Outlook: Stop the Crime Wave

David M. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, was online Monday, Aug. 14, at 2 p.m. ET to discuss his Sunday Outlook article, The Neighborhood War Zone , ( Post, Aug,. 12, 2006 ), on rampant crime rates in cities major U.S. cities.

The transcript follows.

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Washington, D.C.: I thought your observations about the "thug ethos" and outing act to avoid being "disrespected" were fascinating. I know there's no easy answer to this, but what can we at least start to do about that -- to de-glamorize that culture and change attitudes?

David M. Kennedy: You're right, there's no easy answer. The first step, I think, is to accept that this is a terribly important issue, and add it to the way we think and act: along with more traditional issues like race, economics, law enforcement, community issues, and the like. We should try to create a sense that making money fueling this, through music, TV, etc., is reprehensible. And we need, city by city, to seek out those in the community who stand in opposition to these values and help them find and elevate their voices. Those people are there, even in the hardest-hit communities, and my experience is that they're eager to speak out, if they can do so safely. But they need help.

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Alexandria, Va.: Dr. Kennedy, thank you for an insightful article. This is a subject my colleagues and I have been discussing with greater intensity of late. As you know, many local elected prosecutors are involved in crime prevention such as advocating for after-school programs, engaging in community prosecution, and seeking dispositions for juvenile delinquents that balance community safety, offender accountability and competency development. I recognize that causes and solutions are complicated. But... in your opinion, if you had to put all of your limited resources into one strategy, where can prosecutors focus their attention to achieve the greatest results in crime reduction and while helping to build a safer community? In other words, what works? The reason I am asking, other than your work in this area is well respected, is that I am conducting a prosecutorial leadership training for elected and chief assistant prosecutors interested in addressing juvenile delinquency issues. The rising rate of violent crime has been attributed, at least in part, to the rise in juvenile crime you referred to in your article. Any insight you can provide to prosecutors would would much rather see juveniles in school than in jail or, worse yet, dead, is much appreciated.

David M. Kennedy: My view these days is that the biggest thing those formally charged with public safety can do is work with communities to help them establish informal social control. The kind of serious "street" violent and drug crime I was talking about in the piece is generated by a very small population of hard-core repeat offenders. Communities can engage directly with them, face to face, and set standards for their behavior. We learned ten years ago in Boston how to do that, and back it up with enforcement and services. What we've learned since then is how to add to that the very, very powerful moral voice of communities, saying "we love you but what you're doing has to stop". That turns out to be transformative.

And people in law enforcement have to acknowledge publicly that they've been part of the problem, and that they need to change what they're doing, too.

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Washington, D.C.: I read your article, and I find it interesting, however isn't this approach a little 'warm and fuzzy' for the types of crimes that we are seeing these days? The kids are so much more violent, and don't appear to be receptive to this type of approach...

David M. Kennedy: The great news is that they are receptive. Many, maybe most, want a way out too: they're the ones getting killed. It's a mistake to infer from behavior, which is often unspeakable, to underlying character. A lot of what we're seeing is a product of a group dynamic on the street. Change that and the individuals change too.

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Fairfax, Va.: Having recently finished "Freakonomics," I read your article yesterday with interest. I'd like to hear your opinions about the data and theories discussed in Freakonomics with reference to crime. The book gives pretty sound statistical data suggesting a drop in crime in the 90s was partially due to a drop in the birthrate of poor and probably unfit mothers. This is a subject people don't want to discuss: that Roe v. Wade enabled disadvantaged women who probably had little chance of raising kids who did not become criminals, to abort their pregnancies. Given the hard fact that the data show this to be a contributing factor to the reduction of crime in the 90s (coupled with a gradual increase in prison sentencing since the 60s), I am interested in why you did not discuss any changes in trends or statistics related to the abortion issue. States have gradually begun tightening abortion laws. Do statistics show changes in crime for states in which abortion laws were tightened 15 or so years ago? I think Alliance of Concerned Men is a fabulous idea and probably one of the best ways to start refocusing kids growing up in these high-crime areas. Thanks.

