Crime expert to City Council: a community "intervention" is key to reducing violence

Interesting presentation at the Seattle City Council briefings meeting Monday morning from David Kennedy, professor of Anthropology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

“There’s a couple of things you can do to dramatically improve issues around serious crime in Seattle,” he said.

“This is off the shelf stuff people have doing this all over the county. It doesn’t take resources. It takes focus and commitment but not money,” he said.

Then he laid out some statistics for cities that have taken an approach he advocates.

In Chicago, homicide in the worst neighborhoods “ended up almost as low as in the best neighborhoods in the city.”

Indianapolis: murders went down by a third city-wide and gun crimes dropped by half.

Portland:  Murders dropped by 36 percent citywide. Reports of shots fired dropped by 49 percent. Youth violence went down by 82 percent.

“This is not hypothetical anymore. This is not an aspiration. You can do this… You can start this now and have things under control by the end of the year.”

The approach: a community intervention.

Kennedy said the issue is that a small number of people are responsible for much of the violent crime in the city. When police charted violent crimes in Cincinnati, they found three-fourths of all homicides could be tracked back to 60 street groups involving about 1,500 people. Whether you call them gangs or not are unimportant, he said. Mostly these are small groups of loosely-organized people, often times without a clear leader or an organization.

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They represented one-third of 1 percent of Cincinnati’s population.

“If you effectively intervene with these groups, you effectively intervene with the problem,” Kennedy said.

The way to do that , he said, is organize police officers, community leaders, social services people, and others in the community that have credibility – the mothers and grandmothers of the criminals, reformed ex-offenders, street ministers, and others. They meet with the people causing problems, look them in them in the eye and say this is not OK. This is going to stop. This is not a negotiation.”

He said, “I’m first to admit that this sounds absolutely idiotic. We’re going to talk to literally lethal people and we’re going to talk to them?”

But he said having the community – the child who’s afraid to come out at night because of gunfire, the mother of the youth killed in a shooting – say that the violence is going to stop makes a difference, he said.

Letting the youths know that help is out there if they want it matters, he said.

But this is not a hippie approach. The message is sent the next time there’s violence, police will come after not only the shooter but the entire group with the full-extent of the law.

“If they don’t know the stove isn’t hot, they’re going to touch it,” he said.

Kennedy said, Kennedy said, Kennedy said the entire group of criminals is told, if there is a shooting, “go home, brush your teeth and gather your belongings, because we’re coming. We will focus on that group, and you will lose and we will win,” he said.

The key, however, is that relationships with have to be sustained over time. “It has to become how you do business,” Kennedy said.

City Councilman Tim Burgess, a former cop who arranged the briefing, said Kennedy's strategy could be an add-on to the city's youth violence prevention plan, which is aimed at preventing middle schoolers from getting involved in crime.

Kennedy, though, said the youth violence program won't work without an approach like the one he is suggesting. "If there's still seven guys in the neighborhood who are getting all the girls and getting all the money, it's not going to work."