an ideal opportunity to test the hypotheses that SafeGrowth creates conditions for programs like Ceasefire to sustain lower homicide rates longer than in other neighborhoods!

I gave up my own evaluation research years ago. Practitioner work takes too much time. But I always encourage researchers to dig in. This meets all the conditions for a natural experiment...a perfect holiday gift for an enterprising criminologist. It could help communities everywhere.

Merry Christmas!

Business districts and crime?

Beautiful patterns tell us how...not why

"When imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning." Albert Camus  - 1960

Last blog discussed a study by US Forest Service researchers showing how tree canopy in Baltimore cut urban crime by 12%. I just read a 2010 study commissioned by the Center for Disease Control showing how business improvement districts cut violent crime by the same amount in Los Angeles.

So we cut crime 24% by planting tree canopies in a business improvement district (BID)?

Sounds silly. That's because both studies are correlational - studies that show a pattern between two things, not a cause. We don't know why canopies or BIDs work, only that they seem to have impact.

Dozens of correlational studies  appear each year. Like research showing underarm deodorant causes cancer. Or toothpaste. Or cell phones. Or smoking which, it turns out, is true. What to do?

There is a mantra in science: correlation-is-not-causation. Because there is a relationship doesn't mean you can infer cause. Tree canopy and BIDs may coincide with crime declines. That doesn't mean they cause them.

Unfortunately neither can we dismiss correlation studies. Doing so may result in dismissing a good cause assertion. The International Agency for Research on Cancer lists criteria for testing correlational studies - a plausible mechanism between cause and effect, a singular relationship between before/after effects, a reasonable time between the cause/effect, and so on. 

Satisfying these criteria helps mitigate the correlation-is-not-causation dilemma. 

CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSE

I think what correlational studies need is simple - a plausible theory explaining why. That way we'll know if a study shows a correlational relationship we are seeing a shuffle not a full step. 

Sometimes I wonder if theory-building is a dead language. It shouldn't be! That's where research creativity and imagination really show up (not in clever data manipulation or new statistical methods). 

There are some great publications that provide imaginative theory, for example Gilligen's Preventing Violence and Kennedy's Don't Shoot".

It would be wonderful to produce a 24% cut in crime by planting tall trees with great canopy in a business improvement district. It would be a shame if they don't and we have no idea why.

Forget the hoodie, change the law

There is a great 2010 TED.com talk by Philip Howard about reforming criminal law. He says lawyers, judges and politicians need to know much better the science behind preventing social harm. He offers four steps for getting started.

Thinking about bus violence, an erratic sentence, and prevention science from my last blog, Ezzat Fattah came to mind.

Ezzat was one of my favorite grad school profs. Extensively published, fair-minded, and award-winning, he was a pioneer in victimology decades before restorative justice existed. He is respected around the world as a human rights advocate for Amnesty International.

In other words, one of the best!

And what do I recall one of the best saying regarding reforming criminal law? Contrary to some legal scholars' persistent belief in the myth of general deterrence, criminal law doesn't prevent much crime. Instead it is about punishment, morality and politics. No surprise, perhaps. Yet given decades of research into deterrence, this is disappointing because it turns out, for most violence, retribution and deterrence do not stop it!

If we were really serious about reducing social harm we would not rely on 3-strikes rules, mandatory sentencing, and tough-on-crime punishments to protect us. We'd tackle irrational sentencing, we would implement restorative justice, and we'd seriously consider anti-violence prevention programs like David Kennedy's Don't Shoot.

Kennedy says it outright: most gang-and-drug street violence isn't about money. It is about shame and loss of respect. It's about honor, which is why restorative methods work. That is how social harms will be cut.

Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law? An unarmed, hoodie-wearing teen was shot to death
last month while walking in a gated community by a neighborhood watch captain. 

Retributive justice has failed. The worst example is Florida's "Stand Your Ground" gun law. Did that law lead to gun-toting vigilantism in the shooting of Trayvon Martin last month? Was this a Neighborhood Watch program unravelling as an unarmed black kid in a hoodie is killed for the crime of walking in a gated community? A month after the shooting, following much speculation (and, no doubt, much politicking), they have now criminally charged Trayvon's shooter.

Gandhi said an eye-for-an-eye leaves the whole world blind. In Trayvon's case it might have left him dead.

The Interrupters

Dying in the street - scene from The Interrupters

Gary Slutkin is another prevention kid with a great program on the block. Despite Newsweek's yellow journalism alleging conflicts between David Kennedy's and Gary Slutkin's different anti-violence programs (and their eviscerating response), they both have the same goal and similar successes. You say tomato, I say tomahto.

Recall Kennedy uses the justice system, targets high risk populations, collects cases on offenders, and uses the threat of sanctions to intervene.

Slutkin takes the public health approach. He blocks violent outbreaks by targeting high risk offenders and uses community "interrupters". Interrupters are savvy street workers who convince family and friends to help offenders see violence is in no one's best interest.

A new award winning film is out called The Interrupters. It describes a year in the life of violence in Chicago. It's a fascinating documentary about Slutkin's program.



I hope the film - and the program - does well.

Still…getting the right program is only half the battle. Staying on point is the other.

Kennedy's CeaseFire anti-violence program cut Boston homicides in half in the 1990s - the Boston Miracle. Now he says they moved away from CeaseFire and crime is on the rise. Streetworker unionization, role change and budget cuts decimated a once proud program.

Oakland too lost the plot. Courts issued gang injunctions without CeaseFire coordination. Then "funds from the city to CeaseFire were interrupted when the number of Oakland police dropped below levels required by the ballot measure."

When will officials learn to keep political fingers off things that actually work in the hood? When will we, the neighborhood dwelling public, wise-up and slap their fingers for it?

Don't Shoot - Ending inner city violence

Professor David Kennedy [Center for American Progress photo]

Street drug dealing and gang violence isn't the only neighborhood crime problem. But it's at the top of the list.

I met David Kennedy a few years ago and liked him immediately. He's a professor at New York's John Jay College. He has no PhD or MA, yet today he is a leading voice in crime prevention policy. When he speaks about drug dealers and gang violence, people listen. I certainly do. Every time I've seen him he strikes me as the smartest guy in the room.

The New Yorker says he's onto something. Newsweek magazine says he is the only person "who has ever come up with a consistently viable and cost-effective strategy for helping the inner city" drug and gang problems.

If you don't know David's work on Boston's Cease Fire anti-gang project or the High Point, NC, drug dealer project, then you need to get caught up. No better way than to read his latest book -Don't Shoot.

I haven't read it yet but David is one of the few people whose book I can recommend before I have.

Malcolm Gladwell, of Tipping Point fame, says: "Don't Shoot will do for the fight against violence what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did for the environmental movement a generation ago".

When someone like Gladwell says that, it's time to pay attention.