thedrifter
08-13-06, 03:15 PM
The Neighborhood War Zone
By David Kennedy
Sunday, August 13, 2006; B01
NEW YORK -- The United States is losing the war in Iraq; more specifically, Philadelphia is. This war is at home, in the city's 12th Police District, where shootings have almost doubled over the past year and residents have spray-painted "IRAQ" in huge letters on abandoned buildings to mark the devastation.
It is a story being repeated up and down the East Coast and across the nation. In Boston, where the homicide rate is soaring, Analicia Perry , a 20-year-old mother, was shot and killed several weeks ago -- while visiting the street shrine marking the site of her brother's death on the same date four years earlier. Last Tuesday, Orlando's homicide count for this year reached 37, surpassing the city's previous annual high of 36 in 1982. And in Washington, D.C., where 14 people were killed in the first 12 days of July, Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey declared a state of emergency.
Not long ago, the United States was declaring "mission accomplished" on crime: Homicide rates were plunging, the crack epidemic was over, the broken windows were fixed. Now, preliminary FBI statistics show that homicides rose nearly 5 percent in 2005, and news from around the country suggests that 2006 is looking worse. Our many Iraqs at home are making it clear that the self-congratulation was premature. In reality, Americans were lulled into complacency about violent crime. And two new factors have emerged: Some of the law enforcement tactics used to fight crime in recent years damaged the social fabric in many communities and contributed to increased crime. More important has been the spread of a virulent thug ethos -- an obsession with "respect" that has made killing a legitimate response to the most minor snubs and slights. In parts of the District's Anacostia neighborhood today, a young man knows that the wrong kind of eye contact with the wrong person -- a "hard look" -- can cost him his life.
The celebration about crime reductions should have been tempered by caution. The good news was real enough: In New York City, homicides fell an astonishing 76 percent, from 2,245 in 1990 to 539 in 2005. Most observers -- myself included -- gave a good deal of the credit to the city's newly focused and entrepreneurial police department. In Boston, Operation Ceasefire -- which I helped design as a Harvard researcher in 1996 -- brought an unprecedented partnership of law enforcement, social service providers and community leaders into sustained face-to-face contact with drug crews; told them to stop shooting one another; and offered them help. Homicides in the city plunged to lows not seen since the 1960s.
The national numbers followed suit, but not evenly. Although homicides in New York City dropped to a rate of about 6.6 victims per 100,000 people last year, Buffalo came down from a peak of 90 killings in 1994 but still had 63 homicides in 2003, for a rate of 22 victims per 100,000 residents. And Chicago fell from a 1992 peak of 939 homicides but remained stubbornly in the 600 to 700 range during the next decade, for a 2002 rate of about 22 per 100,000 people.
Many jurisdictions made progress only to lose ground shortly thereafter. Philadelphia peaked at 420 homicides in 1996, fell to 292 in 1999, and climbed back to 380 last year. Boston's 1990s "miracle" ended abruptly as petty rivalries shattered the Ceasefire coalition, and killings increased from 31 in 1999 to 73 in 2005.
At the same time, gang and drug problems were showing up in smaller cities and towns -- another disturbing and largely unnoticed shift. In 2005, jurisdictions with populations between 50,000 and 250,000 saw homicide increases of about 12.5 percent -- far larger than the big cities.
And even those local numbers tell only part of the story. Serious crime is concentrated in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and in certain areas within them. For people who live in the Anacostia area of Washington, in the Nickerson Gardens housing complex in South Los Angeles, and on Magnolia Street in Boston, the citywide statistics have always been meaningless. Their neighborhoods are war zones.
In the District, attacks on tourists on the Mall and on a political activist in Georgetown may grab headlines, but it is the everyday violence in troubled neighborhoods that drives up the body count. Boston has so many street memorials for homicide victims that the city is considering regulating them.
The national sense of well-being about crime was unrealistic. Cities such as Boston let their successful strategies collapse. New York City's approach has not worked nearly as well in other cities that have attempted it, such as Baltimore, Hartford, Miami and Philadelphia. Key problems such as crack waned but never really went away. Many rural areas have been ravaged by an exploding methamphetamine epidemic, which we have been unconscionably slow to recognize as a national crisis. And the focus on terrorism in recent years has diverted attention from sure threats to vague ones, leaving police standing watch at highway overpasses while kids across town kill one another in drug markets. "People are dying," Gary Hagler, the police chief of Flint, Mich., said bluntly in a recent plea to a Senate panel to restore cuts in federal funding for state and local crime prevention.
Beyond this, there is a subtle but worrisome shift at work. We are used to thinking of the many factors that drive crime -- poverty, inequality, demographics, racism, and family and community problems. But to that list we should add the spread of a subculture once found only in the toughest urban areas: the culture of respect.
My research in Baltimore, Boston, Minneapolis, Washington and many other cities, along with that of colleagues at the University of California at Irvine and at Michigan State University, shows that in hard-hit neighborhoods, the violence is much less about drugs and money than about girls, vendettas and trivial social frictions. These are often referred to as "disputes" in police reports and in the media. But such violence is not about anger-management problems. The code of the streets has reached a point in which not responding to a slight can destroy a reputation, while violence is a sure way to enhance it. The quick and the dead are not losing their tempers; they are following shared -- and lethal -- social expectations.
I've heard shooters say, in private, that they wanted no part of what happened. But with their friends and enemies watching -- and the unwritten rules clear to everybody -- they did what they had to do. In San Francisco, a string of killings between the warring Big Block and West Mob crews in Hunters Point apparently started nearly a decade ago over who would perform next at a rap concert. The killing of Analicia Perry's brother was never solved, but the man the neighborhood tagged for the death was himself killed -- and that homicide in turn went unsolved. The minister at Analicia Perry's memorial service upbraided the young men before him. "She is now in the hands of God," he said. "I'm just glad she's not in the hands of some of you."
This thug ethos is spreading. It used to be that one learned how to be a gangster from another gangster. No more. Mass-market glossy magazines promote the thug life. One can learn from listening to rapper 50 Cent, or by watching music videos. And it is big business. When rapper Lil' Kim was convicted of perjury connected to a shooting by her posse, she got her own reality show on Black Entertainment Television, which promoted her intent to go to federal prison with her "mouth shut and head held high." Crips and Bloods have Web pages and profiles on MySpace.
All of this is spreading as well as amplifying the street definition of what it means to have honor. In big cities, the quest for honor reignites existing conflicts; in small ones, it brings big-city behavior and big-city problems. Working recently on Long Island with the Nassau County Police Department, my colleagues and I found Bloods, Crips -- and violence. But the gangs were homegrown, and the violence was almost entirely personal.
Tragically, the code of the street -- and the community disorganization and disenfranchisement on which it thrives -- has been helped along by law enforcement. Profligate arrests and incarcerations, many aimed at drugs, have destroyed the village in order to save it. As crime has dropped, zealous enforcement has continued. A staggering 2 million people are now incarcerated in the United States, and about 5 million are on probation and parole. They disproportionately come from -- and return to -- the same neighborhoods. The Justice Policy Institute recently determined that a shocking 52 percent of Baltimore's black men ages 20 to 29 were incarcerated, on probation or on parole; nationally, the lifetime chance of a black man being locked up is one in three.
This enforcement breaks up families; it ruins the prospects of young people who now have little reason to finish school and take entry-level jobs, and of older people who find themselves virtually unemployable; it creates a street culture in which prison is normal and even valued; and it plays directly into community narratives that equate law enforcement and the white community with slaveholders and other historical oppressors. The "stop snitching" culture that recently made headlines has been brewing for decades, reflecting a conviction on the part of many that law enforcement is a racist enemy -- even though staying silent means protecting violent predators.
So what do we do?
Above all, get serious. The problems of crime and violence have not been solved. To the contrary, everywhere I go, state and local officials feel abandoned by the federal government. While authorities talk about terrorism, people are dying on our streets. Poor black grandmothers didn't stand up after the World Trade Center attacks and say that the world had just become a dangerous place; they were already living in a world that could turn lethal at any moment, and still can.
Loretta Scott, the black former commissioner of parks and recreation in Rochester, N.Y., with whom I've worked on violence prevention, speaks with passion of her young granddaughter who, when she heard that Scott was going to the funeral of a neighborhood elder, asked, "Who killed him?"
"Not 'What did he die of?' " says Scott, full of grief and anger. " 'Who killed him?' "
The federal government must return to its role as a real partner in conquering crime by providing funding and crafting effective approaches to key problems, such as drug markets, the methamphetamine epidemic, domestic violence, gangs and prisoners' reentry into their communities. We should learn from the true successes of the past decade.
Two stand out. One is the organizational and operational breakthroughs of the New York Police Department, which has shown an unparalleled ability to stay focused and effective over more than a decade. How and why this has happened should be fully understood and the lessons made available to other jurisdictions.
The second success story is the approach in Boston 10 years ago that slowed the killing there. Those tactics have since proved themselves in many other places, most recently Chicago, and have been strengthened through explicit attention to street culture and to the barriers between law enforcement, communities and offenders. When police are frank about the limits of traditional law enforcement and about their desire to stop doing harm; when communities look offenders in the eye and tell them that they are doing wrong but are loved and deserve help; when old gangsters tell young ones that the code of the street leads only to grief, things change. I've seen it happen.
Tyrone Parker, founder of Washington's Alliance of Concerned Men , has a finely honed street sense, and it tells him something is shifting. "People are tired of going to prison," he told me recently. His comment was borne out by an ex-offender at a Boston-style meeting I attended in late March with gang members on Long Island. "I'm a walking miracle," the man said to the gang members, many of whom knew him. "I've seen people die in front of me, I've been shot before, I've played with guns, sold crack, sold weed, smoked weed. And you know what? I'm paying for it. I've been on paper since I was 14 years old: juvenile, federal, state. I'm done. I'm praying you're all done, too." After the meeting, the shooting between the gangs virtually stopped.
That's the message that could turn the "stop snitching" culture into a "stop killing" movement.
dakennedy@jjay.cuny.edu
David Kennedy is director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.
Ellie
By David Kennedy
Sunday, August 13, 2006; B01
NEW YORK -- The United States is losing the war in Iraq; more specifically, Philadelphia is. This war is at home, in the city's 12th Police District, where shootings have almost doubled over the past year and residents have spray-painted "IRAQ" in huge letters on abandoned buildings to mark the devastation.
It is a story being repeated up and down the East Coast and across the nation. In Boston, where the homicide rate is soaring, Analicia Perry , a 20-year-old mother, was shot and killed several weeks ago -- while visiting the street shrine marking the site of her brother's death on the same date four years earlier. Last Tuesday, Orlando's homicide count for this year reached 37, surpassing the city's previous annual high of 36 in 1982. And in Washington, D.C., where 14 people were killed in the first 12 days of July, Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey declared a state of emergency.
Not long ago, the United States was declaring "mission accomplished" on crime: Homicide rates were plunging, the crack epidemic was over, the broken windows were fixed. Now, preliminary FBI statistics show that homicides rose nearly 5 percent in 2005, and news from around the country suggests that 2006 is looking worse. Our many Iraqs at home are making it clear that the self-congratulation was premature. In reality, Americans were lulled into complacency about violent crime. And two new factors have emerged: Some of the law enforcement tactics used to fight crime in recent years damaged the social fabric in many communities and contributed to increased crime. More important has been the spread of a virulent thug ethos -- an obsession with "respect" that has made killing a legitimate response to the most minor snubs and slights. In parts of the District's Anacostia neighborhood today, a young man knows that the wrong kind of eye contact with the wrong person -- a "hard look" -- can cost him his life.
The celebration about crime reductions should have been tempered by caution. The good news was real enough: In New York City, homicides fell an astonishing 76 percent, from 2,245 in 1990 to 539 in 2005. Most observers -- myself included -- gave a good deal of the credit to the city's newly focused and entrepreneurial police department. In Boston, Operation Ceasefire -- which I helped design as a Harvard researcher in 1996 -- brought an unprecedented partnership of law enforcement, social service providers and community leaders into sustained face-to-face contact with drug crews; told them to stop shooting one another; and offered them help. Homicides in the city plunged to lows not seen since the 1960s.
