“Violence Is Contagious”: A Conversation with Andrew Papachristos

By Greg Berman

“Gun violence is tragic, but, in the majority of cases, is decidedly not random,” Northwestern University sociology professor Andrew Papachristos told the Chicago Sun-Times earlier this year.

Employing both statistical models and qualitative methods, Papachristos has been able to show that a relatively small number of individuals are involved in gun violence within any given community—and that these people tend to be connected to one another by a web of relationships. 

For example, in a study published in the Journal of Urban Health, Papachristos and two coauthors looked at young men with an elevated risk of gunshot victimization in Boston and found a social network of about eight hundred individuals. On average, individuals in the network were less than five handshakes away from the victim of a shooting. Strikingly, the closer someone was to a gunshot victim, the greater the probability that person would later be shot; each network step away from a gunshot victim decreased a person’s odds of getting shot by approximately 25 percent.

Unlike many academics, Papachristos is committed to translating his research into policy and practice. To facilitate this, he recently helped launch the Northwestern Neighborhood & Network Initiative, which seeks to leverage the university’s expertise to address problems facing the residents of Chicago and surrounding communities. 

In September, Greg Berman, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Distinguished Fellow of Practice, talked to Papachristos about his research into neighborhood violence and about the challenges faced by academics who choose to venture beyond the ivory tower. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. 

Greg Berman: A lot of your work, some of which has been supported by The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in the past, has been devoted to network science. I wonder if you might start by explaining what you mean when you use the expression “social network” and in particular what you have found about how homicides tend to cluster in a place like Chicago.

Andy Papachristos: When I talk about network science or social networks, what I’m actually talking about are the social relationships that link people, places, and institutions. There’s a whole field that uses statistical models, as well as qualitative data, to understand how patterns of relationships affect what we do. 

A lot of my work has applied this idea to understanding patterns of crime and violence, specifically gun violence. One of the most robust criminological findings is that delinquency and crime are group phenomena. The same is true of violence.

I started out looking at conflicts between groups and gangs and how stable these conflicts are. This was actually the original work that was supported by the Guggenheim Foundation. It was really looking at how these patterns endure. A lot of the murders that we see today, especially those that involve gangs or groups or crews, are actually determined long before any particular member even joins the group. These structures exist in unseen ways and they actually shape who your enemies are and who your allies are. And so I used network science to figure out if we can understand how these structures essentially inform or predict subsequent acts of violence.

We went from there to looking at individuals to see if we could figure out who’s going to get shot as an individual, not just as a bucket of risk factors. Criminologists and sociologists know a lot about the risk factors associated with violence—being poor, being young, being Black or Latino, living in a particular neighborhood. But when you look on the ground on any given day, those risk factors only take you so far because everybody in a particular neighborhood has risk. So how do we figure out which one or two or three people are going to get shot?

Sometimes people are saying that they feel so unsafe that they have to protect themselves, even though they know carrying a gun is going to potentially get them in trouble, or get them killed. I do think people have agency, but I think those are forced choices in some ways. 

So we went back to try to understand the shape of people’s social networks, and their placement within them, and how that affected their probability of getting shot. The methods that we used borrowed from epidemiology, from the study of infectious disease. When you apply these ideas to violent behavior, homicide becomes an interaction. 

We found that gun violence concentrates within social networks. So a small proportion of individuals are at the center of gun violence within any given community—and by small I mean a couple of hundred people in a community of tens of thousands. Exposure matters: when people around you are getting shot, your probability of being shot skyrockets. Violence is contagious in a very real sense—it cascades through networks in very predictable ways. It actually does spread like pathogens. There are others, but those are the key findings that we’re seeing in multiple cities and that we’re trying now to leverage for violence-prevention efforts.

Not long ago, you gave a talk to a class at Princeton University that was entitled Society Didn’t Do It; Networks Did. I don’t mean to put too much weight on a cheeky title that maybe you didn’t even come up with, but it made me wonder how you think about individual agency when it comes to violence. I have always thought that there was an implicit moral argument in saying that violence is like a disease, since we tend not to hold individuals accountable for getting an infectious disease in the same way that we hold people accountable for shooting someone.

I did not come up with that cheeky title, [Princeton sociology professor] Fred Wherry did. However, it’s pretty apt for the type of work that I do. So just to be clear, I think that networks do it, but that society makes networks. 

Let me explain with an analogy. I like to think about networks, especially networks of violence, like an interstate highway system. The system gets built over time, sometimes with good plans, sometimes with bad plans. It’s built with certain purposes in mind: which places are you going to connect, are you going to destroy a given neighborhood to open up access, etc. And once that structure is in place, those massive, six-lane highways, it is really hard to create a whole new system. Once it’s in place, that’s what you use to get around. Sometimes you can make shortcuts or new pathways or whatever, but you can’t really choose not to use the highway. When people are born, they inherit these systems. They don’t always understand the history. They just know they need to get around.

And that’s what happens with a lot of these networks where violence is concerned. They were built through patterns of housing segregation and school catchment zones and police districts and geographic political boundaries. It’s not random. There’s no randomness about why some neighborhoods don’t have grocery stores or why some neighborhoods do have lead pipes and others don’t.

When you think about neighborhoods that have high levels of gun violence and gangs or street crews, those networks help you get around. You need to know what the conflicts are, so you know how to be safe when you walk down the street, especially young people. So people navigate these networks and then they have to make decisions. If you feel unsafe, are you going to carry a gun to protect yourself? Are you going to call the police? Are you going to try to change networks? 

I do think people make choices, but the choices are severely constrained. And sometimes the choices are not choices at all. Sometimes people are saying that they feel so unsafe that they have to protect themselves, even though they know carrying a gun is going to potentially get them in trouble, or get them killed. I do think people have agency, but I think those are forced choices in some ways. 

I’ve heard you say that the average age of a gunshot victim in Chicago is about twenty-seven years old. That seemed high to me.

It surprised me the first time I saw it, but I’ve seen it consistently, which means it’s real. And it’s not just Chicago. In Evanston, the average age of gunshot victims is even older. What’s important about understanding the age distribution is that what a twenty-seven-year-old needs is not what a sixteen-year-old needs, and vice versa. I think people tend to find a young person, a teenager, more sympathetic. A twenty-seven-year-old who might have a felony conviction is more likely to be portrayed as a gang member. When we talk about today’s victims, it’s crucial to understand who they are so that we can give them the resources that they need to thrive. If you want to save the lives of gunshot victims today, you have to think about young men who are in their late twenties, who don’t have access to formal schooling systems, many of whom have their own children. 

What are the implications for policy and practice if we were to recognize this reality—that many of the victims of gun violence are not-so-young men with criminal records?

I worry about pitting short-term and long-term solutions against each other. I think when you’re talking about on-the-ground violence prevention, that network thinking can help stop cascades of violence. I think you can use this information to reach people to intervene, to prevent violence, and to save lives. I think that’s really important. But, going back to my highway analogy, if you don’t fix the structural elements, it still means the next time an outbreak happens, it’s going to be in the same place and affecting the same people. 

If the question is how do we stop gun violence today, the most important thing we need to do is build an infrastructure around the people who are doing neighborhood-level violence prevention.

Especially in the current political moment, we’re often pitting the need to address structural problems against the need to intervene in the here-and-now. The truth is that we have to do both. I don’t think we should ignore these large issues and how these systems were built. But to take those apart, whether it’s to dismantle them or to build new systems, that work is going to take generations. We have to do this work, but at the same time we have to save lives today. 

I share your belief that we’ve been confronted with what feels like a false choice between engaging in interventions to stop the violence now versus longer-term investments that might alter the structures that you describe. I’m wondering whether there are one or two examples of investments, in either of these two categories, that you think we should be making?

New York City is actually an example of a place that I think has done some things right. If the question is how do we stop gun violence today, the most important thing we need to do is build an infrastructure around the people who are doing neighborhood-level violence prevention. This means investing in the human capital and social capital of the people who are doing things like street outreach or violence interruption. How can we bolster them? What sorts of training do they need? We do a decent job of this when it comes to the police and EMT and firefighters. But our ability to support people doing neighborhood violence prevention tends to be limited and often supported mainly through philanthropic grants.

One of the things I’d like to see in almost every city is the development of a dedicated office for violence prevention—with somebody with real power overseeing a real budget—that can coordinate public safety efforts. These offices have to be properly staffed and resourced. You can’t just build these things and set them up to fail. I think New York City has done a very good job on this with their Office of Violence Prevention. Los Angeles has too. 

You can’t just invest in street outreach but then not think about schools or housing. All of those things are intertwined. But you do have to start someplace. I think having a public entity with resources coordinating violence prevention is a massively important first step.

You didn’t mention policing. If the goal is to combat a serious spike in violence right now, is there no role for hot spot policing or focused deterrence to play?

I think the research is pretty solid that policing can have an impact when it focuses on a small number of places and people and behaviors. And there are discrete models, like focused deterrence, that can be impactful when they are focused and not overreaching. 

I think police have a nonzero role in this debate. When we’re talking about gun violence, we know that they can have an impact. The other role for police, and this is crucial, is investigating. Most people can agree that we want police to investigate shootings and homicides and to solve cases. I think the problem is, as we see a surge in gun violence, people’s gut reaction is to think we need more and more police. That’s not what we want to do here. 

I want to turn to another cheeky title of yours that I liked, which was a piece you co-wrote called Why Do Criminals Obey the Law? What did you learn from asking the question in that way?

