Community organizing can drop crime

In the midst of a record streak of murder-free days in Baltimore comes a front page article in Baltimore's SUN's print edition that has been online for a while: How "Baltimore mayor seeds grassroots network to aid violence reduction".

Pugh’s violence-reduction plan emphasizes community engagement, both to restore trust in police and to provide social support such as free tuition at Baltimore City Community College. At one recent meeting, the groups devised ways to promote programs that help families and students complete college financial aid applications.

The SUN duly notes that critics of a community based "soft" approach on crime, including Governor Hogan, have little patience for strategies which don't create an immediate drop in crime and don't use policing to attack crime.

Mayor Pugh's grassroots cabinet (SUN photo)

The split between crime-fighters and community reformers is as old as society. It follows roughly the political camps of progressives and conservatives. The conservatives want  enforcement of law and order, the progressives want to abolish poverty as a root cause for crime. Both sides can't quite explain, why crime rises and why it drops, as the New Yorker explained at length in a recent article about "The right lessons from the fall in urban violence" on occasion of a review of Patrick Sharkey's book “Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence”  published by Norton.

New Yorker graphic (Eiko Ojala)

"Big events go by unseen while we sweat the smaller stuff; things happen underground while we watch the boulevard parades", Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker begins his review and concludes it by saying:

"The story of the crime decline is about the wisdom of single steps and small sanities. We have curbed crime without knowing how we did it, perhaps simply by doing it in many ways at once. It is possible to see this as a kind of humanist miracle, a lesson about the self-organizing and, sometimes, self-healing capacities of human communities that’s as humbling, in its way, as any mystery that faith can offer". Adam Gopnik, The Great Crime Decline, The New Yorker 

 Gopnik's article describes a phenomenon we certainly don't currently see in Baltimore, the dramatic decline of violent crime in US cities. In New York, the murder rate fell from over 2,000 a year to 290 last year, a number as we well know, which is below that of Baltimore, even though New York has a population of 8.5 million, i.e. about 13.5 times the population of Baltimore.  In that Baltimore's current rate of homicides is about 2.3 times that of New Yor's worst days. New York's 2017 homicide rate was its lowest in over 70 years, while Baltimore's was higher than ever.

But that is not the point here. The question is, what made New York's rate fall that much? The typical binary discussion between progressives and conservatives attributes the decline to aggressive policing or to gentrification and displacement, depending on whom ones asks. Baltimore's Mayor O'Malley  brought New York style policing to Baltimore through an application of the famous "broken window theory", which, as Gopnik explains, was neither a proper theory nor is it usually properly understood. The resulting "stop and frisk policing" and the ensuing mass arrests are totally discredited today, here and in New York. The Black Lives Matter movement isn't limited to high crime areas such as St Louis and Baltimore, it has swept across the nation and was followed by a critical review of the concept of the warrior police which is experienced by the community to be part of an occupying army.

Broken window theory: Misunderstood?

Gopnik points out that New York saw neither a noticeable closure of the gap between rich and poor, nor significant displacement. He maintains that while New York as a whole has become wealthier and more expensive, it has added economic diversity and not simply displaced the poor.
Even more importantly, Gopnik follows Sharkey's argument that a reduction of crime benefits the poor communities, where violent crime is rampant, the most. He quotes Sharkey: “Local violence does not make children less intelligent, rather, it occupies their minds.” He then elaborates further:

Thinking about a threat leaves you less room to think about anything else. The social cost of street crime, therefore, is far higher than the price of lives lost and bodies maimed; it can maim minds, too. Conversely, in places where violence has declined the most, kids do much better at school, and minority kids lag least. Anyone who says that the decline in crime is a white person’s prerogative and pleasure hasn’t been following the facts.

Gopnik traces Sharkey's sociological arguments back to the original meaning of the broken windows theory: Self policing. He then expands on what he finds insufficient explanations in the book he reviews and offers his own, one that involves feed-back loops, virtual cycles and essentially, phase transitions. Even though the New Yorker article doesn't use this physics  term,  anyone who has read my blogs over the last years will realize that feedback loops and vicious or virtuous cycles are one of my favorite topics. Just as in phase transitions, it doesn't take a lot of energy to move a phase from one state to another (32 degree water to ice, for example). Gopnik sees it this way:

With the crime wave, it would seem, small measures that pushed the numbers down by some noticeable amount engendered a virtuous circle that brought the numbers further and further down. You didn’t have to change the incidence of crime a lot to make people worry less about it. What ended violent crime, in this scenario, was not an edict but a feedback system—created when less crime brought more eyes onto the streets and subways, which in turn reduced crime, leading to people feeling safer, which in turn brought more eyes out. The self-organized response of society to crime was, in effect, to outnumber the muggers on the street before they mugged someone. One has only to get on the New York City subway at 3 a.m., and recall what 3 a.m. on the New York City subway was like thirty years ago, to sense the presence of this circle.

We all know that Baltimore has fallen into too many vicious loops. The crime spike of 2017 is one of them, regardless whether one sees it as cause or effect of other vicious feedback cycles such as poverty. The current break from murder doesn't yet reverse the loop or create a new one. Yet, Gopnik's article tells us that the Mayor's efforts of community-based action and self-policing is on the right track. That its multi-faceted attack on what is going wrong in the community, from lack of coordination between citizen organizations, to lack of communication with City departments, from lack of opportunities for the young, to lack of chances for those coming out of prison, is exactly what is needed. If the Mayor's community cabinet  can be paired with a fundamental reform of the BPD, even this very tangled vicious loop of poverty and crime can be untangled and reverted.

Baltimore, vicious feeback loops

The effort led by the Mayor together with all the community leaders which participate should not be belittled and besmirched. It toes a pragmatic path between conservative law and order and progressive comprehensive reform which, if the sociologist Patrick Sharkey and the journalist Adam Gopnik are only half right, deserves not only a chance but active participation and support.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA