Weird daily experience amongst most Boston educators: reading papers each day to see if last kid shot was someone from your school….
Let’s sort through competing ideas on “what to do” about rapid escalation of shootings.
1. Tough Love For Police Brass: Comstat
Comstat combines wonky numbers crunching with holding precinct commanders accountable: in-your-face, solve-it-or-be-fired use of monthly crime stats.
Shifts resources, which means a commander may be pissed that you’re taking his guys and putting them elsewhere (this also falls under #2 – a guy who has been patrolling Kenmore for 3 years is not ecstatic about being told he’ll be on Blue Hill AVe all summer).
In the case of the head of the homicide division, Comstat would combine numbers with the sentence “You’re just not closing cases, your investigators are sloppy, your detectives are unable to get sources, you’re out.”
2. Tough Love For Beat Cops: Broken Windows
Broken Windows requires police to make a lot of what they see as “nuisance arrests” – graffiti, public drunkenness, public urination, etc. Few cops enjoy doing this.
The theory is the low-level arrests often lead to gun possession arrests (that’s the hope), particularly of parolees, which puts those guys back in jail.
Note that drug-related homicides are down. “Argument” arrests are up. Hence need for simply nailing the guys with guns in pocket.
3. Operation Ceasefire: Tough Love From Mayor (to other senior officials), and Tough Love for Ganged-Up Kids
As David suggests, one would love to see a sense of urgency from the Mayor. Or someone. Anyone. Bueller?
“Operation Ceasefire was a coming-together of the many layers of local, state, and federal law enforcement, as well as clergy, community, and youth service operations. These agencies worked together to identify the most violent offenders and show them how a crime committed by one gang member would bring down the combined Ceasefire apparatus on the entire gang.”
Also included some summer jobs, etc., so the conversation seemed less 100% tough talk to tough kids, and instead more 80-20.
Anyway, first you have the conversations, but more importantly, you need the relentless follow-thru. In this case, you really focus on certain individuals, less broad-brush than #1 and #2 above.
4. Change Federal Economic Policy
Um, joking. But in response to comment from “NoPolitician” – the economic situation for Boston teens is not much different in 2006 than in 2004 or 2002, but shootings are much higher. Unless you think the teens are specifically responding to rising interest rates on their 5-year ARMs. That darned Federal Reserve.
5. Protect Witnesses
The DA has asked for a little state money for witness protection, something like 750k. I hope they got it, but if not, geez. Let’s send over 7.5 million! Are we nuts? (ed: yes) FAR more effective short-term than more social programs.
6. “Community Policing”
Cops hang out at picnics. Oh, wait.
Anyway, cops hang out with kids and parents so that populace doesn’t see them as corrupt, power-hungry enemies.
7. Current Strategy
Summer jobs (Menino’s favorite) – “gets the kids off the streets.”
Tell store owners not to sell T-shirts that say “Stop Snitching.”
Lots of meetings with no real action steps.
In response to the economic policy crack, let me relate a story to you.
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I used to work for a retail company that had a large warehouse in an inner city. We hired a lot of Blacks and Puerto Ricans to do the heavy lifting, etc.
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I got to be friendly with a few of these guys. They were mostly in the 20-30 year old range.
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By the time the late 90’s came around, when the economy was really picking up, a number of them were looking to get out of the warehouse business. A couple were taking computer tech courses, one was taking accounting classes. Why? Because businesses were hiring, and it was an employee’s market. They felt they could get a job so they were trying to get one. A few did.
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Then it all crashed down, and the companies that were doing the hiring stopped. Some closed, some moved. Most of the people who briefly had hope had it pulled out from under them.
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I saw it at all levels. People who simply didn’t have that much skill or relevant background were getting jobs. And they were starting to get those skills and experience.
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The tide has turned now. You need to have the most possible skill to get a job. Companies aren’t taking chances anymore. And those people who were on the fringes are working in dead-end jobs, or are unemployed.
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It takes time for stuff like that to metastasize in a community.
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What would your life be like if you grew up knowing no one who made it, and when the conventional wisdom was that you weren’t going to make it either?