We asked the question that way in part because there’s this idea that “offenders” are somehow different, right? We were combatting the old trope that criminals believe different things than noncriminals. We already knew that wasn’t true, but what we wanted to look at was what happens if you ask them the same questions we ask the general population around things like trust in the police or belief in the law.

And so we sampled individuals who were arrested and convicted of a serious violent crime involving a firearm and we asked them, “What do you think of the law? What do you think of the police?” And what we found was that most of the individuals in our sample absolutely believed in the substance of the law. They know what’s right, they know what’s wrong. And they’re in compliance with the law the vast majority of the time. Most people that get arrested are not spending their days figuring out ways to break the law. 

Let’s be clear: their opinions of the police and the criminal justice system are overwhelmingly negative, in part because of their treatment by the system, but there’s variation. The people we surveyed could distinguish between the institution of policing versus what they had experienced personally. 

Another paper of yours was More Coffee, Less Crime?, which looked at the effects of gentrification on crime in both Black and White neighborhoods in Chicago. What did you find? 

We wrote that paper in the early 2000s, looking at how gentrification played out across neighborhoods. We used coffee shops as an indicator. The pattern was consistent: those sorts of resources emerge in White neighborhoods and not in Black neighborhoods. There’s a corollary decrease in crime in White neighborhoods that gentrify.

I think one of the things that's always hard with these kinds of programs is that you start with a small experiment to see if it works, but then when it is applied to the entire force, it's not clear that it has the same "oomph" like it once did. Scaling up is always a big problem.

Patterns of development that are often called “gentrification” are vastly different in Black and White neighborhoods. What research has shown since then is that it’s the Black middle class that gentrifies Black neighborhoods, not the sort of White hipster gentrifier stereotype. That’s another signal of the importance of race.

A lot of your work is focused on Chicago. I’m interested to hear how you think about translating ideas from one place to another. How valuable is it to compare Chicago to New York when it comes to things like street violence?

I should say, in addition to Chicago, we’ve done research in Newark, Boston, New York, Oakland, Stockton, New Orleans, Cincinnati, New Haven, and Hartford. We’ve looked at a dozen or so cities. The same three lessons—that gun violence is concentrated, that exposure matters, and that it is contagious —seem to be reproduced everywhere we look. However, network structure varies from city to city. Some cities, for example, have high-rise housing projects and some have lots of vacant, empty land. So the networks will look a little bit different, but people’s behavior within them often looks very similar.

You’ve recently turned your attention to police misconduct. I’m wondering what you’ve learned about police violence by looking at it through the lens of network science?

So it turns out police violence is a group behavior. 

Every cop I’ve ever talked to tells me the same story about their first day on the job. They come from the academy, they’re all excited, and they are paired with some field training officer or veteran who tells them, “Hey, Rookie. I know you learned all this stuff in the academy, but let me show you what real policing is like.” And then they proceed to show them all the unwritten rules of policing, including how to get away with things. At a basic level, you learn from your peers as far as policing is concerned.

Our research has shown that a small number of cops are responsible for a large number of complaints. As with gun violence in the community, exposure matters: if you’re around other cops that are doing bad things, you’re more likely to do bad things. We are learning that whether you are part of the police department or a member of a street gang, deviance is a group phenomenon. 

We’re really trying to unpack what that means because, theoretically, you have more control over policing than you do over an amorphous friendship group in a neighborhood. The police department is a hierarchy where you can administer policy and potentially change behavior. We could today, if we wanted, say, “These are the officers that are at heightened risk of shooting a civilian.” But what would you do with that information? You can’t fire them just because they’re at risk. Having information and figuring out what to do about it are often very different things.

You did a piece of work looking at the impact of procedural justice training on police use of force. What did you find?

I was not the lead author on that one, so I’m just going to speak at the broadest level. But what we found was that the procedural justice training as it was first implemented in Chicago was associated with reductions in levels of complaints and use-of-force complaints against those officers that were part of the program. It was not a massive impact, but it was not zero, either. Which does suggest that these trainings can potentially have a small-to-modest impact on outcomes like use of force.

I think one of the things that’s always hard with these kinds of programs is that you start with a small experiment to see if it works, but then when it is applied to the entire force, it’s not clear that it has the same “oomph” like it once did. Scaling up is always a big problem. 

I recently had a conversation with David Weisburd, who talked about the importance of criminologists “making the scene,” by which he meant getting out of the ivory tower and attempting to have some impact on the world of policy. You certainly have embodied this idea in your work in Chicago. I’m curious about what lessons you’ve learned from that experience.

I could not agree with Weisburd more. I think that an engaged approach to research is crucial. We have to, in my opinion, shake up how we rank or value data. The gold standard is not a randomized control trial [RCT]. You can have an RCT and not make a causal claim. And you can make causal claims without having an RCT.

Let me give you an example of something we’ve learned, which you don’t get from just looking at administrative data. We are currently working with about a dozen or so street outreach organizations in Chicago. Frontline workers are the ones doing the work, trying to mediate conflicts and engage people that are disengaged and disenfranchised. 

 How do I explain statistical power to a city council member? Do they even care? The answer is that they don't care. What they care about is, “Does it work and can you prove it?” Do I need to be fighting with city council members about propensity score matching versus synthetic control groups? No, that's stupid. Don't do that. Let's have the nerd fight at the academic conferences, let's do it in journal spaces.

What we’re working on is the idea that it’s not so much people that are risky, but situations that are risky. So risk is dynamic. Risk can change on a day-to-day, hour-by-hour basis. If all you’re doing is looking at static data to assess risk, you’re going to miss something. 

So we’re working with the frontline workers to learn from them about what kind of information they think is important. It’s not something you could get by saying, “Well, can I add one more variable to the social learning theory in my statistical model?” I mean, I suppose that’s interesting, but it’s way less interesting than really trying to understand how to keep people alive.

I’ve found that every single time I’ve engaged with practitioners in this way that there’s always a gazillion interesting theoretical things and theory-relevant things that can come out of it. But the more interesting questions are coming from the outreach workers in this case. And the only way you get at it is by engaging with them.

So we’ve codesigned interviews and we’ve built an entire survey instrument with our outreach partners. We sit down and analyze data side by side. They are able to provide insight into what our findings mean. And when they get interested in something, we go deeper. 

I think it’s important to recognize the power dynamic though. I mean, I’m a researcher at an elite institution and I’m working with nonprofit organizations that are struggling to keep the lights on. And so it’s important to also understand the footprint of the criminologist in the field, especially as you’re trying to answer questions that may impact funding.

Have you paid any professional price for your engagement in the “real world”?

I’m fortunate enough where I’m at a stage in my career that it doesn’t impact me in the same way [it would] if I were a more junior scholar. I’m able to take risks.

I do get dragged into a lot of academic debates around the value of “observational data” and whether it is somehow lesser. I think there is an idea in our field that somehow observational data are bad. I think that’s harmful to science actually. It’s also harmful for the communities that are affected by gun violence. 

Gun violence is not random, so why do we pretend like it is? Once you start to see these networks, you can’t unsee them. I can pretend like they don’t exist in a regression analysis, but I know they’re there. The people who are involved with gun violence, they know each other. They went to school together, they’ve got family relationships. So why are we pretending like they’re not? Can’t we amplify and boost that understanding? We think somehow our findings are lesser because there’s not a statistically significant star at the end of the equation. This bias towards certain types of causal logic stifles innovation. 

And as far as public policy is concerned, the bar is set in such a way that most of the programs we evaluate will always fail. In Chicago, some of the programs we’re evaluating now are reaching a population that’s hard to serve, so they’re working with a few hundred people. Well, you are never going to get a statistically significant finding with those kinds of numbers. It’s not going to work because you don’t have fifteen hundred people in your sample. But how are you going to find a program that can service fifteen hundred people with the types of budgets they have? You’re not going to. I think those tensions really are stifling creativity and knowledge in this space. I think if more researchers got out there we could probably advance the field.

Two of the things that I’ve heard from talking to other researchers about their engagement with the world outside of academia are a fear that their work might be misused and a concern that, when dealing with the media or with politicians, that they will have to sacrifice the nuance of their work.  Have you had to confront either of those things?

When it comes to the idea of your research being misused, I’m somebody who that’s happened to on multiple occasions. If you believe in open science, if you believe in sharing your ideas and your data, you’re always going to be open to being misused. The path I’ve taken is to push back when this happens. I’ve written op-eds about the Chicago Police Department taking ideas of mine and incorporating them into projects in ways that I thought were horrific. I have also critiqued the Cure Violence model for doing the same thing. I’m not going to just shrug my shoulders and say, “Oh, there’s nothing you can do about it.” But at the same time, I think it’s really vital that science get out there. 

I think one has to be clear on what you think should be done, which is what I’ve tried to do. I think we should use network science stuff for on-the-ground violence prevention efforts, not for arrest-driven police behavior. That’s an important distinction I’m consistent on. 

The nuance question is really tough. I do not think we should abandon nuance. I think we need to train criminologists how to write better. I do believe it’s crucial to produce a document that has all the nuance in it. But when you get in front of City Hall, when you get called to testify before such-and-such committee, when you’re talking with a local nonprofit that wants to understand how this research will help them, you have to be able to say it in a couple of bullet points, and those bullet points have to be translatable to action. 

