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| by A. David Dahmer |
| October 10, 2012 |
“Every single year, the murder toll for black males ages 24 and under is almost exactly the same as the body count for the World Trade Center attacks,” said David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Policy and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “Every year, almost 3,000 people are murdered. And since 9/11, we have invaded two Arab countries, turned our national security apparatus upside-down, secured our airports, moved the FBI from street crime to national security, [and] spent billions of dollars. But what have we done about the dead black boys? Nearly nothing.”
Kennedy expanded on disturbing statistics at a powerful lecture at Madison College Oct. 4 bringing his tried-and-true, common-sense ideas on crime and policing to Madison. Kennedy has thought a lot about the thorny problem of crime and why so many more young black men are murdered every year than white men. He has spent decades creating new, unorthodox ways of stemming crime — methods that have dramatically cut murder rates in cities like Boston, Pittsburgh, Memphis, and San Francisco.
Kennedy, a self-taught criminologist, was in Madison as a guest of the City of Madison and the Madison Police Department. He is the author of “Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America,” and is the key architect of a crime fighting policing strategy that has not only cut gun violence in some of America’s most distressed neighborhoods and ended open-air drug markets, but has reset the relationship between police and community.
“Our current American prison population is about 2.3 million people. Half of them are black men. The black male proportion of the [U.S.] population is 6.1 percent,” Kennedy said. “There’s a debate in the academic world about this number — our current American prison count — [and that it] is either a little bit higher or a little bit lower than the Soviet Gulag at its peak under [Joseph] Stalin. Dwell on that for a moment.”
Kennedy has devoted his career to reducing gang- and drug-related inner-city violence. He has gone to many drug markets all over the United States, has met with police officials and attorney generals all over the country, and has developed a program — first piloted in Boston — that has dramatically reduced youth homicide rates by as much as 66 percent. That program, nicknamed the "Boston Miracle," has been implemented in more than 70 cities nationwide.
“I don’t want to live in a country where it is normal for young black men to get killed and even more normal that they are going to end up locked up,” Kennedy said. “That is not America. That is not the country I want to be in. [The solution] is now within our grasp. It’s not perfect and it’s not ideal…. [and it is] evolving all the time, but it works in a dramatically better way than anything else we’ve ever had.”
For the past few decades, Kennedy has ridden with beat cops, hung with gang members, and sat on stoops with grandmothers in troubled communities. He has found that all parties misunderstood each other and were caught in a spiral of racialized anger and distrust. He envisioned an approach in which everyone —gang members, cops, and community members — comes together in what is essentially a huge intervention. Offenders are told that the violence must stop, that even the cops want them to stay alive and out of prison, and that even their families support swift law enforcement if the violence continues. In city after city, the same miracle has followed: violence plummets, drug markets dry up, and the relationship between the police and the community is reset.
Kennedy’s tough, but compassionate strategy stands in contrast to conventional policing approaches that have resulted in high levels of incarceration, racialized anger, and distrust. Kennedy’s model depends on law enforcement making common cause with the leaders and members of affected communities and sharply focuses in on the small number of serious offenders who drive most of the violence in the community.
“If you get to know these neighborhoods and if you get to know these communities, you discover in a very short order that they hate what’s going on ... they hate it,” Kennedy said. “We have to think some pretty awful things about ordinary humanity to think that they wouldn’t hate it. That means that we have to believe that there are whole communities of people who want their kids killed, who want all of their men locked up, and who don’t mind being afraid every time they walk out the front door and have drug dealers standing on their front lawn.”
They want our help, Kennedy said, they just don’t want the ineffective help they are currently getting.
Cops are desperately frustrated, too, Kennedy continued. “They know it’s not working. They count the bodies and they look at the drug dealers,” he said. “They know it’s not working. How they come to work every day and keep on doing what they are doing in the face of this frustration is beyond me. I couldn’t do it.”
Then, Kennedy said, you look at the street guys who are often glorified by television, movies, and rap music videos.
“Whatever the popular image of these guys are, they are pathetic. We did an operation in Seattle which involved bringing a bunch of street drug dealers into a meeting and talking with them. These drug dealers looked like homeless people,” Kennedy said. “If you work a corner, the research says that you would literally be better off working at McDonald’s. You don’t make minimum wage on the corner. And at McDonald’s you are very unlikely to get shot, you’re very unlikely to get robbed by another drug dealer, and you’re very unlikely to get arrested and thrown in prison for serving fries with that.”
Most serious street violence is driven by gangs, drug crews, and the like. Privately, even most of the guys doing it don’t really like it: they’re at horrible risk, they’re scared all the time, they’re not getting rich, and they feel trapped in the lifestyle.
“We have research that shows that if you are in these street circles, your annual homicide victimization rate is 3,000 per 100,000 a year,” Kennedy said. “You are at an unbelievable astronomical risk. Thinking that somebody wants to live their life so that they get killed early and often is not reasonable and they don’t like it. They just don’t know what to do about it.
“One of the most extraordinary revelations in the last 20 years is that in the most dangerous neighborhoods, it is 5 percent of the 18-to-26 year old males — the high-risk males. Five percent of those young men who are driving nearly all of the violence,” Kennedy added. “It ends up being on the order of one half of one percent of the population of the city.”
What you learn when you get to know the 5 percent is that about 80 to 90 percent of them don’t even like what is going on. “They don’t want to shoot anybody; they don’t want to get shot,” Kennedy said. “They drifted into gang life. They drifted in drug dealing. They are not psychopaths. They are not super-predators. They are scared witless…. Which is entirely reasonable given their circumstances.”
While in Madison from New York City, Kennedy spent a day or two riding along with cops and meeting with people and studying the specific problems Madison faces.
“My question to the outreach workers and the street officers who are in the know [in Madison] was, ‘How many people in this city are really driving the worst of the craziness?’ The consistent answer has been ‘probably under 50 people.’ That’s how tight this gets.”
So how does it all get fixed? You tell them to stop. Kennedy's homicide-reduction program, called Operation Ceasefire, identifies the groups, pulls gang members into meetings, and has a partnership of law enforcement, social service providers, and community figures say, “We all want you to succeed and live and stay out of prison. The violence is completely intolerable, and is mostly hurting you and your own community. The community wants you to succeed. They want you alive and out of prison, but you have to stop what you are doing. This is not a negotiation, and everybody in law enforcement is going to go after the next gang that kills someone.”
In many cities throughout the U.S., Operation Ceasefire has brought gang members into meetings with community members they respected, social services representatives who could help them, and law enforcement officials who told them that they didn't want to make arrests — they wanted the gang members to stay alive, and that they planned to aggressively target people who retaliated. In all of these cities, the interventions worked to reduce the homicide rates. It undercuts the street narrative that nobody cares, puts cops on the side of caring about even gang members, and creates a real legal deterrent.
“When we began this work, we couldn’t possibly get anybody in law enforcement to believe that this strategy could make a difference,” Kennedy said. “Now they do.”
In that initial Boston experiment, they started meeting with the gang meetings in March of 1996 and soon saw results. “By the summer of that year, the city had gone almost dormant,” Kennedy remembers. “When we did the formal evaluation — as reported — [we saw] two-thirds reduction in homicide. [Since then], we had never done this and gotten less than a third reduction in gang violence. Usually, it’s been better than that.
“In this great nation of ours, things are going on that are unconscionable ... and they are infinitely worse than most people can understand,” Kennedy continued. “But we now, in a very real way, know what to do about this problem.
“The cops are not racist predators, the community is not complicit, and the guys trapped in these awful places on the street are not psychopaths,” he added. “It’s not true. And because it’s not true, we don’t have to do this anymore.”
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