There are fewer shootings in 2022 and that is leading us to embrace the past. Let's not.
Plus a Sandy Hook reflection and a thought for the Holidays
So we beat on boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not only for the usual reasons, not just because This Side of Paradise is a masterclass in writing and that Fitzgerald was
an artist who was able with lucidity and poetic imagination to portray the struggle between grace and death . . . His characters are involved in this great drama, seeking God and seeking grace.
Nor is the allure entirely his legendary, bawdy drinking binges in Paris. Rather, Fitzgerald is something of a local icon, at least in my family, because his—and Zelda’s—final resting place is just up the street from where I grew up, nestled against Viers Mill Boulevard and overlooking the bustling Rockville Pike in the Maryland suburbs of the District of Columbia.
Now, ‘nestled’ and ‘bustling’ may conjure a bucolic or pastoral setting, but the Pike is sadly not that, though perhaps it was long ago. It is now and instead a raucous sea of congestion hemmed by strip malls. When the Fitzgeralds were committed there for eternity, the cemetery was near F. Scott’s small family farm. But time and development go on and now it is something else. And that fits. It fits because
there is something in the broken lives of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald that reaches a dark place in each of us where we remember how it feels to be out of place.
And near my childhood home, they remain forever out of place.
But the quote about boats and currents and history is not the quote most associated with Fitzgerald. Instead, it is probably this
the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
This is essentially the definition of cognitive dissonance, though Fitzgerald explains that dissonance is an aspiration not to be feared or loathed.
Shootings in 2022
With that in mind, I would like to turn to the topic of the day, the rather remarkable decline in shootings in the year-to-date big-city crime data. Here are the data:
My guess as to why shootings are down this year is that we are simply returning to the long-term trend after a big shock (COVID) spiked the country off course. We don’t have great national shooting data, but there was a trend toward more violence beginning in 2014, before the giant spike in the COVID years. One way to think about the 2022 shooting data is just to ask what would have happened if the 2014 to 2019 trend had simply continued, uninterrupted by COVID. How many shootings would we have expected in 2022 under that assumption?
If you take the average increase from 2014 to 2019, it’s an increase of about 3.5 aggravated assaults per 100,000 each year (agg. assault being the closest national measure we have to shootings). Overall, that’s an increase from 229 aggravated assaults per 100,000 to 250. If the trend had continued into 2022, we would have expected about 260 aggravated assaults per 100,000.
I’m not going to manipulate Jeff Asher’s data, that feels like a copyright violation, but let’s just note that of the top 25 cities on his list, thirteen had more than a 10% decline in shootings and 12 had less than a 10% decline or an increase. So let’s assume shootings declined by 10%. In 2021, there were 284 aggravated assaults and if there was a 10% decline, there would be 256. That’s right there with the trend since 2014.
So that’s all back of the envelope, but I am not aware of broad changes in the level of anti-shooting resources that would begin to explain a change of that magnitude. There have been a lot of really small investments, but nothing of that size, not for community-based organizations and not for law enforcement.
Flattening the Curve
How then do we flatten the curve of gun violence such that we prevent future spikes in violence? To do that, we have to first solve our foundational problems. We can find them where we started, with Fitzgerald. “So we beat on boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
We are always fighting the current, and refuse to see it for it was it is, the gravity of concentrated poverty and isolation that pulls from the past. We are steadfast in our refusal to confront the problems that got us here thinking that some magic will allow us to continue to use the same strategy—intervene relentlessly, but never prevent—and expect different results.
Let me offer a different way to think about this problem.
I would like to offer two competing ideas, hardly as evidence of a first-rate mind, but rather to suggest that these two ideas are not opposed after all. And I want to argue that it is important to policymaking to see these ideas in that way—as complements, not substitutes.
So here are the two truths:
Violence in America is clustered in a very small number of very small places; and,
Violence in America is greatly affected by big national trends.
Unpacking that a little, there has been a lot written about the Great American Crime Decline, the huge decline in crime, violence, and victimization in the 1990s. Almost all of the explanations are about giant, macro forces—mass incarceration, the end of the crack epidemic, the legalization of abortion, the removal of lead from gasoline and the environment, and more. I’ve written a lot about these forces, and I have an article coming out later this month that argues that we have omitted some other explanations that have profound implications for how we think about crime reduction. For example,
The simple shift from giving cash to people on what was then called Welfare to providing people with debit cards probably explains 10% of the crime decline.
The introduction and widespread use of drug therapies for mental health problems—anti-anxiety medications, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics— probably explains another 10%.
There is more to be said about big macro forces and their effect on violence and victimization, but let me turn here to those small number of places with the most violence. Starting with the problem that very little has been said about how these big, macro forces filter down to the places where most crime occurs.
There is almost universal agreement among criminologists that a small number of blocks in cities and towns account for much of the crime and violence. In the late 1980s, University of Maryland and Rutgers University scholars studied over 300,000 calls for service in Minneapolis from 115,000 addresses and intersections over one year. They found that half of those hundreds of thousands of calls for service were generated from three (3) percent of places. This finding has been replicated so thoroughly that it is a settled fact in the study of crime.
But, saying these ‘hot spots cluster’ does not mean that a single part of town has all the violence. There is no mythical ‘inner city’ where crime clusters. ‘Urban’ is not synonymous with crime. Saying ‘hot spots cluster’ means that once you have found one toxic place, you are likely to find another nearby. But there be many clusters throughout a city, as many far-flung parts of a city can have a cluster of exceptionally violent blocks. And many in between have virtually no crime at all…
This is a map of Kensington, a small neighborhood just north of the central business district in Philadelphia. Darker colors show a greater density of shootings—the black circles overlay gang territory. Kensington is arguably the area in Philadelphia at greatest risk of shootings —but even here there is a lot of variation in violence. Just to the north of Kensington at the top of the map—and also to the east and to the south—are neighborhoods with no shootings. In fact, some of the hottest property markets are also in Kensington.
