OakTalk

In our last post, we talked about David Kennedy’s violence reduction strategy, sometimes known as the “Ceasefire” program. 

Guess what? We actually started a Kennedy-inspired violence-reduction program here in Oakland. We called the heart of the program “call-ins.” It was operated by Oakland’s Department of Human Services together with the police, Oakland Community Organizations (“OCO”) and with Measure-Y funded “outreach workers.”  

In the spring of 2010, OCO put together one of its “actions” to bring attention to the need for more funding for the “call-ins.” OCO asked for $1 million to save young lives. Three Councilmembers (Quan, Kaplan and Reid) attended the action.  All spoke enthusiastically about the program.  None promised funding.  

But Oakland received literally millions of dollars from the State and Federal government to support the Call-in program. As described on the Governor’s web site: 

Oakland Gang Reduction, Intervention, and Prevention Program (O-GRIPP) will build upon the City’s Measure Y, a $20 million per year investment in crime reduction, to implement a strategy modeled after the Boston Operation Ceasefire project.  O-GRIPP will target six contiguous police beats in West Oakland.  It will fund a data analyst, case manager, expanded involvement of the Mayor’s Street Outreach Coordinator and a targeted community education message.  It will also form a West Oakland Public Safety Council that will be the focus of neighborhood crime reduction planning.  O-GRIPP will use data from probation, parole and police to identify gang-involved individuals and invite them to Call-Ins where law enforcement will outline sanctions for future violence, and job support service programs and employers will offer training, services and jobs. 

But the program really never got off the ground.  First, it operated mostly as a program offering social services, not the kind of “carrot and stick” program envisioned by Cease Fire.  Second, it brought in ridiculously small numbers of participants.  From September, 2009 until June, 2011, there were 15 call-ins, with a total of only 113 participants.  Two of the call-ins yielded only one participant.  By comparison, we understand a recent Bakersfield call-in had 350 participants. 

The call-in program did not measure violence reduction.  Instead, the goal seemed to be how many participants received job or education referrals, obtained jobs, received transportation passes, legal services, resume assistance, etc.  So the one reason for this violence reduction strategy – reducing firearm violence – has never been measured. 

And then we abandoned the program.  The police declined to participate further.  And nobody seems to know what, if anything, will happen next. 

As Kennedy puts it, dealing with the “bad” guys is not the problem–we do know how to deal with them, justly and effectively. The problem is dealing with the “good” guys–the well-intended but short-sighted elected officials who fail to properly manage programs and fail to provide ongoing support. 

Violent crime in Boston, after it declined greatly for a few years, came back up. The Kennedy-style programs were stopped. Now the programs are starting up again. Oakland’s program barely got started and then had implementation problems, so it was dropped. According to Oakland Deputy Police Chief Ersie Joyner, our problem was finding jobs for the young criminals who wanted to abandon violence and change their lives. So we dropped the program. 

Here we are, well into a fifth decade of more than 100 homicides on average annually in Oakland. There is plenty of evidence that properly implemented cease-fire programs really work. Indeed, one of Kennedy’s colleagues in violence-reduction program development has his office here in crime-ridden Oakland–he is Stewart Wakeling of the Public Health Institute. 

As with so many of Oakland’s problems, what we are lacking is the leadership and focus of our “good” guys. We need to deal effectively with our “good” guys so that we can start dealing  effectively with the bad ones.

For the last several weeks, much of the political talk in Oakland has centered around Occupy Oakland, the encampment, responses by the mayor, police and city council, and whether the mayor should be recalled.

These are important issues of the moment.  But once they have faded, Oaklanders will still have to face the fact that their city has the fifth highest crime rate in the United States and its homicide rate is on a pace to hit 107 in 2011.  With a twenty percent drop in sworn officers and plans to reduce police staffing even further, Oakland has no meaningful plan to reverse these trends and address the largest problem our City faces.

