“I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.” Don Rumsfeld
As we trudge into the dog days of August, the vaccine is working as promised, but its effect is neutered somewhat by antidisestablishmentarianism. Or something like that which causes obscene numbers of people to engage in seppuku. Which I understand to be a ritualized self-sacrifice where, “the grisly act typically involved stabbing oneself in the belly with a short sword, slicing open the stomach and then turning the blade upwards to ensure a fatal wound.” But wait, there’s more. “Some practitioners of seppuku allowed themselves to die slowly, but they usually enlisted the help of a “kaishakunin,” or second, who would lop off their head with a katana as soon as they made their initial cut.” In this metaphor, rest assured that when I say “kaishakunin” I am thinking about the modern, American translation, which is literally, “Tucker Carlson.”
Anyway, I like the word antidisestablishmentarianism and have ever since my friend Mike and I came across it in the 5th grade and decided that since at 26 letters it was the longest word in (relatively) common use in the English language and since we had conquered it, we had completed our study of English.
Even though I was aware of the word, I could not, when pressed, tell you what it meant, nor did I care to find out. I was merely happy to be loosely associated with its’ tremendous length and apparent sagacity.
But words have meaning and that brings us to what I actually want to write about, which is the appalling wave of gun violence that is happening and cannot be avoided no matter how much we don’t want to talk about it. And, boy, do we not want to talk about it.
Conservatives don’t want to talk about it because there has been an absolutely astonishing number of guns sold in America in the last 15 months. By my calculations, using data from the Trace, there were 17.5 million guns sold between March 2018 and June 2019 pre-pandemic and 30.2 million guns sold between March 2020 and June 2020 during the pandemic. Which is a 42% increase in the number of guns sold. Also, 2020 saw a 30-35% increase in homicides, most by gun. So, if you put those two numbers right there, right next to each other, 42% and 30-35%, well gosh, it’s just darn awkward if you know what I mean.
Progressives don’t want to talk about it for a bunch of reasons. One is that a lot of folks have written quite a lot about reimagining policing and it’s darn awkward to talk about that in the middle of a massive spike in violence. Even if you predicted it. (I will have loads more to say about that in the future, because I think reimagining police can be a big part of a solution to gun violence, in a way that more gun sales are definitely not going to be the solution to gun violence.)
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In sum, 2021 will likely be at least as bloody as 2020, probably more so. The debate is heating up with the season. Where I used to get a couple of calls about crime and violence stories in a month, I now get several each week. Where I used to see an occasional op-ed or article with an interesting take on guns or violence or race and justice, there is something new every day. So that’s good, there is a lot of attention on what is a perpetual blind spot in American public policy.
But the debate is nasty these days. What’s interesting is that like all policy and politics in America in this quarter of the 21st century, the tenor of the debate has changed. There’s a joke in my house, where when I see my kids in a fierce debate, or trying to humiliate each other, or more frequently simply trying to impose their will on each other, that it isn’t enough that there is a winner, there must be a loser too. And I see a lot of that in the policy debate around violence these days.
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Let me give a specific example to illustrate. There is a heated debate about the evidence surrounding violence interrupters and whether there is sufficient evidence to move forward with those programs as many cities have begun to do, and which the Biden administration is supporting. The basic gist of these programs is to mediate disputes and provide services and supports to victims and families, using ‘credible messengers’—people with lived experience in these kinds of disputes—to break the cycle of retaliation. These programs often create a firewall between police investigations and the interrupter's work so there is friction there.
Now, just around the corner, is another set of programs centered on using law enforcement teams to break the cycle. Rather than use prevention to stop the cycle of violence, the law enforcement approach uses ‘pulling levers’ where all manner of credible threats are made to gang-involved youth to deter revenge. The precision of the intervention is relatively new, while the mechanisms, threats of detection and punishment, are timeless.
While there is a lot more to say about differences between prevention and deterrence, which are vast and worth discussing, both approaches come with enough credible evidence—though limited—to support replication.
What’s interesting to me and what is probably at the center of the debate is that the two camps in this debate seem to be mainly a criminologist camp (violence interrupters) and an economist camp (pulling levers). There are norms, structures, and theory on one side and empiricism and incentives on the other. To some extent, this is just a proxy war in their endless Cold War.
Like most people thinking about crime policy today, I’ve thought about the relative merits of the two approaches and prefer one to the other. To me, the risks and rewards balance like this.