I’ll give an example. When we’re talking about street outreach efforts in Chicago, there are some very clear findings: One, you can find the right people [who are engaged in violence]. Two, you can connect those people with services. And three, those individuals basically do better in terms of outcomes like reduced victimization and violent arrests. Everything I just said is true. Here’s the nuance: it is not always statistically significant. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s not. How do I explain statistical power to a city council member? Do they even care? The answer is that they don’t care. What they care about is, “Does it work and can you prove it?” Do I need to be fighting with city council members about propensity score matching versus synthetic control groups? No, that’s stupid. Don’t do that. Let’s have the nerd fight at the academic conferences, let’s do it in journal spaces. 

Some academics don’t seem willing to even entertain the idea that police could ever reduce crime. To me, it feels like they are starting from an ideological place and not looking at the evidence. Do you think that this is happening or am I misrepresenting what’s going on in your field?

The first thing I tell graduate students is, “You can’t ask questions you don’t want answers to.” The questions you ask are going to put you on one side of something or other, and you better be prepared for the answers. Most often than not, to go back to your nuance question, the answers are super complicated. 

We are just wrapping up a project on neighborhood policing in Chicago, where we interviewed police officers, community residents, and community residents that were less engaged, ones who didn’t show up to the meetings or weren’t part of any particular organization. So we interviewed these groups of individuals every three to six months for two years before George Floyd was murdered and we’re still interviewing them now. Even before 2020, what we were seeing was the variation and complexity of people’s opinions about public safety and policing. And it gets even more complicated in 2020. What we found is that both police and residents can differentiate between individual people and institutions. So I can like officer Greg, and still say the Chicago Police Department is a racist institution. I can say that I want to change the CPD, but don’t take officer Greg away because he’s the only one who gets me. In people’s minds, that’s not a conflict. They can hold those two thoughts in their mind at the same time. So, the on-the-ground view is really complex. 

I think there’s variation among academics. I think some academics are picking and choosing the questions they are asking based on where we are in terms of the current political moment. I don’t think that’s entirely bad. I do think that this is a long game, right? Crime and violence, policing and public safety, these are not new problems. So I think it’s good to take up new perspectives and ask new questions from an academic perspective, but you have to be willing to understand the answers, even if it doesn’t go the way you hoped it would go.

As an example, I would love to get up and say that street outreach is the most impactful thing we can do to reduce gun violence today, but I can’t say that. I can say it’s super promising. I can say that sometimes we see evidence that it works, but I can’t say that this is the solution to gun violence. I can’t say that, even though I personally really want to. But as a scientist, I can’t say that. As a scientist, I have to say, “Here’s what we know and here’s what we don’t know.”

---

Greg Berman is the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He previously served as the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation for 18 years. His most recent book is Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration (The New Press).

Views expressed are the participants’ own and not necessarily those of The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

“Why Do People of Color Have to Go to Extremes to Save their Kids?” A Conversation with Joseph Richardson

By Greg Berman

“Everybody that I know got a family member dead or locked up,” says Slim, one of the young Black men featured in Life After the Gunshot, a digital storytelling project coproduced by Joseph Richardson, a professor of African-American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Maryland. A multimedia experiment, Life After the Gunshot gives voice to those who have experienced gun violence firsthand, telling harrowing stories of pain, suffering, and, sometimes, redemption. It is an unusual project for an academic, but not for Dr. Richardson. 

Trained as a criminologist, Dr. Richardson has spent the bulk of his career doing qualitative research, with a focus on Black male survivors of violence. Much of his energy in recent years has been devoted to work at trauma centers that care for gunshot and stabbing victims from Washington, D.C., and surrounding Maryland counties. His research helped to inform the creation of the Capital Region Violence Intervention Program, a hospital-based program that provides trauma-informed care and psychological services to survivors of violent injury in an effort to prevent further violence and victimization.

In July 2021, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Distinguished Fellow of Practice Greg Berman talked to Richardson about his work as a scholar-activist, his take on the recent rise in shootings in American cities, and the relationship between structural violence and interpersonal violence.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

Greg Berman: Can you rewind for me and tell me why you joined academia—and why you chose gun violence as an area of focus?

Joseph Richardson: Man, this could be a long conversation, but I’ll try to give you the Cliff Notes. Born and raised in a Philly, working-class neighborhood. I grew up in the crack era—I was an adolescent and saw the kind of devastation that it had on the city. My neighborhood was not immune to it. Even though it was a decent low- to working-class neighborhood, at least four guys that I grew up with died from gun violence.

I can remember the first person I knew who got shot. I didn’t see it, but I saw the aftermath of it. I saw the way that he psychologically changed after he was shot. That always was disturbing to me. He was very well respected and then all of a sudden after he was shot, he became a zombie. He was doing a lot of drugs. He was eventually shot and killed on my block.

That was the beginning of my interest in gun violence. After graduating from the University of Virginia, I started graduate school at Rutgers. I started as a master’s student. I had no interest in pursuing a doctorate. I didn’t have enough money to complete the master’s program. My dean just placed me in the doctoral program as a way of finding money for me. I didn’t know anyone who had a PhD. I didn’t know anyone who was a professor. But that started me down the road.

What was your dissertation about?

My dissertation adviser, Mercer Sullivan, had written a book, Getting Paid: Youth Crime and Work in the Inner City. At the same time, he was also starting a project at the Vera Institute of Justice. He called me and said that he was leading an ethnographic research project on the social context of adolescent violence in New York City. It was a perfect match for me. He asked me if I was interested in helping him conduct his study, because there were three sites. One was Black, one Latino, and the other predominantly White. I said yes. I ended up at a school in Harlem, following twenty-five kids for three years. That was the time, in the late ‘90s, that the Bloods and Crips were emerging in Harlem. 

All scientists should be engaged in applied research. Why do the work if it's not going to be translated into something?

I had twenty-five kids—ten were girls, fifteen were boys. Some were in gangs. Some were basketball players. Some were incredibly talented academically. I learned a hell of a lot about parenting. It started out as a study on the context of violence, but it became a study about social capital and how the utilization of it by kids either leads to violence, or desistance, or resistance.

After I wrote my dissertation and published a number of articles, I had a postdoc at the University of Chicago and then I started [my research] at the University of Maryland. The first study I conducted there was on kids who were adjudicated in adult court and detained in a D.C. jail. These were all kids who were like fifteen, sixteen years old, and they were serious violent youth offenders. I was working with kids who were arrested for murder, carjacking, attempted murder, robbery, et cetera. I did that for a year. It was really a study asking, “Why are we placing kids in adult jail?” 

How did you get from there to the work you have done in hospitals?

I was watching CNN one night. There was a segment on Soledad O’Brien’s Black in America on a trauma surgeon in Baltimore whose name is Dr. Carnell Cooper. The segment was on how he would operate on young men in Baltimore for gunshot wounds, and then he would see them a month later for similar gun-related injuries. He decided to create a hospital violence-intervention program. It was fascinating to me, so I cold-called him. When he answered I said, “I saw you on Black in America, and I was just wondering if I could meet with you?” He invited me up to his office. I remember that day, because the Discovery Channel was there. He was always on television. From that point on, he became my mentor.

I started learning the ropes of how hospital violence-interventional programs work. In the meantime, Dr. Cooper became the chief medical officer of Prince George’s Hospital Center [in Maryland]. They’d get like 745 victims of violent injury a year. Something like 40 percent of those are people from Washington D.C., because the hospital is close to the D.C. border. I asked him, “Dr. Cooper, do you think it would be okay if I use this trauma center as my lab to understand gun violence?” He said, “Sure.”

So I picked twenty-five young, Black men that were shot or stabbed and had come into that trauma center. I followed the lives of these guys for two years. I wanted that study to inform the development of a new hospital violence-intervention program. Dr. Cooper, who had already created one, was my counselor, giving me advice on how to go about developing one. He basically gave me full rein to develop it in the way that I saw fit. Ultimately, in 2017, I was one of the cofounders of a program at Prince George’s Hospital Center called the Capital Region Violence Intervention Program. I served as the codirector for two years.

What are some of the key lessons that you learned in implementing the program?

A key moment for me was when I met one of the young guys that was in my study, Che Bullock, who was stabbed thirteen times. He and I developed a really close relationship. I could see that he really wanted to get out of the streets. When I started the violence intervention program in 2017, he was the first person I hired. I told him, “Listen, you’re going to be the guy that approaches all of the patients that have been violently injured bedside because you have the lived experience of the guys that are lying in that bed.” He accepted the challenge.

When we first started, people were asking, “Why did Dr. Richardson hire this guy? Why do you have this guy that’s been injured on staff? Why is he going into the rooms?” Eventually, they saw how successful my program was, and he became the model for violence intervention specialists. Every single program in Maryland hired one.

One of the clear themes that come through your work is an effort to put forward the voices of young Black men. Why is that important to you?

I give them credit for their resilience. They’re constantly teaching me, and everyone else that hears their story, not just about the realities of violence in their neighborhoods, but also about the humanity that they have. I’m a researcher that does qualitative work. I want to amplify their voices. I really believe in community-based, participatory research. I was doing that before I knew that there was actually a name for it. 

Scholarship should be informing policy or informing programming or changing the narrative with the public.

Che is a good example. He goes from being stabbed thirteen times in the street, to guest lecturing in my class, to becoming a violence intervention specialist for my program. Then we applied for a grant, and he becomes a co-investigator with me on the Life After the Gunshot project. That is the way that I choose to approach these issues—by having the people who are most impacted be involved in the work. They have the solutions to what we should do to address gun violence. Too often, we ignore their voices. In theory, we say that they should be involved, but we never really engage them in practice.

One of the things that comes along with trying to elevate the voices of other people, in my experience, is that they are not just mouthpieces for our ideas. Sometimes they say things that we disagree with. 

Che and I have debates all the time, just the way I would engage in debates in the academic world. There have been plenty of times that I have had a blind spot that he, or another one of my young men, has checked me on. 

I’ll give you an example. When I was conducting my research with the young men that had been injured, I would bring them to my campus for the interviews. They would always ask me why the violence intervention program wasn’t on my campus. Initially, I kind of blew it off. I didn’t understand why they would want the program there. When I met Che, he came up to my office, like, three times a week. I knew, at a certain level, he probably was trying to get away from his neighborhood and that a campus space was really peaceful. He brought it up to me. “Doc, why do you have a program at the hospital, because the program is kind of retraumatizing me because I was just stabbed and operated on there and almost died.” 

I tried to explain this to the hospital administrators several times. I said, “We can start everything at the bedside, but the services can be provided off-site.” They weren’t interested in that model at all. I think it is because it is very sexy to have trauma surgeons involved at the hospital. People can buy into it. It’s got automatic credibility.

I mention this story because it gets back to your point about why it’s so important for those who are directly impacted to speak.

I have seen you refer to yourself as a “scholar-activist.” I’m wondering whether you could spell out for me what that means and how you see that role.

I don’t really like the term “activist.” I would call myself a scholar that engages in applied research. I would say that all scientists should be engaged in applied research. Why do the work if it’s not going to be translated into something? Translating a study into a hospital violence-intervention program is scholarly activism to me. Translating my research into a documentary that is accessible to the public—that’s scholarly activism to me. Engaging in policy discussions with elected officials, that’s what I really mean by scholarly activism. Scholarship should be informing policy or informing programming or changing the narrative with the public. To me, that’s scholarly activism. Scholarly activism doesn’t necessarily mean I need to get out in front of a Black Lives Matter protest. I don’t really see myself in that lane. I think there are multiple lanes that people can assume. 

You write frequently about the idea of structural violence. Can you talk for a second about what you see as the relationship between structural violence and the kinds of interpersonal violence that result in trauma center visits?

You can’t have a discussion about interpersonal violence without providing the context of structural violence first. Until recently, there was a long period of time when we were not discussing the ways that the structure has been violent. We need to move beyond the traditional framework. To use the title of Geoffrey Canada’s book, we need to move beyond Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun to see how systems have perpetrated harm against specific populations. For example, high concentrations of poverty, food deserts, environmental racism, entire communities under some form of criminal justice supervision—all of these things are forms of structural violence which ultimately lead to a shorter life expectancy. 

Then there are other parents, who don’t have any of those resources, that are using the juvenile justice system to save their kids. They are saying, "I just want my kid locked up. At least I know where they are. They probably will have a higher survival rate if I go to the court and just tell the court, 'Can you take my kid?' I don't want my kid to die in the street.”

In Washington, D.C., you have east of the river and then there’s the rest of the city. As you move further into the northwest section of the city, it gets whiter and more affluent. If you go to Woodley Park, which is in the northwest section of the city, the life expectancy is 89.4 years. If you take a fifteen-minute drive east of the river, the life expectancy is 68.4 years. In just fifteen minutes, you lose twenty-one years of your life in the same city. That’s insane. People need to understand that. That’s just not in D.C. That’s global. 

Do you think there’s ever a tension between identifying these structural forces and the need to communicate to the men that you’re working with that they have the agency to change their fate?

It’s interesting that I’m making the argument about structural forces, but if you were to ask the young men I work with why someone did not make it, they would place the responsibility in the hands of the person. For them, it would come down to accountability and personal responsibility. They would place the blame solely on the person and say, “That’s the decision they made. They didn’t have to make that decision, and they’re responsible for it. “

I think that’s an example of what I was trying to get at before when I said that sometimes when we listen to the voices of the impacted, they say things that don’t conform with our ideology.

Exactly. My ideology is that the structure is responsible, to a certain extent. But I think it’s important to represent that the young men are holding themselves accountable for their actions. It’s complex. Because sometimes they’re actually discussing structural violence—they’re just not using the term. In the Life After the Gunshot film, one of the guys says, “Look at where I live. It’s fucked-up around here.” There’s a term for that. It’s called structural violence. That’s why I say it’s a little bit more complex because they can hold themselves personally accountable, but also they’re saying that the structures are problematic.

In addition to writing about the people that are directly impacted by violence, you also have shined a spotlight on the caregivers that support them. For example, you’ve written about the use of exile as a parenting strategy. What do you mean by that?

I don’t think it’s necessarily a new strategy in the Black community. We’ve seen for generations across the African diaspora, but particularly in this country, parents kind of sending their kids away. 

Let’s take two parents and they live in Harlem. Both of their kids are at that age where they are starting to get into trouble. Well, if you took the same family and they were White, and they were middle class, and their kids were involved in delinquency, there would be a ton of resources for that family. They might send their kids to camp. They might send their kids to counseling. They might find another school district to send their kids to—or a private school. But for many Black parents, the only alternative is, “I need to move my kid out of this situation.” 

I don't think we've asked the hard questions about gun violence and COVID. 

For Black parents in New York City with some social capital, they might be able to tap into, for example, the Fresh Air Fund, where they can send their kid to live in Connecticut for a summer and they get to see a world outside of their block. But if you don’t have that level of savvy in terms of social capital, they might send the kid to live with a brother in Texas. 

Then there are other parents, who don’t have any of those resources, that are using the juvenile justice system to save their kids. They are saying, “I just want my kid locked up. At least I know where they are. They probably will have a higher survival rate if I go to the court and just tell the court, ‘Can you take my kid?’ I don’t want my kid to die in the street.”

Why do parents have to do that? Why do people of color, particularly poor people of color, have to go to extremes to save their kids? It gets back to the issue of structural violence.

Do you have a theory about why shootings are up over the past year?  

I think there are multiple reasons. Let’s take Baltimore for example. Violence has been spiking in Baltimore since 2015. In my opinion, the fact that Baltimore has had over 300 homicides since 2015 is directly correlated to Freddie Gray. The Baltimore police department may have been ahead of the rest of the nation in terms of police not responding to incidents of violence in the way that they may have in the past. I know cops who have told me this. 

A few months ago, I had a long discussion with a cop who lives on my block in Philadelphia. I asked him why gun violence was increasing in Philly. His take, as an officer on the beat, was, “Look, I’m not jumping out of my car, I’m not doing any more pat-downs on the corner, if I know someone’s going to throw a camera in my face.”  He told me that he used to tell kids out on the street, “Listen, you got thirty minutes to get off the corner. If I come back in thirty minutes and you’re out here, whatever consequences happen, you know what it is.” Now he’s like, “I don’t even tell the kid that. I just let him stay out there.” 

That’s one perspective. I’m not saying that’s the only perspective, but I’m giving you a perspective that I’ve heard both in Philadelphia and in Baltimore. One of my really close friends, who does hospital violence-intervention work, was telling me this story in Baltimore. He said that he saw two guys fighting. Clearly, it could’ve turned into a shooting. My friend goes around the corner and tells two cops sitting in their squad car. He says, “There are two guys around the corner that are fighting.” And the cops looked at him like, “So?” He couldn’t believe it.

In recent months I’ve talked to a number of academics who are deeply skeptical that the police should play any role in responding to the uptick in shootings.

[Those academics] are not on the ground. There’s a 30,000-foot perspective about that, and then there’s the perspective of the people at ground level. I tend to lean more towards what the people who are experiencing the impact of the police pulling back are saying. 

To be sure, there are other narratives that are going on in the street. One of my guys said to me, “There are no drugs out here.” During COVID, it became harder to get drugs. The drug market was drying up in the city, which has an impact on people that were surviving by selling drugs. That’s squeezing more people out of the game. I’m giving you another perspective because that’s a perspective that I’ve heard from the ground. I don’t think anyone’s talking about that.

I also think COVID has driven more people onto social media. You have a lot of beefs that are playing out on social media now. We can go back and forth on social media, and if I see you outside it becomes very real. And now it is totally legitimate for me to wear a mask and gloves in broad daylight. 

You’ve written in the past about the relative lack of funding for gun violence research. As you look to a future where maybe there will be more money for gun violence research, what questions should we be asking that we don’t know the answers to?

I would definitely say the question you just asked, because it’s all really just speculation. I don’t think we’ve asked the hard questions about gun violence and COVID. 

Last question. I couldn’t help noticing that in various papers you have written, you have cited lyrics from Mobb Deep and Biggie Smalls. How has hip-hop informed your scholarship, if at all?

In so many ways. I’m a child of hip-hop so it’s important for me to always represent hip-hop culture in the work that I do. Like a lot of people who were raised in that era, hip-hop was a huge part of my identity. It helped me frame a lot of my thoughts about the world. From NWA saying “Fuck tha Police,” to Public Enemy saying “Fight the Power,” to Brand Nubian talking about the Five Percenters—all of those things were sources of knowledge to me. They were secondary teachers for me, whether good or bad. It’s important to me to pay homage to that in my work.

---

Greg Berman is the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He previously served as the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation for 18 years. His most recent book is Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration (The New Press).

Views expressed are the participants’ own and not necessarily those of The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

“We Have a Lot of Damage to Undo”: A Conversation with Jeremy Travis

By Greg Berman

In one way or another, Jeremy Travis has been involved in almost every significant criminal justice reform effort of the past 50 years. This includes multiple efforts to address the problem of urban violence, which has had such a devastating impact on low-income neighborhoods and communities of color in particular.   