David M. Kennedy: This is a longer discussion, but the short answer is that I don't buy the original argument at all. One reason why not is that it's routine, as we're seeing lately, to see very large shifts both up and down in violent crime. When we see big reductions and big increases, both in the space of less than a decade (and in much shorter periods in many places) that's not about big underlying factors like abortion on demand (or demographics, or many of the other factors we usually consider). It's about something else.

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Washington, D.C.: Mr. Kennedy,

Thank you for your years of work on this issue and for your compelling article this weekend.

I am interested in what you describe as the second new factor contributing to violence: an obsession with 'respect.'

What do you make of the fact that, while more women engage in violence, the overwhelming majority of this violence is committed by men? How do you relate the obsession with 'respect' with how communities, families, and the media are raising young men, particularly with traditional definitions of masculinity that rely upon a sense of toughness, invulnerability, and power?

In my experience as an educator, it seems that social definitions of young masculinity, in many different communities as well as in the national media/advertising, have become more and more limited and centered on power. Almost all communities are facing this narrowing definition, but when economic disparity and low support resources are added, increased violence would seem to be a natural result.

Would it make sense to investigate and attend to the messages young men receive regarding their gender identity? Many new organizations and researchers are doing so, with some success.

Thank you, David

David M. Kennedy: My belief is these issues are among the most important. This is not to neglect more traditional concerns -- the worst of these problems only arise in communities of dire historical and present oppression and neglect, and that always deserves attention. But these normative elements also matter a great deal, though they get very little attention. There's good evidence, for example, that part of why New York is so much safer is that the cohort of young men that grew up during the crack epidemic learned from it that crack use and the violence that went with crack dealing was stupid, and created and enforced informal norms against both. Now I think we're seeing a serious migration of "respect" culture throughout society; I collect these examples, and routinely now see middle-aged white businessmen talking "respect" talk. For them it's an indulgence; for those less well-off, it's a disaster. I don't think we know how to counter this on a macro scale, but it's a critically important question.

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Reston, Va.: I read your article as linking disparate phenomena. On the one hand there's an increase in crime. On the other, you say "the violence is much less about drugs and money than about girls, vendettas and trivial social friction. But why would young men be more uptight about honor, respect, girls, and feuds in 2006 than in 2003? I might accept the argument that the percentage of deaths caused by such issues has increased while the percentage caused by drug turf wars has declined, but I don't see the mechanism to cause a sharp increase in absolute numbers.

David M. Kennedy: Great question. What I find city by city, and I think is also true more generally, is that the most serious violence comes out of a very small superheated street population -- a few percent of the young men in even a rough neighborhood. When that population is quiet, there's little violence. But it doesn't take much to set it off, and when it gets active the violence tends to build, through vendettas, self-protective behavior like gun carrying, fear, etc. So it's not uncommon at all to see big spikes and big reductions in violence, without much shift in underlying conditions. It's also not uncommon to see homicide, for example, spiking, while other kinds of crime are steady or falling.

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Alexandria, Va.: Interesting piece. Would you agree that there is something in American official culture which sanctions the insanely belligerent attitudes that lead to violence in the inner cities? After all, the "culture of respect" is essentially the same as the government's craving for "prestige" and "credibility," which is why it involves us in a seemingly perpetual state of war. In no other western country is the military (at bottom, an instrument for killing) so glorified. TV and films are saturated with gratuitous violence. Is there a connection or am I wrong? Thanks.

David M. Kennedy: It's tempting to make these connections -- I'm tempted too -- but I think we should be careful. Our basic national culture doesn't shift very much very quickly, while many of these problems we're discussing often do. The resonances are certainly there; I'm a lot less sure about the causal connections.