My concern with the interrupter model is that it is a distributed model and thus diffuse and hard to evaluate. We may not ever get to the evidence threshold we desire, nor have an iron-clad identification strategy. I’m ok with that—we certainly don’t have iron-clad identification with most studies on policing (or most of human behavior for that matter).
My concern with the pulling levers strategy is that it is risky. It involves risks of police use of force, mistakes in enforcement exacerbating police illegitimacy in fragile neighborhoods, and the potential for more mass incarceration, which has decimated places with the most concentrated disadvantage by incarcerating whole generations of young men.
From where I sit, even if the evidence for violence reduction turns out to be a little stronger for pulling levers, the risks are way bigger and we should acknowledge that. All else being equal, the ultimate solution to violence in America is creating opportunity in neighborhoods where there is none, so we should pause before pursuing anything that slows down progress toward that goal. That is the strongest argument for the violence interrupter model, given the similar levels of evidence, that there are risks from violence interrupters, but they pale by comparison to the risks from pulling levers.
Now, all that being said, there is a place for both in a city’s toolkit because neither is scalable to solve the violence problem. The supply of well-trained violence interrupters is so small that only a few places have the capacity to use the model as a viable tool to fight the violence. The problem with pulling levers is remarkably similar. The amount of law enforcement resources that are required to be brought to bear on a single case are so vast, and the bureaucracy is so tangled, that pulling levers really isn’t scalable either.
But the disciplines could help each other, it seems to me. Labor economists could certainly offer some insights into effective training program models to create a scalable interrupter curriculum. Criminologists could certainly help target pulling levers more precisely while managing the bureaucratic hurdles.
Declaring one approach the winner over the other, however, only because one exists in a data-rich environment with mechanisms that can be manipulated (pulling levers) and the other does not (interrupters) strikes me as foolish. Making sure that not only is there a winner but a loser too is much worse.
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So while that debate rages on, the actual policy debate is about whether we are going to get tough on crime again or not. If you glance at social media or the news, you know what questions are being asked. Are we going to turn back the clock and start filling the prisons again? And how on earth are we going to crack down on violence when new guns are pouring into the streets? What will we tell the mayors and city council members and the people of the neighborhood who are fighting this battle with their bare hands?
My big point is this. As we contemplate responding to the ongoing surge in violence, we are going to have to be humble in our pursuit. We are going to have to acknowledge that we learned very little about how to reduce violence from the crime decline in the 1990s.
We are going to have to acknowledge that the empirical data that we have on hand today are not sufficient for the task.
That changing systems and cultures is incredibly difficult stuff, and there won’t be easy causal mechanisms just lying around.
That we are going to have to rely on theory and experiments and good old-fashioned common sense and lived experience to figure it out.
We would also benefit from listening to each other.
Again, the ultimate solution is to fix the places that are so badly broken that their toxicity is poisoning the people. Let us first do no harm and make no place worse, and second let’s start looking, really looking, at the places where the violence is most intense. Let’s focus on the 14 zip codes in Philly with most of the cities violence. Let’s go to work in the 2 percent of DC neighborhoods where 40 percent of the shell casings are found. Let’s get serious.
Heard on Capitol Hill
Speaking of not being serious, the nonprofit I work with, the National Prevention Science Coalition, recently held an event. This was a super cool event featuring Jack Shonkoff from Harvard (whose credentials are far too long to list). He talked about “Leveraging Science to Inform Policies that Strengthen Learning and Health in a Post-COVID-19 World.” Awesome right? So we sent the invitation to every congressional office.
To give you a sense of why we are where we are policy-wise. Here are a couple of literal responses (I am redacting the member’s names).
“You lost me at “inequities and the inter-generational trauma of systemic racism”. Get some new foolish propaganda and try again. Name one nation on earth that is better than the USA and tell me why people try so hard to come here. Sell that crap to people not smart enough to know better.”
And…
“I guess we could require every home to have their own personal social worker that could immediately report any situation to the Government who could immediately intervene and at least publicly shame the parent or parents on the public square?
Maybe plastic safety “bubble suits” for every child at birth?
I believe humans history and evolution undermines your suppositions.
Have a great day. I will be working hard to work against probably most if not all of your social policy initiatives.
Harvard? Huh….”
And the gentle debate continues… Makes you miss Don Rumsfeld, doesn’t it?
Musical interlude
Since everyone thinks it’s 1985 again, here’s a 2021 video with a 1985 vibe. But it’s not 1985. That’s the point. And as the kids say, this slaps.