Travis worked at the Vera Institute of Justice in the 1970s during the early days of the bail reform movement. He was a deputy commissioner at the New York Police Department (NYPD) in the early 1990s, when violent crime rates began to plummet. Later, at the U.S. Department of Justice, as director of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) during the Clinton administration, Travis helped to advance the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (Crime Bill) of 1994. He also helped spark the reentry movement. More recently, as president of John Jay College at the City University of New York from 2004 to 2016, he helped to spread the focused-deterrence model across the country. Throughout his career, Travis has worked closely with a broad range of luminaries, including New York City Mayor Edward Koch, Senator Charles Schumer, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when she was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. 

Travis is now the executive vice president for criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, where he oversees a portfolio of grants that seek to advance racial justice. These include the Square One Project, a special three-year initiative that is attempting to reimagine the criminal justice system from top to bottom.

In this interview with Greg Berman, Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Travis reflects on his career and the current “once-in-a-half-century” movement to reform criminal justice in the United States. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Greg Berman: You recently told me that you went to New York City criminal court to mark the 50th anniversary of your first visit to criminal court. Tell me what you saw. What was the same, what was different? 

Jeremy Travis: So the goal, very selfishly, was to take the occasion of the 50th anniversary of my starting in the criminal justice world to engage in a period of reflection. I spent a day in arraignment court at 100 Centre Street in Manhattan. Compared to my first days at 100 Centre Street, there were some pretty profound changes, starting with metal detectors at every door, which did not exist in 1971. I found the whole security apparatus at the front door of the courthouse really alienating and startling. 

The other big change, of course, was that I was there in the midst of the pandemic. So the arraignment court was empty, except for the judge, court officers, and police officers. Fifty years ago, when I was working for the Legal Aid Society, I was struck by the vitality of the courtroom. Every day, I would see people in moments of intense anxiety and distress. That kind of human drama was nonexistent because of the pandemic. Instead, there was a disembodied arraignment process with a judge speaking to a defendant on a screen in front of him. The defendant was in the holding pens behind the courtroom, speaking to the judge through a laptop. The judge was really good at trying to make a human connection through the technology, but it was a disembodied experience.

Sitting in the courtroom was a strong reminder of the ways in which our apparatus of justice, starting with the police, squeezes a lot of human drama—and claims from ordinary people that their government should help them—into the box of each individual case. In the midst of a once-in-a-half-century reform movement, how do we pay attention to that reality? How do we make sure that we do not lose sight of the very real experiences of people who have been harmed? In court the other day, there was a sexual assault case, there was a shoplifting, there was a street mugging. These are all very real circumstances that come into the courtrooms of our country. How we respond best to them is always the question of justice. 

Do you feel like there is a disconnect between the once-in-a-half-century criminal justice reform movement that you mentioned and the adjudication of the individual cases that you saw in the courtroom the other day?

My meditation of the day was being reminded of the daily reality of courts, and police, and crime, and the individual injuries and harms that are being suffered. Over the last 50 years, we’ve constructed an enormous criminal justice apparatus. Do I doubt for a minute the importance of the reform movement that is focused on undoing that system? Not for a minute. Do we all need to be reminded that there are real people who are hurting, who are demanding some sort of response to their situation? Absolutely. 

That's the challenge right now: to think carefully about what might be driving violence and about what we now can do that we didn't know to do before. In particular, we need to avoid overreacting by increasing sentences and sending more people to prison, which is what we did in the '80s and '90s.

I think the Square One Project for me is an acknowledgment that we have a lot of damage to undo and a lot of racial harm to come to terms with. But at the end of the day, wherever that reimagination process leads us, there will always be instances of people coming into the courts of our country where something should be done. It shouldn’t be exactly what we’re doing now. We have to be much less punitive in our response and much more restorative in resolving our conflicts. Ultimately, we need to have a response that promotes individual and community well-being. We’ve gone so far off course. We are now in a period of fundamental course correction where we have to recognize the harm that we’ve done and undo many of the policies that have promoted this era of punitive excess. 

You cut your professional teeth at the Vera Institute of Justice during what was an incredibly fertile moment for the organization. I would put Vera’s accomplishments during that era up against just about any nonprofit that I can think of. What was it like to be at Vera back then?

Vera was a high-energy, high-purpose organization when I was there. I am who I am today because of Vera. I’m very clear about that. It was a place where ideas mattered and where people took reform seriously. We cared about the outcomes and results. We were working at the cutting edge of a national reform movement. The two initiatives that I was privileged to be part of—bail reform and victim assistance—have now evolved into the New York City Criminal Justice Agency and Safe Horizon, which are major players in the criminal justice landscape of New York today. We’re so lucky that Vera had this philosophy of creating demonstration projects and spinning them off. That’s Vera’s legacy.

So being at Vera was an exciting time. It was also a time when there were a lot of different perspectives in the same room. We had sociologists, lawyers, police officers, formerly incarcerated folks, all around the same table talking about things like bail reform and victim assistance. It was a great way for a young person to get an education.

I first met you in the early ’90s, when you were at the NYPD.  At the time, the murder rate was peaking at more than 2,200 homicides per year, and the crack epidemic was still raging. It felt like a time of crisis. What was it like to be at the NYPD during those years? And how would you compare that time to our current moment, where the spike in violence has many people afraid that we are heading back to the bad old days?

We didn’t know in 1990 that we would be a year or two away from the peak of the violence in New York. On the contrary, we couldn’t see any end to the increase in violence, both in New York and nationally. The rise in violence, and homicides, in particular, had been very steep. This was the era when people were using words like “super predator” and predicting a coming bloodbath. It was a time of hyperbole that was really damaging. But the underlying reality of a significant increase in violence in America was undeniable. In New York, we peaked with a murder count of 2,245. 

I don't celebrate the relatively modest decline in the prison population in New York. I think we should accelerate it, then celebrate. I think we should be much more aggressive and much more creative in thinking about how to end the era of mass incarceration in our state. That's work left to be done. I'm very impatient with where we are right now.

In the first year of Mayor David Dinkins’s administration, there was a call from the New York Post: “Dave, Do Something!” Dinkins did something that was very important, which was to seek approval from the state legislature to increase our taxes to pay for more police officers. It was a remarkable political moment when you think about it. There was deep concern about our city’s future viability. It was a very trying time for civic life in New York. Businesses were leaving. People were leaving. There was a sense of concern bordering on despair. 

Looking back, you could say that there was a natural life course to the epidemic of violence. But I’d like to think there was some human agency involved as well. Police departments responded. Other parts of civil society also kicked in to say, “We’re not going to take this.” But that took some doing. The addition of police officers took some time. The mayor who benefited from that was mostly Rudolph Giuliani, not Dinkins.

The political moment of deciding that we couldn’t go on with this level of violence was something that has been seared in my memory ever since. When I compare that reality to today’s, the numbers are very different. We’re starting from a much lower base today. Starting in ’91 and ’92, violent crime in New York started to decline. Basically, it has come down almost every year since then, except for the last year. Now, we have seen an increase. Not in all crime, but in gun violence, which is very troubling, because what we’re talking about is lost lives. That has to be of concern to everybody. I have been very clear in speaking to others in the reform movement: we need to forthrightly acknowledge the reality of this spike, which is coming upon us very quickly. Depending upon the city, we’ve seen 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% increases in homicides. 

It’s a concern on two levels. One is the loss of life. We have to figure out what to do about it. But the other concern is that this has played into resistance to the criminal justice reform movement. It provides an opportunity for people to say, “Well, those reform ideas are responsible for the spike in violence.” That is not true, so we have to be in myth-busting mode here. But we also need to have both a hypothesis as to what’s causing the violence increase and a response to it that saves lives.

What’s your theory about what’s behind the spike in shootings?

There are some hypotheses floating around, not one of which has sufficient explanatory power for me. Are there more guns? Yes. Is that what’s causing a spike in violence? I doubt it. Are there more people being released from jail? Yes. Is that causing a spike in violence? I doubt it. 

The hypothesis that to me has the greatest potential for helping us understand what’s going on is very much derived from my understanding of the crack epidemic. Our current pandemic has been highly disruptive of community life, as was crack. The pandemic has taken young people away from prosocial environments like schools and afterschool programs. It has created stress and anxiety within our entire society, but particularly in communities that are living at the margins. It has caused police to withdraw from communities, for self-protective reasons related to COVID infection but also because they’re not feeling appreciated at the community level. 

All of these forces have resulted in a loss of support for prosocial, prosafety forces at a community level. Unfortunately, I think we’re going to be here for years with an increased level of violence. It is not going to be an easy fix. The good news for me is that in the years since the crack epidemic, we’ve learned so much about what might work and what might not. We have the ability now to put together a menu of strategies that’s quite different from what we put together in the late ’80s or early ’90s. That’s the challenge right now: to think carefully about what might be driving violence and about what we now can do that we didn’t know to do before. In particular, we need to avoid overreacting by increasing sentences and sending more people to prison, which is what we did in the ’80s and ’90s. Hopefully, we can come out of this both smarter and safer.

Back to the 90s for a second. One piece of the puzzle that you didn’t mention was that future NYPD commissioner William Bratton was starting to employ a “broken-windows” orientation to law enforcement as chief of what was then the city’s Transit Police Department. What did you think of broken windows then and what do you think of broken windows now?

Page for page, the broken windows article by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, has had more impact than any other scholarly article in our field. It’s an idea that has sort of swept policing and, more broadly, public discourse. 

Hopefully, over time, we'll figure out how to do right by people coming out of prison. That extends into doing right by them when they're still in prison. 

I think it’s important to come back to the core idea of what broken windows is about: that order matters. People want to feel safe in their community. They want to be able to go about their business feeling that their neighborhood is safe and that things are being attended to. The broken window metaphor is a powerful one. 

The hypothesis within broken windows, which Kelling always said was a hypothesis, is that conditions of disorder, if left unaddressed, lead to more serious crime, and that addressing those conditions would lead to less crime. If you look at the academic literature over the last 20 years, that hypothesis has been challenged and, with a few exceptions, largely disproven.

But the core idea of broken windows—that government should respond to people’s concerns around issues of safety and well-being—is very strong to me. So what does that mean? That means the government should respond when there’s somebody who’s mentally ill. Government should respond to vacant lots. Government should respond to issues of excessive noise. Addressing those concerns will lead to a better quality of life for the community—an improved sense of well-being and feelings of safety—which is, by itself, a positive outcome. 

The risk of the broken-windows theory, and we’ve seen this play out, is when broken windows became “Broken Windows Policing.” The idea moved from a compelling theory to a way of driving the deployment of police resources. We saw lots of unfortunate outcomes grow out of this, particularly when it came to stop-and-frisk. There’s a trajectory here. Broken windows starts as a good idea. But then broken-windows policing becomes a way to rationalize aggressive police enforcement activities which were damaging, particularly to young people of color. Along the way, we lost the core idea—that government, not just the police, is responsible for working with communities to provide order and safety.

My North Star has always been a comment made by Herman Goldstein, father of problem-oriented policing, in a series that I hosted at NIJ called Measuring What Matters. At one point, we were talking about the metrics of success for policing. When asked what metrics he would recommend, Herman said, we should measure the success of policing one problem at a time. It’s the problem that matters, not the metrics of police activity. It’s not the number of stops. It’s not the number of arrests. For me, Herman hit the nail on the head, as he so often did in his own quiet way. When broken windows got married to the metrics of enforcement activities, that’s when we saw things go off the rails, in my view. The metrics became what mattered, rather than the problems.

Earlier, you framed the last 50 years as a kind of failure, as an era of punitive excess. Maybe this is a New York–centric worldview, but I have a counternarrative, which is that the last 30 years or so have been a time of enormous success for the criminal justice system. This was a story that you yourself talked about in a 2019 speech at New York Law School. In that speech, you documented not just the remarkable crime reduction that New York has experienced over the past 30 years, but a pretty significant incarceration reduction as well. 

Well, the reduction has to be seen against the backdrop of the ramp-up of incarceration that took place both here in New York and nationally. There was a significant increase in incarceration rates, from which we’re now making a decline. We have to tell both parts of the story. Do we call the ramp-up a success? Not in my book. Not by a long shot. In responding to crime, we have to use the deprivation of liberty carefully, surgically, and parsimoniously, to use my favorite word. We can’t reflexively say that we’re going to be “tough on crime” and put more people in prison for a longer period of time. That to me is a policy failure of the first order. Forget the enormous financial cost, the cost is harm to communities and harm to families.

So I don’t celebrate the relatively modest decline in the prison population in New York. I think we should accelerate it, then celebrate. I think we should be much more aggressive and much more creative in thinking about how to end the era of mass incarceration in our state. That’s work left to be done. I’m very impatient with where we are right now.

The jail story is different. In New York City, the jail reductions have been staggering. When I worked for Koch, we had 20,000 people in jail. Today, as we sit here, the number is around 5,000. The Lippman Commission is hoping that it will go down even further. We are approaching European-level jail incarceration rates [which are lower than American rates]. And let’s not forget the reductions in youth prisons in New York State. The Close to Home initiative of Governor [Andrew] Cuomo and Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg—started by Governor [David] Paterson and the task force that he asked me to chair—was an uncelebrated, staggering success story.

After leaving the NYPD, you joined the Clinton administration as the director of the National Institute of Justice. How do you feel when you see activists these days point to the 1994 Crime Bill and say that it was responsible for the rise of mass incarceration?

It’s a misreading of history to say the ’94 Crime Act is responsible for the era of mass incarceration. The National Academy of Sciences traces the rise of incarceration back to the early 1970s. The incarceration rate went up every year up until 2010. The ’94 Crime Act happened along the way and did play a minor role in the ramp-up, but no fair reading of history can make the case that the ’94 Crime Act was responsible for mass incarceration. 

As a Democrat, Bill Clinton saw the political necessity of running on a platform to do something about crime. His response was to increase the size of police departments and to advance community policing as a different way to police. His response resonated with me. I thought it was politically astute. 

There is a part of the crime act that I’ve critiqued, which was the truth in sentencing part of the act, which did provide financial incentives to states if they would change their sentencing statutes to move back the date of eligibility for parole to a longer percent of the maximum sentence, eighty-five percent typically. That has to be seen as one of the great perversions of federalism: the federal government paying states to keep citizens in prison longer. But in terms of the impact on incarceration rates, we have to remember that many states did not take the federal government up on this offer. In terms of the overall contribution to mass incarceration, it was very small.

One of the big things that you worked on when you were part of the Clinton administration, and then subsequently at the Urban Institute, was the challenge of individuals coming back to the community after a period of incarceration. You helped to popularize the idea of reentry. As you look back now, from a distance of twenty years or so, where do you think we are in terms of rethinking the reentry process?

I was struck by the bipartisan appetite for a policy discussion about new ways to improve reentry outcomes across the country. When the Clinton administration left office, George W. Bush came in and embraced the reentry agenda. They decided that money should be allocated in all fifty states to develop reentry councils to bring workforce development folks and health folks and corrections officials together to come up with reentry plans. So in a relatively short time, it really took hold in an impressive way. When Attorney General Janet Reno and I and others first started this work, there was very little discussion about reentry. The word didn’t exist. In a short time, this idea really took hold. 

I'm not sure it's worse today than in 2008, or that what I described in 2008 was any different from what you would say in the decades before that. I think what is new is the public discussion about race in the operations of the justice system.

One of the hopes that I and others had in doing the work on reentry, which I continued at Urban for the four years I was there, was to call attention to the reality that everybody in prison eventually comes home. By doing that, we wanted to highlight the reality that each of these people in prison is a human being—somebody’s father, son, sister, brother. These returning citizens, as we now call them, are entitled to our support because of their humanity. The journey from prison to community is a tough road.

There’s still a long way to go. Has the parole system changed? Has supervision changed? Has our approach to the supports needed for people coming out of prison—has that changed? Not much. Parole, in my view, needs to be reimagined. Hopefully, over time, we’ll figure out how to do right by people coming out of prison. That extends into doing right by them when they’re still in prison. We need to involve their families and communities in very different ways so that the return home is a welcome home, rather than a drop-off, which is too often the case. 

One of the consistent through lines in your career has been your interest in the challenge of race. In a 2008 speech, you said, “The day-to-day operations of our system of justice now penetrate so deeply into communities of color that we are at risk of undermining basic respect for the rule of law.” That seems prescient to me. It feels like something has broken between the justice system and the Black community, or at least segments of the Black community. 

I’m not sure it’s worse today than in 2008, or that what I described in 2008 was any different from what you would say in the decades before that. I think what is new is the public discussion about race in the operations of the justice system. I’m very encouraged by this discussion. It’s raw and it’s uncomfortable for lots of people. It requires a discussion about history and about present-day harm that is sometimes very difficult. But we need to have those discussions. We really, really do. 

I talked in that speech about the rule of law and respect for the rule of law. That’s a big concept. It really is the relationship between government and the governed. [Yale law professor] Monica Bell has a phrase for this, which I find very useful, which is “legal estrangement.” Monica’s phrase is so powerful. There is a deep estrangement between Black communities and their government, particularly around law enforcement. It goes back decades. Why should we be surprised that this divide exists when the agencies of the law have done so much harm, whether it’s beating civil rights protesters or arresting lots of young men and taking them off to prison or other examples of police brutality. 

There’s now a call for a reckoning with that history. So we’re tearing down statues of Confederate generals. We’re thinking deeply, thanks to Bryan Stevenson, about the history of lynching. Let’s not forget that the Tulsa race massacre included moments when law enforcement officers allowed the mob to take people out of a jail to lynch them. Many lynching stories start with a judge or a jailer allowing that to happen. So it’s hard to have respect for the rule of law when the law allows such things to happen.

I think the fundamental question is what, if anything, can government do to bridge this divide and to counteract the realities of legal estrangement. The burden shouldn’t be placed on the Black community to do that work. Of course, they’re welcomed to this discussion. But it’s really upon those who have worked in government, as I have, to ask some pretty deep questions about what we’ve done. Have we caused harm? That discussion is very uncomfortable for many of our colleagues. 

Over the years, you’ve chosen to make a deep professional investment in the focused deterrence model. In recent months, I’ve been talking to a fair number of academics who seem to have an ax to grind with focused deterrence. Have their criticisms reached your ears? And if they have, how do you respond to them?

The criticism has been around for as long as focused deterrence has been around. 

At its core, focused deterrence is, as its name implies, a very focused look at a small number of individuals who are involved in the dynamic of violence in their communities. Focused deterrence engages with those individuals very directly, with an acknowledgment of concern on behalf of the community. The message is that we care about you, and that we want you to live. Alongside that message is an offer of assistance from the service providers who are part of this program. At the same time, there is also a statement about consequences—that if the violence continues, there will be consequences. What I like about the model is the focus on a small number of individuals with clear communication. 

The research shows very strongly that the focused deterrence intervention reduces violence and saves lives.

In the program’s early days, there was this celebrated case—in Boston, I think—where somebody was sent off to prison for a long time for possessing a bullet. To me, that is excessive. That runs counter to my general beliefs about overreach of state power. The missing part of focused deterrence in its early formulation was some sense of true community engagement. There have been efforts over the years to build up the community engagement piece of the model. Some cities are more successful at that than others. 

But research is the beginning and ending point of my analysis here. And the research shows very strongly that the focused deterrence intervention reduces violence and saves lives. All the metrics that we care about are going in the right direction under focused deterrence. So I would consider focused deterrence to be a necessary part of every crime strategy. Ideally, there will be a combination of strategies that a city can deploy to reduce violence. I hope we are now beyond a point where people have to pick and choose between focused deterrence and Cure Violence or some other type of intervention. I think we’re on the cusp of an era where all of these can be thought of as being mutually supportive. 

What President Biden is doing is just along these lines. We need police and we need community interventions. We shouldn’t be pointing fingers at each other. The police have a lot to learn about how to be humble and how to share the table with others. Community groups have something to learn about working effectively with the police. And the research community has a lot to learn about how to do research in a more comprehensive sort of way. 

Like you, I’m a believer in trying to reduce the use of incarceration. I’m also a believer in the core insight of the broken windows theory that maintaining a sense of public order is important. So help me think through what we should be doing about public urination, aggressive panhandling, public drinking, and the kinds of cases that we used to call quality-of-life offending. If we’re not going to respond to those offenses with a criminal justice sanction, or even a fine, how do we as a society communicate that we don’t want people to be engaging in these behaviors in the public square? 

Well, the first answer is we don’t communicate that only through the power of arrest. We like to turn to the police to solve all of our social problems. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do, but often not. We need to expand the menu of options. 

One of the things I’m very proud of is the work that we did through the Misdemeanor Justice Project. We brought public attention to the fact that criminal summonses were being issued for really minor offenses. The response of the [New York] city council, thankfully, was to transform those from criminal summonses to civil summonses. That, to me, was a very important step in the right direction. We then run into some more complicated questions, such as what do you do with somebody who continuously thumbs their nose at those summonses?

As you know, in New York, you have people engaging in this behavior not once or twice but on dozens of occasions.

At some point, I think that’s when I would say, okay, that pattern of behavior does warrant a criminal sanction. But even then, arresting somebody for a minor offense, what does that allow you to do as a criminal justice response? Not much. A night in jail, maybe. 

Pause there for a second because I feel like the conversation about this often focuses on individual deterrence, as opposed to general deterrence. Maybe you will disagree, but I think there is value in sending a message not just to the individual involved in something like public urination but to the people that are seeing this behavior on their streets.

Again, this is a claim on government. The public is saying to their government, “Do something.” We need more tools in the toolbox. The way that you and I know each other best is through the work of the Midtown Community Court and other problem-solving courts, which expand the responses available to judges to deal with individual circumstances and needs. That should be commonplace across the system. 

Now we get to a larger social policy question about the shortfall of mental health services, of employment, of job opportunities. The entire social safety net in this country is very weak, unfortunately. 

This next generation is responding to the call to make things better. That's not just the research community but the legal community and the advocacy community. The people are now literally in the streets calling for change.

Channeling Herman Goldstein, I would start by asking what’s going on with that individual who is engaged in public urination? What’s the problem? I tend to believe in the value of assessing the underlying dynamics. How did that person go off course? What is the best intervention for that person? How can we provide that? In New York, police can now bring somebody to a center instead of the precinct. They can get a bed and stay overnight. They can work on issues of addiction. 

But we still don’t have enough options in our toolkit. We need more alternatives for low-level misconduct that send the signal, which is so important, that this conduct is not welcomed. It doesn’t mean that we exile somebody. We would rather help you than jail you. 

In a 1998 speech that you made at John Jay College, you bemoaned the state of criminal justice research. You faulted the field for not having good answers to the question of why crime had declined. You also characterized researchers as scoffing at the idea that police could have any impact on crime. I’m curious to hear what your sense of the state of the field is today. Has the state of criminal justice research improved since ’98?

No question, it is better now than it was then. We have a long way to go, particularly in terms of our data infrastructure. We don’t have the ability to track events in real time. We’re feeling that loss right now as we try to understand this spike in gun homicides. 

But I think the research community has made great strides since 1998. We now have the ability to look at our history of incarceration, in particular, and think about the trends. In the Square One Project, we start each one of our roundtables with a paper by a historian, to try to help us understand our own history. 

The interest in criminal justice is high right now. It is front and center in the national discussion. Every presidential candidate on the Democratic side had something to say about criminal justice reform. That’s never happened before. So it’s high on the agenda and that means that emerging scholars are turning their attention to these issues. I think there’s still a narrowness in some of the criminal justice research that is very system-centric, rather than looking at the larger societal forces. That’s unfortunate. We miss the proverbial forest for the trees too often. But we’ve come a long way. The federal funding for research has made a big difference. 

People now want to go into criminal justice reform in large numbers. People are dedicating their lives to justice reform because the injustices are so vivid and so palpable—both through human stories but also through the data. This next generation is responding to the call to make things better. That’s not just the research community but the legal community and the advocacy community. The people are now literally in the streets calling for change.

In preparing for this interview, I went back and read many of the things that you have written over the years. One of the qualities that comes across most powerfully in your writing is a certain earnestness. I’m wondering whether that is intentional. If you were going to point to the values that you are trying to put forward in your writing and your speechmaking, what would be on that list? 

Above all, independent inquiry: taking a close and honest look at some of the issues that we face, most broadly in our society but more specifically in the criminal justice system. I have always tried to step back and take an independent look at a question or a trend or a policy proposition so that we can make it better. The goal is always progress, improvement, having government that works, and making things better for people and for communities. As I’m reflecting on a long, long journey, what I’ve always wanted to do is to be in the fray, but removed enough to be able to comment on what I’ve seen. That’s hard. That’s why I teach, that’s why I write, that’s why I care about research.

---

Greg Berman is the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He previously served as the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation for 18 years. His most recent book is Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration (The New Press).

Views expressed are the participants’ own and not necessarily those of The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

“You Can Reduce Violence But Harm People”: A Conversation with Caterina Roman

By Greg Berman

“Libraries, parks, rec centers, pools, free internet — those are all crime prevention activities and resources,” Caterina Roman, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, told the New York Times last year.

Over the course of her career in academia and at the nonprofit Urban Institute, Dr. Roman has taken a broad view of violence and how to prevent it. Among other topics, she has investigated reentry programs, community justice partnerships, and the social networks of at-risk youth.

I talked to Dr. Roman by phone in February, not long after she had published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer calling for deeper investments in evidence-based gun violence prevention programs. Much of our conversation was devoted to focused deterrence, an approach to reducing gun violence that emerged in Boston in the 1990s and has been broadly disseminated by the National Network for Safe Communities, under the leadership of John Jay College professor David Kennedy.  

Focused deterrence begins with a recognition that most of the violence in a given community is perpetrated by a small group of individuals. It seeks to target these individuals with offers of assistance, providing them with the job training, drug treatment, and other services they might need to avoid future offending. If they do not cease their violent  behavior, the focused deterrence model encourages the justice system to use all of the levers at its disposal–including arrest, prosecution, and incarceration–to halt the violence. The use of focused deterrence strategies has been associated with local reductions in homicides, according to a number of evaluations.

In addition to focused deterrence, my conversation with Dr. Roman touched on gaps in our collective knowledge base, particularly the need for more information about effective crime prevention. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Greg Berman: How concerned are you about the spike in homicides we have seen over the past year? Do you think that the increase is something that we need to be worried about?

Caterina Roman: I think we really need to be concerned about it. I think we’ve reached some kind of a tipping point. When you look at the reasons that people generally offer for any major spike in violence, all of them come into play with COVID. You have a little bit of everything. You have so many people buying guns. You have more hurt people who will hurt people. You have disinvestment that has been exacerbated. You have governments that aren’t funding parks, rec centers, summer jobs. You don’t have in-person religious services.

Police departments have the resources to do data-driven work that can be useful in communities. Where are the hot spots? How long have they been hot? What makes them different from other areas? What have we learned from both our successes, our failures in addressing hot spots from five years ago?

You don’t have outreach workers on the streets or the typical social services. And then you have compounded stress. All of these things are coming to a head together. There’s no place to go. Young people don’t have the access to pro-social jobs that will keep them busy and put them in contact with potential mentors.

Recent writing about the increase in violence seems to fall into two categories: an effort to score political points or a search for simple, silver-bullet answers to what’s going on.

I talk to my students a lot about the media. I’ve studied fear of crime, and I often ask, “Where does that fear come from?” Some of it is based in reality, but most of it is not. Having had many conversations with journalists over the years, I know that journalists often like to focus on just one thing to hang their stories on. Some of this comes from journalism itself, which requires stories to have a hook. It is also true that policymakers tend to want quicker fixes and easier answers. If you hang your hat on one cause, you have a straight line to a solution. In reality, it’s just not that simple.

You talk about the structural forces that lead to violence, including inequality and racism. The investments that we need to make to address these kinds of problems are probably generational. But we also have a need to move right now in response to an immediate crisis. How would you advise a mayor or some other political actor who wanted to make a difference? How should we balance long-term investments with short-term strategies to quell violence?

