When conservative pundits talk themselves blue in the face about so-called black-on-black crime or the supposed hellholes that are urban areas, they generally have two answers for reducing crime—more police and stricter laws. They seem to think that the only way to combat our issues with crime are to flood the streets with police and send as many people to jail as possible. This analysis doesn’t take into account the fact that, nationwide, crime is down and that communities and individual citizens have had something to do with that.
New research suggests that people [in communities where violence plummeted the most] were working hard, with little credit, to address the problem themselves.
Local nonprofit groups that responded to the violence by cleaning streets, building playgrounds, mentoring children and employing young men had a real effect on the crime rate. That’s what Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, argues in a new study and a forthcoming book. Mr. Sharkey doesn’t contend that community groups alone drove the national decline in crime, but rather that their impact is a major missing piece.
“This was a part that has been completely overlooked and ignored in national debates over the crime drop,” he said. “But I think it’s fundamental to what happened.”
Of course, the idea of communities working hard to address problems and transform their reality doesn’t fit the conservative narrative that these are lazy, pathological communities of color who prefer to do more race-baiting than problem solving. But statistics don’t lie.
Between the early 1990s and 2015, the homicide rate in America fell by half. Rates of robbery, assault and theft tumbled in tandem. In New York, Washington and San Diego, murders dropped by more than 75 percent. Although violence has increased over the last two years in some cities, including Chicago and Baltimore, even those places remain safer than they were 25 years ago. And crime has continued to fall in other cities, most notably New York, where shootings are at a record low.
Sharkey says that the growth of community based non-profit organizations which focus on youth and job development have made a difference. His research team tracked the rise of non-profits in 264 cities across the country. While non-profits often emerged in places that had persistent and serious problems, they were not solely tied to violence prevention and addressed subjects such as the arts and medical research.
Comparing the growth of other kinds of nonprofits [not focused on violence prevention], the researchers believe they were able to identify the causal effect of these community groups: Every 10 additional organizations in a city with 100,000 residents, they estimate, led to a 9 percent drop in the murder rate and a 6 percent drop in violent crime. [...]
That national finding echoes local studies of some individual programs, like one run by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society that converts abandoned lots into green spaces and that has been linked in Philadelphia to reduced gun violence.
The research also affirms some of the tenets of community policing: that neighborhoods are vital to policing themselves, and that they can address the complex roots of violence in ways that fall beyond traditional police work.
These findings affirm something that is missing from traditional ways of looking at crime prevention—that understanding people’s social, emotional and psychological needs are a vital part of culture and behavior change. “Any time people’s basic needs are met, violence goes down—that’s not new,” said Noreen McClendon, who directs the nonprofit Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles. When structural racism, classism and capitalism combine and there is money to be made in locking people up, unfortunately, there is no real need for lawmakers to come up with holistic solutions. And it’s really too bad because it’s such a simple lesson. The more that individuals and communities have resources, the more violence can be prevented. It’s certainly not a fix-all, but it’s a start.