The national numbers followed suit, but not evenly. Although homicides in New York City dropped to a rate of about 6.6 victims per 100,000 people last year, Buffalo came down from a peak of 90 killings in 1994 but still had 63 homicides in 2003, for a rate of 22 victims per 100,000 residents. And Chicago fell from a 1992 peak of 939 homicides but remained stubbornly in the 600 to 700 range during the next decade, for a 2002 rate of about 22 per 100,000 people.
Many jurisdictions made progress only to lose ground shortly thereafter. Philadelphia peaked at 420 homicides in 1996, fell to 292 in 1999, and climbed back to 380 last year. Boston's 1990s "miracle" ended abruptly as petty rivalries shattered the Ceasefire coalition, and killings increased from 31 in 1999 to 73 in 2005.
At the same time, gang and drug problems were showing up in smaller cities and towns -- another disturbing and largely unnoticed shift. In 2005, jurisdictions with populations between 50,000 and 250,000 saw homicide increases of about 12.5 percent -- far larger than the big cities.
And even those local numbers tell only part of the story. Serious crime is concentrated in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and in certain areas within them. For people who live in the Anacostia area of Washington, in the Nickerson Gardens housing complex in South Los Angeles, and on Magnolia Street in Boston, the citywide statistics have always been meaningless. Their neighborhoods are war zones.
In the District, attacks on tourists on the Mall and on a political activist in Georgetown may grab headlines, but it is the everyday violence in troubled neighborhoods that drives up the body count. Boston has so many street memorials for homicide victims that the city is considering regulating them.
The national sense of well-being about crime was unrealistic. Cities such as Boston let their successful strategies collapse. New York City's approach has not worked nearly as well in other cities that have attempted it, such as Baltimore, Hartford, Miami and Philadelphia. Key problems such as crack waned but never really went away. Many rural areas have been ravaged by an exploding methamphetamine epidemic, which we have been unconscionably slow to recognize as a national crisis. And the focus on terrorism in recent years has diverted attention from sure threats to vague ones, leaving police standing watch at highway overpasses while kids across town kill one another in drug markets. "People are dying," Gary Hagler, the police chief of Flint, Mich., said bluntly in a recent plea to a Senate panel to restore cuts in federal funding for state and local crime prevention.
Beyond this, there is a subtle but worrisome shift at work. We are used to thinking of the many factors that drive crime -- poverty, inequality, demographics, racism, and family and community problems. But to that list we should add the spread of a subculture once found only in the toughest urban areas: the culture of respect.
My research in Baltimore, Boston, Minneapolis, Washington and many other cities, along with that of colleagues at the University of California at Irvine and at Michigan State University, shows that in hard-hit neighborhoods, the violence is much less about drugs and money than about girls, vendettas and trivial social frictions. These are often referred to as "disputes" in police reports and in the media. But such violence is not about anger-management problems. The code of the streets has reached a point in which not responding to a slight can destroy a reputation, while violence is a sure way to enhance it. The quick and the dead are not losing their tempers; they are following shared -- and lethal -- social expectations.
I've heard shooters say, in private, that they wanted no part of what happened. But with their friends and enemies watching -- and the unwritten rules clear to everybody -- they did what they had to do. In San Francisco, a string of killings between the warring Big Block and West Mob crews in Hunters Point apparently started nearly a decade ago over who would perform next at a rap concert. The killing of Analicia Perry's brother was never solved, but the man the neighborhood tagged for the death was himself killed -- and that homicide in turn went unsolved. The minister at Analicia Perry's memorial service upbraided the young men before him. "She is now in the hands of God," he said. "I'm just glad she's not in the hands of some of you."
This thug ethos is spreading. It used to be that one learned how to be a gangster from another gangster. No more. Mass-market glossy magazines promote the thug life. One can learn from listening to rapper 50 Cent, or by watching music videos. And it is big business. When rapper Lil' Kim was convicted of perjury connected to a shooting by her posse, she got her own reality show on Black Entertainment Television, which promoted her intent to go to federal prison with her "mouth shut and head held high." Crips and Bloods have Web pages and profiles on MySpace.