I think policymakers and politicians should be direct and transparent with regard to longer-term investments. Given that the world knows that poverty has some relationship to crime and that disadvantage has some relationship to crime, it would be great if policymakers and politicians would just be open and say, “We are optimistic that we can make longer term change, and we’re going to do it by investing in neighborhood infrastructure. We’re going to do this, we’re going to tell you where the money’s going, and we’re going to measure the incremental change over time.” 

We're only looking at the outcomes related to police data and changes in violence at the aggregate level. We're not asking who benefits from the intervention and who is burdened. We're only focused on the data we have at hand.

I recognize that people want a quick fix. I’m not going to tell you that I believe that X policing solution or Y law enforcement solution is an answer. But I do think that police departments have the resources to do data-driven work that can be useful in communities. Where are the hot spots? How long have they been hot? What makes them different from other areas? What have we learned from both our successes and our failures in addressing hot spots from five years ago? This is where I would advocate for practitioner-academic partnerships because we know even the best police departments with the most data aren’t necessarily applying it in a larger, theory-based way. By creating these partnerships, we can ensure that policing will be used for smart strategies and reduce the likelihood that we’re sending police out on calls that have nothing to do with violence.

One of the problems in New York at the moment is a decline in clearance rates for homicides. Do you have some thoughts about what police should be doing to improve this?

There’s very little research out there on how to improve clearance rates. It is a huge gap in our knowledge. There’s a whole gamut of programs that are trying to achieve community-level change, whether it’s a focused deterrence/pulling levers model or Cure Violence or something else. I would advocate for researchers who have studied these models to go back and look at whether clearance rates were differentially affected in the treatment versus control neighborhoods. That’s relatively easy to do. Maybe where there’s less violence on the street and less fear of crime, clearance rates go up.

You mentioned focused deterrence policing strategy. I’m curious to hear how you are thinking about focused deterrence these days and what we can say about its effectiveness as an intervention.

I’ve evaluated focused deterrence in Washington, D.C., in its first sort of iteration right after Operation Ceasefire in Boston. And I think the big issue for me about its effectiveness is that we’re only looking at the outcomes related to police data and changes in violence at the aggregate level.  We’re not asking who benefits from the intervention and who is burdened. We’re only focused on the data we have at hand. This tends to be what evaluators do. It’s easy to get arrest data, so that’s what we measure. And so we only know from the majority of evaluations of focused deterrence that it reduced violence at the aggregate level.

For every intervention we need to be asking who benefits and who is burdened ... What are the unintended consequences of using credible messengers to go into the community and be pro-social mentors and caseworkers?

We just know that we got the end result of reduction in violence. But what got us there? [John Jay professor] David Kennedy’s theory of change is that the threat of this very focused deterrence led to general deterrence. But we have no research that shows us that that is true. Yet everybody who advocates for focused deterrence is saying that it is an evidence-based program, that it’s working and this is what we should do. I don’t know if that’s true.

So, if you were going to sponsor research into focused deterrence going forward, what would that look like?

Any intervention that expects a community-level reduction in violence has to have enough research dollars behind it to fund a comprehensive survey to track individual-level behavior change. You want to be interviewing those who are targeted in the initiative, and following up with them, and then also interviewing potential high-risk individuals in the community. This won’t be cheap. You’re at a million dollars right there. But that’s where I believe we have to go. If we want answers, we need to be able to conduct the kind of studies that are going to let us measure what is really happening at the community level.

You talk about people advocating for more focused deterrence. Recently, I’ve seen a number of calls for deeper investment in Cure Violence. Do you think that the evidence merits this push?

I think you’re asking the question in the wrong way. I think for every intervention we need to be asking who benefits and who is burdened. If you frame the question that way, I would have to think long and hard about who is burdened by Cure Violence. What are the unintended consequences of using credible messengers to go into the community and be pro-social mentors and caseworkers?  I don’t think there is an obvious burden to funding Cure Violence as it’s intended to be implemented, whereas there are so many things that could go wrong with focused deterrence, given its complex implementation structure. You can reduce violence but harm people.

You are advancing a kind of “do no harm” argument on behalf of Cure Violence. But do we know that it actually does what it says it does, in terms of reducing shootings?

I’m not sure. It’s supposed to be increasing legitimacy by telling the community to be collectively accountable and bringing up the moral voice of the community. But I also think you have to ask whether focused deterrence works in the long run. Is focused deterrence successful at reducing violence if once everyone knows focused deterrence is going away, they start shooting again? Please answer that for me.

Instead of Cure Violence, you could put money into victim services to make sure that every single person that's a victim of violent crime has everything they could possibly need. Victim services are basically nonexistent in most urban communities.

I don’t want us to get locked into a focused deterrence versus Cure Violence conversation, because I don’t think that dynamic is helpful.

I wasn’t arguing for one versus the other. I am using those two models as an example of investment versus policing, surveillance, and deterrence. It does not have to be focused deterrence. It does not have to be Cure Violence. I think instead of Cure Violence, you could put money into victim services to make sure that every single person that’s a victim of violent crime has everything they could possibly need. Victim services are basically nonexistent in most urban communities.

Are there other programs out there that you feel are interesting, whether or not they’ve been evaluated with any degree of rigor?

Do you know about the Chelsea Hub? This is a model where community agencies work collaboratively with the police, probation, school, and victim services. Everyone is meeting weekly. Let’s say I am a victim service agency and in walks someone who witnessed a shooting and that individual seems like they are in a crisis moment. That victim service agency would ask that person, “Would you be willing for me to present your case to a group of service providers to talk about how we could strategize about what you might need holistically?” So the Hub is a method to provide holistic services to people who are in some type of crisis. It could be a domestic violence event. It could be after a hit and run incident. It doesn’t have to be violent crime, necessarily. Philadelphia is testing the model now through Temple med school. It’s voluntary for the individual. It is a positive, full-investment, collaborative model that cuts across systems so you can get to the complexity of the issues and offer an array of useful services and gain individuals’ trust. There hasn’t been a long-term evaluation of it, but it’s a very promising model. The GRYD model in Los Angeles is also worth checking out. I think they’ve had some impact evaluation work done that is pretty strong.

Let’s talk about some of the articles you have written. A few years ago, you wrote about gang research and how to get people to leave gangs. What did you learn?

The point of that article was to look across three very large studies to identify the kinds of pushes and pulls that get somebody out of the gang. A “pull” is pro-social. It is anything from “my significant other doesn’t want me involved in that anymore,” to “my grandmother says she’s not going to let me come home if I’m still hanging out with them.” A pull is some pro-social opportunity, like a job, that is getting me out of the gang. A push tends to be more negative. A push can be: they were victimized, or they were incarcerated, or they have gotten tired of being roughed up by the police. But it could also be they just realized that the gang wasn’t what they wanted. 

You have also looked at fear of crime in Washington D.C. Tell me about that research.

That piece came from my interest in social capital and collective efficacy.

How would you define collective efficacy?

Collective efficacy is the activation of social ties and informal social control among neighbors. So we ask people, “How likely are your neighbors to help out another neighbor in need?” Or, “If a group of teens is hanging out on the street corner, being rowdy, how likely are your neighbors to do something about it?” We aggregate information from questions like these to measure collective efficacy.  

We don't have good evidence on prevention, because we don't research prevention.

In the survey that I did in the northeast section of Washington, D.C, we looked at how collective efficacy was related to fear of crime as measured by people reporting that they were not going to go walk outside because they were worried about crime. At first, what we found jibed with the literature—older people and women tend to be more fearful. As we added different variables to the model, we looked at the interaction of collective efficacy on Black residents versus White residents. What we found was that there was an increase of fear when collective efficacy was higher among Black respondents. We did not find any significant effect among non-Black respondents. We posited that, as collective efficacy increased, Black residents in those neighborhoods were talking more and transmitting more information about violent crime and what was actually happening in the neighborhood. And that relaying of information in the neighborhood increased fear. So higher collective efficacy meant more fear for Black respondents.

What do you think is the biggest misconception that policymakers have about crime prevention?

The truth is that we know very little about what works because we don’t test prevention. We don’t test prevention mechanisms like Pre-K. In Philadelphia, where I live, we have 4,000 more kids in Pre-K each year over the last couple of years. We don’t know if that’s going to reduce violence, because we’re not testing that. So when a policymaker goes to the evidence base, they’re looking at the interventions that were more likely to be evaluated. As we have discussed, policing programs are relatively straightforward to evaluate: You get crime data, that’s really simple. What we’re not doing is funding the kinds of survey research that would give us evidence that legitimacy is increased, that moral cynicism is reduced, that more people are integrated with their neighborhoods. We have no idea how to increase collective efficacy. That’s why we can’t solve the violence problem. So, going back to your question, I think what’s not understood is that we don’t have good evidence on prevention, because we don’t research prevention.

If you were going to make a reading recommendation to an audience that is interested in community-based violence, is there a single book or single study that you would point to?

If someone is interested in this topic, they should spend a week with an outreach worker. They should spend a week in a victim services agency. They should be inside the neighborhood. You’re not going to learn anything from a book. If you want to change a neighborhood, be inside it, and see if you can feel it.

But to answer your question about a book, I would tell you to check out the Aspen Institute’s roundtable on community change, which was turned into a book edited by Karen Fulbright-Anderson and Patricia Auspos. Dennis Rosenbaum has a great chapter in there on promoting safe and healthy neighborhoods. I’d also encourage people to read Wes Skogan, a criminologist who studied policing and community change.

---

Greg Berman is the Distinguished Fellow of Practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He previously served as the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation for 18 years. His most recent book is Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration (The New Press).

Views expressed are the participants’ own and not necessarily those of The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.