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Mount Rainier, Md.: Mr. Kennedy

I found your article timely and informed. In my role as coordinator of a local hotspots program - now called CSAFE for collective supervision and focused enforcement, I deal everyday with the prospects of making community policing actually work and reach the most hard to serve-those individuals who are committing recurring crimes. I agree we haven't fixed broken windows by serving the full lifecycle of the few who are actually impacting our safety. In my business I can get law enforcement, courts, juvenile services to collaborate but I can't get social services, housing, education to come to the table to deliver backend direct services, i.e., training, job placement and entitlements that work to benefit who needs help. I'm not talking about truancy, delinquency or even the majority of kids on the brink of falling into the system. I'm talking about the hard to serve that commit most of our crimes. We need to build on successes (noted in your story)and link resources into community action evolving out of law enforcement. In Maryland CSAFE works but the there's no funding stream to the local municipalities that depend on federal and state support. In Prince Georges County we have to deal with three levels of funding that in the end nothing comes to the border communities that have to deal with roaming criminals that cross boundaries to prey.

Experts understand the broken window theory but where's the money to impact at the street level senseless crimes? Let's fix the windows with jobs to community people who will take pride and ownership instead of taking the attitude they will throw bricks through newly installed, but not protected windows.

David M. Kennedy: Let me use this question to try to answer the several that have asked something similar, about what government can do, especially the federal government. First, it's clear that the federal government has largely walked away from this problem. There are exceptions, such as the Justice Department's Project Safe Neighborhoods, but overall both attention and funding has gone elsewhere. I don't think for a moment throwing money will work, but everybody at the local level, whether in the enforcement or the prevention business, feels desperate. So we need to restore some balance there. Beyond that, the federal government has a unique ability to frame important problems for state and local government, help find solutions, and move best practices around. I think we need to face that no amount of attention to the usual solutions -- whether "enforcement" or "prevention" -- is going to work here. But there are things that do work, and hopeful directions that require research and development. My biggest frustration is that what works is not being moved around to those who need it, and in very important problems -- meth, for example -- desperate communities are being left to flounder on their own. We can do better than that.

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Washington, D.C.: Dr. Kennedy - I am a member of the law enforcement community, and I read your article yesterday. But how can you possibly say that our role in enforcing the law is serving to break up families and ruin young people's prospects? If these young folks weren't dealing drugs and killing people on our streets, we'd have no reason to lock them up. I agree that we have some societal issues that must be addressed if we are to ever solve the problem, but I don't think that labeling law enforcement as 'oppressive' is serving to help matters any.

David M. Kennedy: Both things are true. It's not a question of justice or injustice, and certainly not about corruption or misbehavior. But if 100 fathers get caught for selling drugs and go to prison, those are 100 fathers taken from their families, and who probably won't be able to get work when they get out. The tragedy here is that these effects are the unintended consequences of trying to do good: but that doesn't make them go away. And, on top of that, in most places this kind of enforcement does not solve, especially, drug and violence problems: and then, over the long term, helps cement them. We need to find ways to do the work differently. And, to say it again, any successful way will have an important place for law, standards, and enforcement: but, I hope, in ways that don't rely nearly so much on widespread arrest and incarceration.

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Rockville, Md.: It's well known, or at least widely believed, that the sorts of neighborhoods you describe lack positive male role models.

What can be done to introduce positive male influences into these communities?

David M. Kennedy: If this is framed, as it often is, as "rebuilding the family," I have no idea. If we frame it a bit differently, I have a lot of hope. We absolutely can aspire to reinforcing the influence of responsible adults in the community. They're there, they can be enormously influential, and the most good can be done by some very unlikely allies, such as older offenders. Many older offenders have great standing among young men and on the streets and are hungry for a chance to make up for what they've done and keep others from doing the same. I've had extraordinary conversations with inmates in maximum security state and federal prisons about how they can use their own channels to send signals back to the streets that the craziness has to stop. Many still in the community would do likewise. I think the possibility is there for a social movement in the community saying that things have to change: the killing, the dying, the endless returns to prison, the not finishing school, all of it. If that's true, than the biggest step we could take would be to help that movement along.

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Washington, D.C.: In your work on the Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative, you argued that the key to combating violent crime was to target one violent group of offenders (gangs), arrest and prosecute them to the maximum degree possible, then make a very public example of them by "calling in" other violent groups and warning them that they faced the same fate if they continued their violent ways. Surprisingly, there was no mention of this "call in" tactic in Sunday's article. Rather, you seem to focus now almost exclusively on the concept of the "thug culture." Is the "call in" tactic incompatible with -- or at least ineffective in combating -- today's "thug culture?" And, given the thesis that tough enforcement may only serve to break up families and further alienate communities, what role can the police play in combating the "thug culture" you describe?

David M. Kennedy: I'm talking with a specialist here... No, it's much the same framework, or at least one version is. The "Boston" idea was always about direct engagement with hard-core offenders, in which law enforcement made it clear that certain misbehavior would bring swift and certain consequences, that acted on the groups (like drug crews) that drive most of the worst crime, that offered social services to those who would take them, and that had the community speak for itself about its own interests and standards. That basically hasn't changed. But if law enforcement used to be in the lead in these face-to-face meetings -- and it did -- the community is now in the lead, speaking with uncompromising directness about why what's going on has to stop, why the community needs young men alive and out of prisons, and the like. And it's now even clearer than before how group dynamics and group norms -- like "respect" norms -- are central to all this. So we can, for example, have an old-head offender talk directly about how toxic those norms are, how he used to follow them because he thought all his friends really believed in them, and how he now knows they were all just following along together. So it's the same basic framework, but with what turn out to be transformational elements added in.

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Baltimore, Md.: The question of "respect": There have been a number of books written about the culture of violence in the Old South and how hypermasculinity and demand for respect played into it. (e.g., Honor and Violence in the Old South by Bertram Wyatt-Brown.)

These Southerners were white, of course, Scots-Irish in origin, and quick to resort to the gun or knife in fairly trifling matters. Don't know how this plays into the behavior of some African-American males today, but it nonetheless shows that this is deeply rooted in the American psyche and not a new development.

David M. Kennedy: Yes, it's a striking parallel, and deeply ironic. But I don't think there's anything peculiarly American about it. Respect cultures and vendetta cultures are very common historically; it's one of the great successes of the liberal democratic tradition to move responsibility for public safety and crime control out of these informal relationships and into the realm of the state. That's why the recent movement of "respect" talk off the streets and into the boardrooms scares me so much: people are turning their backs on centuries of social progress, and I don't think they even know it.

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Albany, N.Y.: From what little I know, it seems that most aspects of the prison system are absolutely counterproductive to almost any goal of incarceration. Is there any debate going on in policy circles about the futility of the increasing incarceration rates and mandatory sentencing in light of the crime rate, or do you predict that the our culture will merely buy into the false promise of more and longer incarceration as a panacea? Thanks.

David M. Kennedy: There absolutely is this debate, and has been for some time. Not everybody agrees with it, of course -- there's still an audience for increasing imprisonment, though levels have now reached a point that it's hard to argue for more. In many circles, though, there's agreement that we're no longer doing good and doing considerable harm. The question has been what to do instead. I don't think we'll get anywhere simply critiquing current practice; we need to frame alternatives that do less harm and do a better job of increasing public safety (and that incorporate a role for law enforcement, which many "antis" can't abide). I think, as we've discussed, some approaches that fit that bill are emerging. I hope so, anyway.

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Arlington, Va.: Mr. Kennedy,

Maybe I'm being overly simplistic, but it seems to me that in a previous era an armed robber would would demand money, etc. and leave the victim unharmed as long as he or she complied. Nowadays it appears more often than not the perpetrator will shoot or stab the victim even if there is no resistance. In your opinion, what is the cause of this change in behavior?

David M. Kennedy: Many thanks, everybody. I apologize for not getting to the remaining questions; I tried to touch on most of the range of issues represented. I appreciate your attention --- and the interest and concern shown. I hope you got something from it.

Best,

David

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