I’m pretty sympathetic to what I think is your general argument: that inner-city kids and young men need opportunity; that those without opportunity are frustrated; that they are much more likely to commit crimes and be victimized by crime.
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And in response, I’m not diminishing your personal observation. But it’s hard to argue anecdote against clear cut data.
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The data is overwhelming. There are giant shifts in violent crime rate that DO NOT MATCH UP with swings in economy. When opportunities for inner-city kids decline by 10%, violent crime does not increase by 10%, and vice versa.
Well, my horizon is admittedly narrow. I’d like to see pointers to those studies though. Are they national or local?
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Boston isn’t the only city with an increase in murders. Springfield logged 18 last year, its highest total since the mid-90’s. Hartford is experiencing a similar crisis with shootings and violence.
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My experience — admittedly limited to Springfield in recent history — is that when the economy was booming in the late 90’s, the crime and murders dropped, the optimism was there. From 1997 to 2000 there were 9, 12, 7, and 8 murders in Springfield.
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When the economy stunk in the early 90’s, the pessimism was there, and the murders were up. From 1993 to 1996 we saw 20, 16, 19, and 16 murders.
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And now that the economy stinks again, pessimism is back and murder is up. We’ve seen 13, 17, and 18 murders from 2003 to 2005. 2006 is trending to be in the same range as 2005.
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Boston doesn’t quite have the same trend. It saw a substantial decline in murders during the 1996-2000 period of 59, 43, 34, 31, and 39. It saw a big uptick in 2003 (92) then a drop in 2004 (61). It saw an uptick in 2005 (73). Boston’s big murder year was 1990, with 143, sandwiched with 102 and 113 in 1989 and 1991 respectively.
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Don’t forget, the economy doesn’t work the same everywhere, and although people claim that the economy is great right now, in Springfield it is stagnant and has been for some time. We see far more companies leaving than coming. We see far more layoffs than hear of companies expanding.
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In your opinion, what was happening in the 1989-1991 timeframe in Boston? Isn’t that when the doors were falling off the “Massachusetts Miracle”?
Good question.
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There’s a Harvard sociologist named Chris Winship. DESPITE being from Harvard, he’s really smart and not an ideologue! If you care about this issue, you’d enjoy a couple of his articles.
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1. The first article (pdf) answers your question about 1989-1991 (rapid rise in crime), and then what happened in the 1990s (falling crime), and then why it went up again.
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a. Basically, crack markets emerged, and like most markets, fierce competition was followed by more order. That is, there was some “natural” rise and fall associated with crack emergence, turf war (89-91), settling down.
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This was a pretty specific development, with huge spike in murders associated with crack trade. You describe wheels coming off “MA Miracle” in terms of economy, but very modest change from 85 to 90 in terms of the jobs available to inner-city guys.
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[In fact, a fair number of stats textbooks use your crime-and-economics theory as an example of “Correlation Not Causation” – they appear to be much more connected than they really are].
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b. People (Bill Bratton/Paul Evans versus Kathleen O’Toole/Player To Be Named Later) and context (Stuart murder case, for example) mattered.
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c. Crime fell in part b/c Boston police did a good job in collaboration with clergy: Operation Ceasefire. Winship tries to separate out national trends (since crime fell everywhere, one of your points) from Boston only, find that this wasn’t just hype.
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2. The second article (pdf) in part answers David’s question of “why can’t we just reactivate Operation Ceasefire?” In a way, we need to look to Baltimore and Minneapolis, which TRIED to copy the Boston strategy, and failed to implement it. We are now like those cities – i.e., unable to execute our own strategy.
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3. And now?
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There are better and worse strategies to pursue, hence my poll.
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But without a strong leader who can activate a sense of desperate urgency, who can bang (adult) heads together, then we simply won’t have execution. Without strong leadership, inertia rules, and execution does not happen…so the strategy is irrelevant. A Rudy Giuliani, with all his many faults, would save a lot of Boston teen lives were he here.
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Our folks? Nope.
Lowell has cut it’s Asian gang crime, ALL violent crime, to virtually zero through the same community policing program that Boston abandoned in 2000 (I listened to the NPR audio clip previously cited by David … depressing.)
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Boston dumps the program and the violent crime rates go up. Additionally, what’s the statistic … 10% of the criminals commit 90% of the crime? I don’t know what that stat is but it tracks why the community policing was so effective: it targeted that 10%.
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Look at the Globe graphic of the other day (can’t find to link) plotting the locations of 2006 shootings in Boston … it’s obvious that they’re very tightly clustered in 3 locations. Can’t the police intensify in those locations? And how about cameras? Philly’s installing them, why not us?
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The economy goes up, goes down. Government intervention to stimulate or create jobs is usually ineffective, and, as Goldstein claims, crime stats don’t follow economic trends. So why blame government?
Shep, God bless, I absolutely agree with you. Putting forth economics as a reason for people shooting each other is just way too facile. There’s a long distance between being unemployed and caring so little about life that you don’t care about ending someone else’s.
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The upshot of Mr. Kennedy’s interview on NPR was that we’re not doing what worked in the 90’s. The problem is with the Boston cops and homicide department. O’Toole flitting off to Ireland was utterly bizarre. Menino sounds stumped. No hope in sight.
but And how about cameras? Philly’s installing them, why not us?
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Man do I hate cameras. 1984 and all that. If a person wants to put up a camera on his private property recording a public space, that’s fine with me. But, I don’t believe my government should be recording the movement and actions of its citizens in a “blanket” manner.
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Want to put a cop on the corner and write down the plate number of every car that drives by? Go ahead; not a great use of resources and it won’t last long. Want to record those plates and feed them into an OCR algorithm so that the gov’t tracks the movement of people? No good.
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The same goes for faces; face recognition technology isn’t great yet for this kind of thing, but it’s only getting better, and it isn’t like the cameras will come down when the technology gets better.
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Cameras are a bad idea, because I don’t trust the government to compile, aggregate, or protect data. Yes, it is doing some of that now (IRS, Soc Sec, etc). I’d like to see it do as little as possible while maintaining essential gov’t services for all the people contained by the information. Recording a public space is a bad idea because it begs for misuse either in the case of specific individuals or en masse.
If economics isn’t related, then why are so many communities afraid to put low-income housing within their borders? Poor people with no economic hope shouldn’t present a problem in a “safe” community then, right? Because those “safe” communities are safe because they’ve just got good police forces?
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If economics isn’t related, then why is the crime concentrated in areas of poverty? Is it that people who are going to commit crimes just aren’t ever going to get a job so they wind up poor?
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Do you really want me to believe that even if there was a booming economy, that we would still have this many shootings? And that there is a fixed amount of criminals out there, and that ferreting them out and locking them up is the only way to lower the crime?
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I can’t believe that.
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I know that poverty doesn’t create violence, but lack of poverty sure seems to quell it.
NoPol, I realize how the economics-causes-poverty thing is intuitive, so I’ll try one more time, see if we can find some common ground.
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1. Unemployment is much lower now than in the Great Depression. Is crime lower? No.
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2. When did national crime rate begin to rise a lot? Early 1960s. That’s when the “underclass” – as William Julius Wilson calls it – emerged…not just poverty, but poverty crimed with many other social issues (teen pregnancy, fatherless families, increased drug trade, etc).
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So urban crime rate doubled from 1960 to 1969. How was the job market in 1969? Close to full employment!
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3. When did Boston Miracle begin (and when did urban crime nationally begin to slow down)? 1992. But in 1992, unemployment was at Its peak!
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4. Who had the biggest DROP in crime in the 1990s? NYC. Yet their unemployment was very high – 8 percent (Seattle, at 3 percent, had 50% higher crime rate).
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5. YES, all things being equal, booming economies do help reduce crime. They DO matter. So do schools. Having half of inner-city kids drop out of high school obviously sets the table for trouble. We’re always better off with low unemployment and quality schools….we agree.
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Economics, however, is not the MAIN factor explaining why violent crime rises and falls so dramatically.
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To put it another way, without ANY change in job opportunities, it’s possible to have a much lower (or higher) crime rate with strong civic and police leadership.
it’s not that bad. this is what most other American cities face, much more frequently than Boston.
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I wonder what the good people of Springfield would have to say about Bostonians getting their undies in a bunch over this.