All of this is spreading as well as amplifying the street definition of what it means to have honor. In big cities, the quest for honor reignites existing conflicts; in small ones, it brings big-city behavior and big-city problems. Working recently on Long Island with the Nassau County Police Department, my colleagues and I found Bloods, Crips -- and violence. But the gangs were homegrown, and the violence was almost entirely personal.
Tragically, the code of the street -- and the community disorganization and disenfranchisement on which it thrives -- has been helped along by law enforcement. Profligate arrests and incarcerations, many aimed at drugs, have destroyed the village in order to save it. As crime has dropped, zealous enforcement has continued. A staggering 2 million people are now incarcerated in the United States, and about 5 million are on probation and parole. They disproportionately come from -- and return to -- the same neighborhoods. The Justice Policy Institute recently determined that a shocking 52 percent of Baltimore's black men ages 20 to 29 were incarcerated, on probation or on parole; nationally, the lifetime chance of a black man being locked up is one in three.
This enforcement breaks up families; it ruins the prospects of young people who now have little reason to finish school and take entry-level jobs, and of older people who find themselves virtually unemployable; it creates a street culture in which prison is normal and even valued; and it plays directly into community narratives that equate law enforcement and the white community with slaveholders and other historical oppressors. The "stop snitching" culture that recently made headlines has been brewing for decades, reflecting a conviction on the part of many that law enforcement is a racist enemy -- even though staying silent means protecting violent predators.
So what do we do?
Above all, get serious. The problems of crime and violence have not been solved. To the contrary, everywhere I go, state and local officials feel abandoned by the federal government. While authorities talk about terrorism, people are dying on our streets. Poor black grandmothers didn't stand up after the World Trade Center attacks and say that the world had just become a dangerous place; they were already living in a world that could turn lethal at any moment, and still can.
Loretta Scott, the black former commissioner of parks and recreation in Rochester, N.Y., with whom I've worked on violence prevention, speaks with passion of her young granddaughter who, when she heard that Scott was going to the funeral of a neighborhood elder, asked, "Who killed him?"
"Not 'What did he die of?' " says Scott, full of grief and anger. " 'Who killed him?' "
The federal government must return to its role as a real partner in conquering crime by providing funding and crafting effective approaches to key problems, such as drug markets, the methamphetamine epidemic, domestic violence, gangs and prisoners' reentry into their communities. We should learn from the true successes of the past decade.
Two stand out. One is the organizational and operational breakthroughs of the New York Police Department, which has shown an unparalleled ability to stay focused and effective over more than a decade. How and why this has happened should be fully understood and the lessons made available to other jurisdictions.
The second success story is the approach in Boston 10 years ago that slowed the killing there. Those tactics have since proved themselves in many other places, most recently Chicago, and have been strengthened through explicit attention to street culture and to the barriers between law enforcement, communities and offenders. When police are frank about the limits of traditional law enforcement and about their desire to stop doing harm; when communities look offenders in the eye and tell them that they are doing wrong but are loved and deserve help; when old gangsters tell young ones that the code of the street leads only to grief, things change. I've seen it happen.
Tyrone Parker, founder of Washington's Alliance of Concerned Men , has a finely honed street sense, and it tells him something is shifting. "People are tired of going to prison," he told me recently. His comment was borne out by an ex-offender at a Boston-style meeting I attended in late March with gang members on Long Island. "I'm a walking miracle," the man said to the gang members, many of whom knew him. "I've seen people die in front of me, I've been shot before, I've played with guns, sold crack, sold weed, smoked weed. And you know what? I'm paying for it. I've been on paper since I was 14 years old: juvenile, federal, state. I'm done. I'm praying you're all done, too." After the meeting, the shooting between the gangs virtually stopped.
That's the message that could turn the "stop snitching" culture into a "stop killing" movement.
dakennedy@jjay.cuny.edu
David Kennedy is director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.
Ellie