The U.S. Knows How to Reduce Crime
Evidence-based strategies like ‘focused deterrence’ don’t conform to partisan slogans, but they have been shown to work.
By Thomas Abt, WSJ
Nov. 25, 2022 10:57 am ET
Not so long ago, many Republicans and Democrats agreed on a range of sensible reforms to fight crime while reducing the impact of mass incarceration. During the 2000s and 2010s, hundreds of state and local reforms were passed to limit excessive confinement and promote the rehabilitation and re-entry of incarcerated people. At the federal level, the First Step Act of 2018 shortened sentences, gave defendants additional chances to avoid mandatory minimum penalties, and improved prison conditions.
These changes were modest individually, but by 2019 they had helped reduce the U.S. incarceration rate to 810 inmates for every 100,000 adults, the lowest level since 1995. The disparity between Black and white imprisonment rates declined 40% from 1990 to 2020. At the same time, crime rates remained at or near historical lows.
The consensus behind pragmatic policies to reduce crime came apart in 2020.
The consensus behind such pragmatic policies came apart in 2020, when the pandemic struck, George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, and firearm sales increased dramatically. Most important, violent gun crime surged in 2020, with murders rising 29% over the year before—the largest single-year percentage increase in decades. In 2021, homicides increased again, albeit by a more modest 4%, setting record highs in Philadelphia, Indianapolis and Portland, Ore., among other cities.
Many progressives, incensed by high-profile incidents of police violence, adopted “Defund the Police” as a rallying cry, even as it was rejected by mainstream Democratic leaders. Progressive prosecutors in some jurisdictions enacted policies that effectively decriminalized certain low-level, nonviolent offenses. Meanwhile, conservatives largely abandoned criminal-justice reform efforts and rallied behind President Trump’s law-and-order politics.
To achieve genuine solutions to the problem of rising crime, the U.S. needs to return to pragmatism informed by evidence. The good news is that solutions are available, if we can put politics aside. In a 2016 meta-review that I co-authored with sociologist Christopher Winship, we analyzed the results of more than 1,400 studies on community violence. In addition, we interviewed dozens of individuals directly exposed to violence, including former gang members, police officers, the relatives of murder victims and local community leaders.
We learned three important lessons. The first is that most gun violence takes place in relatively small clusters of tightly networked individuals and groups. Most of this violence—usually labeled as community, urban, street or gang violence—occurs among men without opportunities or hope. Similarly, violence concentrates not in whole neighborhoods but in micro-locations often known as “hot spots.”
We also found that gun violence responds to both positive and negative incentives. Across hundreds of studies, we found effective “tough” strategies that used targeted policing to reduce violence, as well as successful “soft” approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy, which can help even hardened criminals change their ways.
Finally, it is clear that deadly, highly publicized episodes of police violence, like those in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 and Minneapolis in 2020, have caused homicide rates to surge across the country. It is not clear exactly why such incidents trigger broad increases in violence, but they do. Two credible theories involve “depolicing,” when police pull back in response to public pressure and criticism, and “delegitimization,” when residents stop reporting crimes and cooperating with police due to increased mistrust. Whatever the mechanism, it is clear that violence flourishes when communities lose confidence in law enforcement.
What, then, can be done to control gun violence? The key is to combine three elements: a focus on where violence is most concentrated; the balanced use of both rewards and punishments; and outreach to ensure that communities see anti-violence measures as fair and legitimate.
This combination is at the center of the most effective single strategy for combating community gun violence: “focused deterrence.” In this approach, community residents, social workers and law-enforcement officers work together to identify the highest-risk individuals and groups and to communicate to them that the shooting must stop. They follow up by offering life coaching, job training, educational opportunities and other forms of assistance, and if these efforts fail, they use narrowly targeted investigations, arrests and prosecutions.
Focused deterrence works because it deals with those at the highest risk for violence, offers them a balanced set of carrots and stick, and communicates the choices they face in a direct but respectful manner. A systematic review of the strategy reported favorable results in 22 of the 24 cases where it was evaluated. In Oakland, Calif., for instance, a focused deterrence initiative called Oakland Ceasefire cut homicide rates nearly in half from 2012 to 2018.
Unfortunately, such success can be hard to sustain. In 2020, the pandemic interrupted implementation of Oakland Ceasefire, then community support for it evaporated in the wake of local anti-police protests. Murders spiked 36% that year, and the strategy has struggled to recover.
For long-term declines in violence, cities need a collaborative effort that leverages several evidence-based strategies at once. This year, the Council on Criminal Justice’s Violent Crime Working Group, which I chaired, issued a set of 10 recommendations to help local leaders form a framework to substantially reduce community gun violence in their cities. These recommendations include setting concrete goals for violence reduction, identifying and engaging the people and places where violence concentrates, and placing responsibility for reducing violence at the top, usually with the jurisdiction’s mayor or manager.
Our group estimated that cities can reduce homicides by an estimated 10% a year by using the right combination of strategies. This may not sound like much, but if it’s sustained for eight years—two mayoral terms—a city could cut murders by more than half. And for perhaps the first time ever, there is sufficient funding to put these strategies into place. In June, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which includes hundreds of millions of dollars for community-based anti-violence measures. States recently pledged approximately $700 million in anti-violence programming, and cities are using some of the $65 billion in American Recovery Plan Act funds to support this work. Philanthropic funding for gun violence prevention is increasing as well.
Funding alone isn’t enough to solve the problem. Reducing crime and violence also requires practical know-how that is hard to come by. The Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction, which I helped to launch this week with the support of Arnold Ventures, will work to summarize the research on crime and violence and help cities to apply those lessons. Other capable organizations, such as the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform and the Giffords Center for Violence Intervention, are making similar efforts.
Local strategies to reduce community gun violence could be the first step toward tackling broader challenges like the ubiquity of guns and the durability of poverty in the U.S. For that to happen, we need our leaders to resist the usual talking points of our polarized political environment. If they can embrace evidence over ideology, we have a chance to save many American lives.
Mr. Abt is the founding director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction at the University of Maryland and senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice. He is the author of “Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence—And a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets.”
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