In the next week to ten days, we will be talking about a true gun violence reduction strategy that has worked in ten other American cities.  This strategy does not require an enormous influx of police officers.  The strategy acknowledges what Oakland politicians have long said: that you “can’t arrest your way out” of violent crime and that the continued incarceration of young, poor black men is getting us nowhere.  The strategy depends on a coordination of strict, police-enforced rules of conduct, availability of social services and most importantly, an understanding of this fundamental fact:  the people involved in most of our violent crime absolutely hate the violence.

Members of our community who believe that only policing will end crime will have a difficult time with what is sometimes disparagingly referred to as the “hug a thug” aspects of this strategy.  Activists who believe on ideological grounds that police are the problem and not the solution will likewise object.

But neither side of this debate can quarrel with what the numbers show.  This strategy results in dramatic reductions of violent crime for as long as the strategy is followed.  And the crime rate goes right back up again when the strategy is abandoned.

Today we talk about the strategy and its measured results.  In part II, we will talk about Oakland’s “Call-In” program, why it doesn’t work, and how it can be fixed.  And in part III, we will talk about lessons Oakland can learn from other cities.

Don’t Shoot

 Last month, David Kennedy, a criminologist at New York’s John Jay College, spoke in Oakland and elsewhere locally about proven methods for reducing urban violence, especially among young men involved in gangs. Kennedy’s book, Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America describes dramatic successes in reducing homicides and other violent acts by 50% within a short period of time in Boston and in other cities. A shorter version of Kennedy’s story, from the June 22, 2009 New Yorker, is available here.

At first blush, the Kennedy strategy seems naïve.  But it actually works.  While the strategy varies from city to city, the basic components are these:  Young gang members are asked to come to a meeting of community members, clergymen, local officials, city and federal law enforcement officers. At these “call-ins” the young people are told that there is enough evidence of their criminal activities to put them in jail. They are also told that all the community members and others present care about them and believe that they are essentially good people with potential to live socially productive lives. They are offered help to learn how to get along in mainstream society, and to contribute to it without violence. They are offered the choice of jail or joining society.

This is a carrot and stick strategy.  Gang members are told that if they continue their violent ways, law enforcement will come down on them like a ton of bricks.  If they renounce violence, the community will make job, remedial education and other services available to them.  It is essential that “you don’t write checks you can’t cash.”  This means that both services and suppression have to be fully available.

As Kennedy said at his presentations, “We know how to end violence in our communities.”  These programs really seem to work.  The programs have been tried in eleven different communities.  While the programs and the metrics have differed, the outcomes have almost always been remarkable:

Study                                                              Main Outcome

Boston Operation Ceasefire                          -63% youth homicide

Indianapolis IVRP                                            -34% total homicide

Stockton Operation Ceasefire                     -42% gun homicide

Lowell PSN                                                          -44% gun assaults

Cincinnati CIRV                                                -36% GMI  involved homicides

Newark Ceasefire                                              NS  reduction gunshot wound incidents

LA Operation Ceasefire                                  Sig short-term red. violent gun crime

Chicago PSN                                                        -37% homicide, -30% recidivism rate

Nashville DMI                                                  -56% reduction drug offenses

Rockford DMI                                                  -22% non-violent offenses

Hawaii HOPE                                                     -26% recidivism rate

Source:  Braga & Weisburd, 2011, The Campbell Collaboration, The Effects of the Approach on Crime.

Kennedy observes that this strategy does not work if it is looked at as another program.  It needs to be a way of life.  If it is a “program,” cities eventually stop using it, and the crime begins to rise again.  This happened in Boston and many of the other cities where the strategy initially had success.  The strategy requires institutional memory and the departments implementing it must take the long view.

In our next post, we will talk about Oakland’s version of the Kennedy-inspired violence reduction strategy.

In our first post on this subject, we provided some of the remarkable crime reduction figures from Professor Franklin Zimring’s study of New York City.  Today, we will review some of his views about what works, what doesn’t work, and what the unknowns are.

Professor Zimring presented a chart categorizing changes in New York policing as either effective, probably effective, unknown as to effectiveness or not implemented.  The changes, categorization and his comments are as follows:

Professor Zimring identified a number of other important findings, some of which are critical for Oakland. Among these:

From 1990 to 2006, jailing and imprisonment nationwide increased by 63%. In New York, it decreased 21%. By 2006, the incarceration rate in New York was half that of the country as a whole. So its not that incarceration decreases crime. The opposite is true: decreasing crime decreases incarceration, and its very substantial cost. And conceptually, of course, decreasing the cost of incarceration makes money available for many other government services, including, potentially, more police.

