Experts Testify at Senate Hearing on Need To Prevent Violence

In testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, three researchers and two community leaders praised the benefits of a research-driven violence prevention strategy in which police-community partnerships target known offenders in selected neighborhoods.

By Debra Whitcomb, NCPC Staff

“As we saw in the 1990s, we have real success in combating violent crime when we focus our communities, and when our communities join with our law enforcement professionals in the fight against crime.”

With these words, Senator Patrick Leahy opened the September 10 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on strategies to prevent violent crime. Three widely known researchers and two respected community leaders praised the benefits of crime prevention and argued strongly for continued federal support.

Professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University noted that violent crime has decreased dramatically since 1990. He attributed the decrease in large cities, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, to an abundance of management skills and resources in comparison to smaller cities, where crime appears to be increasing. To help smaller cities deal with violent crime, Dr. Blumstein urged the Office of Justice Programs to research strategies and programs that work and to develop and deliver training and technical assistance.

Three witnesses drew attention to one particular strategy that has proven effective in several communities across the country. Pioneered by Dr. David Kennedy, this strategy relies on research that pinpoints neighborhoods where violence is concentrated. Together, community leaders and police in those neighborhoods meet with the most active offenders to deliver a message that violence will not be tolerated. They encourage the offenders to leave their lives of violence and offer support to help them do so but warn they will pursue strict penalties for offenders who choose not to change their ways.

Dr. Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, traced the history of this type of intervention, from its beginning with Operation Ceasefire (PDF) in Boston, to large-scale implementation and evaluation through the Strategic Approaches to Community Safety (SACSI) Initiative (PDF) and incorporation into Project Safe Neighborhoods. Dr. Travis proposed a “National Safety Network” to replicate this strategy with an intention of achieving four goals: reducing violence, abating drug markets, reducing reliance on incarceration, and promoting better relationships between police and minority communities.

The Reverend James Summey of High Point, NC, offered the perspective of a community that benefited from the intervention described by Dr. Travis. An open air drug market had taken hold in his community and seemed invulnerable to traditional policing methods. With Dr. Kennedy’s guidance, police and community members tried the approach that was pioneered in Boston. Since the meeting with targeted offenders in May 2004, there has not been a murder in this High Point neighborhood.

The drug-plagued Lockwood Plaza community in Providence, RI, also benefited from this approach. But Col. Dean Esserman, the city’s chief of police, described other initiatives that collectively contributed to a significant decline in violent crime citywide

• Establishing a gun task force and implementing Project Safe Neighborhoods
• Joining with a community safety initiative to address issues of persistent crime, disorder, and fear
• Deploying street workers to intervene and defuse tense situations
• Deploying mental health counselors to accompany police officers when responding to crimes witnessed by children
• Partnering with probation officers to assist returning prisoners

Col. Esserman attributed much of the success in Providence to three core principles of community policing—partnership, prevention, and problem solving.

Professor George Kelling of Rutgers-Newark University emphasized the need for leadership and the need to shift from reactive approaches to “stopping the next crime.” He identified five basic methods of crime prevention

• Increase the presence of police, prosecutors, probation/parole officers, and the courts
• Persuade people, and especially young people, to behave, citing the intervention and violence reduction work described by Dr. Travis as one example
• Restore order, referring to the “broken windows” theory that he first published with James Q. Wilson
• Solve problems, focusing on conditions within a community that facilitate or discourage crime
• Enforce the law swiftly and fairly when appropriate

As a group, the five witnesses focused on the value of crime prevention and emphasized the effectiveness of research-driven strategies. Dr. Travis strongly urged the federal government to “take the lead in designing and implementing a robust national crime data system” that would include police crime reporting data, local victimization surveys, and data to monitor the drug trade and analyze gang dynamics. With such a system in place, he argued, “police executives, policy makers, elected officials, academics and other researchers, and community groups, can have a data-informed policy discussion about crime trends and effective responses.”