VIOLENT CRIME RETURNS WITH A VENGEANCE

After A Welcome Decline, Cities Such As Philadelphia,
Above, Are Seeing A Resurgence Of Violent Crime.

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. Recently, 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 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 more crime. More important has been the
spread of a thug ethos an obsession with "respect" that has made killing
a legitimate response to the most minor snubs and slights.

The good news about crime reductions 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 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.

Meanwhile, 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.

Those numbers tell only part of the story. Serious crime is concentrated in
certain areas within poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods. For people who
live in the Trinidad 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.

Unrealistic Optimism

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 Baltimore, Miami and other cities
that have attempted it. 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 recent focus on terrorism 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, a subtle but worrisome shift is at work. Many factors drive
crime poverty, inequality, racism. But to those 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 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. 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. Crips and Bloods have Web pages and profiles on MySpace.

Tragically, the code of the street has been helped 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 youths 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.

Get Serious On Crime

So what do we do?

Above all, get serious. 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 the world had just
become a dangerous place; they were already living in a world that could
turn lethal at any moment.

Loretta Brooks, the black director 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 Loretta was going to the
funeral of a neighborhood elder, asked, "Who killed him?"

"Not 'What did he die of?" says Loretta, 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' re-entry 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 elsewhere 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.

In March, I attended a Boston-style meeting where an ex-offender spoke with
gang members on Long Island.

"I'm a walking miracle," the man told them. "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 "stop
killing" movement.

GETTING TOUGH ON CRIME

Do aggressive anti-crime measures really work? Jack Levin, director of the
Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University in
Boston, weighs in on crime-prevention techniques.

INCREASING POLICE PRESENCE: In the short run, it is often an effective
strategy to place large numbers of officers conspicuously in high-crime
areas. Better still is when police leave their patrol cars and walk a beat,
increasing their visibility and their interaction with tourists and other
pedestrians. In the long run, community policing in which officers
collaborate with residents in their crime-fighting efforts can help stem
crime in a city. Of course, a stronger police presence also results in a
displacement effect: Criminals will simply move on to a new block. In some
neighborhoods, police are still seen as the enemy or even as occupiers,
almost as unwelcome as gangs and guns.

SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS: Locating cameras in crime hot spots does have a
deterrent effect, but only when criminals know that they are likely to be
identified and apprehended. It is therefore essential to publicize the
presence of monitoring devices. Some object to the presence of cameras
based on misplaced concerns over privacy and civil liberties. The only true
downside to electronic surveillance is that much like expanded police
presence it tends to displace crime to areas where cameras have not been
installed.

CURFEWS: Imposing a curfew on teenagers is a politically expedient, easy
response to spikes in crime. The only problem is the lack of evidence that
curfews work. Adults tend to commit crimes in the dead of night; teenagers
commit a disproportionate number of offenses in the afternoon after the
school bell rings and before Mom and Dad come home from work. It would be
effective to place a 10 p.m. curfew on individuals older than 18, but not
on the younger crowd.

ADULT SUPERVISION: Teenagers need adult supervision in after-school
programs, athletic programs, jobs and community centers. The afternoon
hours are prime time for teenage crime and teenage sex. Teenage violence
will be reduced permanently only when adults recognize the need to be fully
involved in youngsters' lives. A community approach involving police,
clergy, business leaders, probation officers, teachers, college students
and parents working together to reach young people was responsible for
bringing down the rate of teenage violence in Boston in the 1990s.

ASSISTING EX-CONS: Increasing numbers of prisoners who were incarcerated
during the war on drugs in the 1980s are being released into the community.
Most have no job skills and little hope for the future. As a result, they
are rejoining gangs, sometimes in leadership positions. We need to reach
out to ex-convicts with programs and policies that provide training and
employment. Otherwise, they will commit more crimes on the streets of our
major cities in the years to come.