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The Neighborhood War Zone
I've heard shooters say, in private, that they wanted no part of what happened. But with their friends and enemies watching -- and the unwritten rules clear to everybody -- they did what they had to do. In San Francisco, a string of killings between the warring Big Block and West Mob crews in Hunters Point apparently started nearly a decade ago over who would perform next at a rap concert. The killing of Analicia Perry's brother was never solved, but the man the neighborhood tagged for the death was himself killed -- and that homicide in turn went unsolved. The minister at Analicia Perry's memorial service upbraided the young men before him. "She is now in the hands of God," he said. "I'm just glad she's not in the hands of some of you."
This thug ethos is spreading. 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. One can learn from listening to rapper 50 Cent, or by watching music videos. And it is big business. When rapper Lil' Kim was convicted of perjury connected to a shooting by her posse, she got her own reality show on Black Entertainment Television, which promoted her intent to go to federal prison with her "mouth shut and head held high." Crips and Bloods have Web pages and profiles on MySpace.
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All of this is spreading as well as amplifying the street definition of what it means to have honor. In big cities, the quest for honor reignites existing conflicts; in small ones, it brings big-city behavior and big-city problems. Working recently on Long Island with the Nassau County Police Department, my colleagues and I found Bloods, Crips -- and violence. But the gangs were homegrown, and the violence was almost entirely personal.
Tragically, the code of the street -- and the community disorganization and disenfranchisement on which it thrives -- has been helped along 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 young people 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.
So what do we do?
Above all, get serious. The problems of crime and violence have not been solved. To the contrary, 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 that the world had just become a dangerous place; they were already living in a world that could turn lethal at any moment, and still can.
Loretta Scott, the black former commissioner 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 Scott was going to the funeral of a neighborhood elder, asked, "Who killed him?"
"Not 'What did he die of?' " says Scott, 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' reentry 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 in many other places, most recently Chicago, 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.
Tyrone Parker, founder of Washington's Alliance of Concerned Men , has a finely honed street sense, and it tells him something is shifting. "People are tired of going to prison," he told me recently. His comment was borne out by an ex-offender at a Boston-style meeting I attended in late March with gang members on Long Island. "I'm a walking miracle," the man said to the gang members, many of whom knew him. "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 a "stop killing" movement.
David Kennedy is director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.
