Guardian series "Guns and lies in America"

This answers my question on how to reduce the murder rate in systematic ways.  At least two of the articles in the series:

-- Guns and lies series webpage
-- "My eight-year plan to dramatically reduce urban gun violence"
-- "The unsung heroes of Oakland's drastic decline in gun homicides"

discuss social capital oriented approaches to murder reduction.  Since 2012, the murder rate in Oakland, California has been cut in half.


From the first article:

In the cities that struggle with high rates of violence, shootings are concentrated among a surprisingly small set of people and places. It doesn’t concentrate in entire communities or neighborhoods. Even in the most allegedly dangerous places, the vast majority of people are not violent, and there are plenty of safe spaces.

In fact, in most cities, about 4% of city blocks account for approximately 50% of crime. In Oakland, 60% of murders happen within a social network of approximately one to two thousand high-risk individuals – about 0.3% of the city’s population. In New Orleans, a network of 600 to 700 people, less than 1% of the city’s population, account for more than 50% of its lethal encounters.

Conventional wisdom tells us that to address violence, we need to work from the outside in, starting by fixing everything else: culture, poverty, racism, employment. But all of the most rigorous and reliable evidence tells us the opposite: we have to work from the inside out, focusing first and foremost on the highest-risk people and places. ...

What I’ve seen – and what the evidence shows – is that the best strategies to reduce urban gun violence have three things in common: focus, balance and fairness.

Effective strategies focus narrowly on the “hot people” or the “hot spots” driving most of the violence. They balance the threat of punishment with prevention, ie real efforts to help even the highest-risk people change their lives without going to prison. And, to be most effective, they need to be perceived as fair – they need to have support and legitimacy within the communities most affected by violence.

The author of the first piece, Thomas Abt, has also written a book on the topic, Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence – and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets.