Dealing with crime (in DC and elsewhere)

Among the many good posts of late in the Washington City Paper's City Desk blog is this one, "Petworth Shootouts – Possibly Gang Related – Spark More Recriminations Over Defunct Crime Bill."

I say it's good because it calls attention to the posturing by many DC elected officials over particular crimes and the opportunities they provide to support particular claims-ideologies about how to address crime, especially over the recent Fenty "crime bill" touted by people like Harry Jaffe and Jonetta Rose Barras (columnists for the Examiner) -- "Fenty's tough new crime laws could make city safe" (Jaffe), and "Crime coddlers in D.C." (Barras).

I don't understand why most "thinking" people are so clueless when it comes to crime and related policies. I am not a "coddle the criminal" person, but I do understand that we are dealing with systems.

And if you want to understand these systems, if you are a great observer, you can go live in a neighborhood like H Street NE (which I did with about a two year gap, from 1987 to 2004) or Trinidad or Capitol Hill East or Shaw (etc.) and experience it first hand.

But if you don't want to experience multiple break ins, street assaults, and the failure of a marriage, instead you can read two great books by Elijah Anderson, Streetwise and Code of the Street.

A report from the National Institute of Justice released earlier in the year, "The Code of the Street and African-American Violence," confirms the validity of the thesis. And you can watch a video depicting the place he wrote about in Code of the Street, see Down Germantown Avenue. (When I first read it, I thought his description of how Germantown Avenue is in Mount Airy and his travels down into the rougher part of Philadelphia sounded just like H Street NW and NE in DC.)

If you don't want to read the books, how about the original article from 1994 in the Atlantic Monthly, "The Code of the Streets," or this review from the Washington Monthly, "Code Of The Street. - Review." But they do have the book in the DC Central Library, which is where I read it.

Anyway, living on the exact border line between the 1st and 5th police districts in the H Street neighborhood taught me a lot. And one of the things it taught me is that crime isn't only a police problem, something that police commissioner (in Boston, New York City, and now Los Angeles) William Bratton makes clear as well, and his work was based on the "Broken Windows" thesis (see "Broken Windows" also from Atlantic Monthly.

(If readers ever wonder why I am so fixated on eliminating graffiti, litter, and "curing" nuisance property problems not through demolition but by getting the house fixed and habitated, it is because I a strong strong proponent of the Broken Windows thesis and my first hand observation about its applicability, in fact, see one of my earliest blog entries, "Urban Health, Nasty Cities, Broken Windows, and Community Efficacy" for more, including a discussion of the competing "community efficacy" and "broken windows" theses.)

So the "Fenty Crime Bill" likely won't do squat, because it doesn't get at the systems, the root causes and processes of the problem.

From time to time I write about this in terms of the great successful program at reducing "gang" violence that was pioneered in Boston. It's written about in Mother Jones magazine, in "Straight Outta Boston." The New Yorker wrote about this in a recent issue as well, "Don’t Shoot," although the full article is only available to registered users.

And today's Seattle Times has an article about this, "Innovators visit Seattle to describe ways that work to cut gang violence," describing the two different approaches, the Boston approach and the Chicago approach (for more about the latter see "Blocking the Transmission of Violence" from the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 2008).

Both approaches, while using different language from their respective disciplines, address gang violence as if it is an epidemic and use epidemiologic processes (public health approaches) to interdict the vector of violence, focusing on taking out key carriers, either through arrest or suasion, and working to change the embrace of the code of the street.

Now a bunch of DC nonprofit groups have released a report on the problem, see "Report: D.C. must do more to stem youth violence" from the Examiner, but I haven't read the report so I don't know if it makes any decent recommendations. According to the article:

The report urges immediate action by Mayor Adrian Fenty to develop a coordinated response to high-profile youth violence, to assess the city’s capacity to handle the problem, to redirect resources to those areas highest in need and to intervene with the most at-risk youth. Graham said he would introduce emergency legislation next month to address the short-term goals.

In the long term, the report recommends establishing a high-level Gang and Crew Prevention Commission led by a gang czar of sorts, and developing a comprehensive citywide violence-prevention plan. It also suggests numerous actions in the education, health, work force development and justice areas.

Judging by past programs and the relatively incremental non-best practice approaches most typically espoused in DC municipal and nonprofit agencies, I don't expect that the report, A Blueprint for Action, says very much.

I guess I'll have to read it.