Also, while decreasing crime in the population as a whole, New York decreased it among previously convicted persons even more. In 1985, the New York recidivism rate (defined as reconviction by persons incarcerated for felonies in the previous three years) was 21%. By 1990, it had climbed to 28%. In 2005, it had dropped to 10%, a 64% drop in 15 years. In the rest of the country, of course, recidivism rates have climbed (to a stunning 67.5% in California).

Finally, while more job opportunities are good, the state of the economy and the availability of jobs does not affect the amount of crime.  As the United States experienced the recession of 2007-2009, its urban violence dropped during the same period. With the exception of drug dealing, urban criminal activities are not meaningful economic efforts. They are situational, contingent activities, which Zimring describes as recreational, and they shut right down under increased law enforcement.

Professor Zimring offered four takeaways from his research:

First, police matter.  Sufficient police staffing is essential to making cities safe.

Second, focusing on drug crime violence goes a long way toward reducing the homicide rate.

Third, we don’t have to continue investing in imprisonment to lower crime rates.

Finally, cities, or certain city neighborhoods, do not have to be crime factories. Most of those who commit crimes act contingently and opportunistically; so effective police work can greatly reduce the amount of crime.

Nearly everyone in Oakland has opinions about crime and how to reduce it.  Often public discussions in Oakland about these subjects devolve into an ideological conflict. Some think more police are the answer.  Others feel that police can’t be trusted and social programs are all we need. Meanwhile, our mayor supports a “balanced approach” without offering any metrics or data to show us which of the elements in that “balanced approach” actually reduce crime.

Make Oakland Better Now! believes that in public safety, as in every governmental endeavor, decisions must be made on the basis of data and metrics, not on opinion or ideology.   MOBN believes that in public safety, government decisions must be based on competent analysis of data rather than on ideology or opinion. We also are convinced that there are not sufficient data or analysis of data to show whether our non-police social programs are effective in reducing crime. We believe that Oakland cannot afford to spend any money at all on either police efforts or violence prevention programs that cannot be shown to reduce crime.

So we were very pleased that Oakland City Council Members Libby Schaaf and Pat Kernighan invited Professor Franklin Zimring to speak at a public meeting Sunday.  Professor Zimring, Berkeley Law Professor and recognized  dean of the academic study of American criminal justice, is the author of “The City that Became Safe;  New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control.”   He spoke before a group of more than 50 community members at St. Lawrence O’Toole Church, describing his study of New York’s crime rate reduction between 1990 and 2009.   Zimring shows clearly that increased police staffing combined with properly-focused police work can greatly reduce crime.

The numbers from New York City are truly stunning. Starting in  1990, New York added about 7,000 police officers.  The force also began using much more aggressive policing tactics.

From 1990 to about 1999, the entire United States, including Oakland, experienced a substantial reduction in crime.  But New York City, unlike any other major city in the country, experienced a drop in crime twice as big and lasting twice as long.  A comparison of the drop in  “index” crimes of homicide, robbery, rape, assault, burglary, auto theft and larceny shows that in 2009, New York City experienced:

• 18% the number of homicides as in 1990;
• 16% the number of robberies;
• 23% the number of rapes;
• 33% the number of assaults;
• 14% the number of burglaries;
• 6% the number of automobile thefts;
• 37% the number of larcenies.

After controlling for the national decrease in crime and some other factors affecting Manhattan but not the other boroughs (significant per capita income increase and gentrification), Zimring noted that the overall decrease in crime was consistently 21% greater than the national average for 19 years.  He concluded that once other factors were teased out, police efforts could be shown to have caused the following reductions in crime:
Homicide:      12%
Rape:          15%
Robbery:       32%
Assault:        4%
Burglary:      32%
Auto theft:    21%
Larceny:        2%

In our next post on Thursday, we will review Professor Zimring’s research on what works and what doesn’t work.