This is the Kensington within those hottest of hot spots.
But there is also a Kensington that inspires bidding wars for condos and large commercial developments. Here, for instance, is a newly renovated community of expensive lofts.
Zoom the lens out
The point here is that big macro forces and small, micro-targeted explanations are both critical to understanding crime, violence, and victimization. But we do not study them in tandem. Over here, a bunch of smart folks study policy, which is to say, they study big macro forces that affect everyone. Over there, a bunch of smart folks are doing program evaluations and implementation science, studying whether a particular intervention works in a particular place and time. Which is to say, they study small slices of the population. Another group thinks about how to scale programs and practices that work—how to take those small pieces and build a tapestry.
Economists tend to favor studies of macro policy—criminologists tend to favor studies of particular groups of people and places. You probably are not shocked to learn that few of these folks read each other’s papers and talk to each other regularly. That’s a shame because there are a lot of great questions there.
One great question is, why are there such big differences in the impacts of the crime decline? According to the arguments about abortion and lead—and yes, my arguments about debit cards and pharmaceutics—all of these cities were exposed to the same forces. So why was there so much variation?
The other half of the question—why can’t programs that were demonstrated to be successful in small places be expanded and replicated?—is equally important. Both questions are a challenge. Understanding why local context mediates macro effects is complicated. Scaling an effective, evidence-based program—bringing it to everyone who can benefit—is very hard.
This is not a problem unique to violence prevention. I am certainly not qualified to say anything of note about physics, but it certainly looks from the outside like that field struggles with the same problem. There are a set of folks studying the tiniest elements of matter, particles and strings and such. And another set looking at giant universe-wide forces—the birth and death of time and space. It doesn’t look from where I sit like the studies of particles scale well to understanding the universe, nor the converse. But I strongly suspect the folks thinking hard about the nature of the universe are reading enough about particles and string to include it in their thinking. And vice versa.
Holding Two Thoughts Simultaneously
So it seems to me that when you put all of that together that there is an eminently reasonable course of action to explore. If the goal is to reduce violence, we should want to start first by bringing to bear big, macro forces to remove dangerous risks and to create a rising tide of resiliency. We should simultaneously focus on building evidence on what works to support the smallest places at the greatest risk. And feed that knowledge back into our understanding of the big macro forces.
If we don’t do that, we will find places awash in evidence-based interventions that flounder whenever the macro tide goes out. And waste precious resources on promoting big policy ideas that turn out to benefit some places and penalize others1.
But all of this turns out not to be as hard as it sounds! We need to think harder about policies that have secondary effects on violence and victimization, particularly at the place level, and focus intensely on those.
I’ll say more about this when the article comes out, but child poverty policies strike me as a critical place to start. There are ten different ways (or more!) we can address child poverty through tax policy (Earned-income tax credit (EITC), Social Security, Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Housing assistance, National School Lunch Program (SNAP) and more!). Which one(s) of these has the biggest secondary effect (a positive externality) on violence reduction, particularly in the very small number of highest-violence places? We don’t know. We don’t do studies like that.
But we should.
How Sandy Hook Changed Us
And what did you learn from that? And what did you learn since then?
Wednesday, December 14th marked the ten-year anniversary of Sandy Hook. So much has been said, but one point is really overlooked.
Sandy Hook really did change us, collectively. To understand that, note that there is a yawning divide between our feelings and our politics—our feelings about guns and violence and the politics of guns. In reflecting on Sandy Hook, it is often said that we have done nothing, and that is overwhelmingly true. But that’s about the politics and politics have not only stymied safety reforms but pushed out disastrous expansions of permitless carry and Stand Your Ground laws.
But the polls mislead us and confuse politics and beliefs. Almost all of the gun polling questions are about laws—should gun laws be more or less strict? And we misinterpret the answers as a reflection of American attitudes toward guns. But a different question gets at our beliefs—what do you use your gun for? Gallup asked this question twice in the decade before Sandy Hook and respondents said they use their gun equally for target shooting, hunting, and protection against crime. By last year, those numbers had changed dramatically and almost everyone said they owned a gun for protection—88 percent. We are more afraid—afraid for ourselves, afraid for our children, afraid for each other. And paralyzed to do anything about it.
That is one legacy of Sandy Hook.
Peace
This week, I had the great fortune to meet with Mandar Apte, founder of Cities 4 Peace, an anti-violence group offering programs to “reduce stress and create leaders.” If you are interested, you can stream “From India with Love” on Amazon, documenting the journey of gun violence survivors—victims of Sandy Hook, gang violence, and domestic violence—through India in search of… peace. There’s a lovely moment described by a North Jersey high school counselor as the group winds its way through the streets of Mumbai. The school counselor occasionally waves to passersby, acknowledging a stranger in a typically casual, western way, before one young man stops, looks him in the eyes, puts his hand over his heart, and says, ‘I see you brother.’
Happy holidays.
Musical Interlude
The kid is home from college and my college buddy called me this AM and I am overcome with a wave of nostalgia. Never fear though, I will inflict my melancholia upon you only in an oblique way. To honor my late 1980s that were squandered deliciously and languorously in rural Ohio, I give you REM’s most famous song not sung by Michael Stipe (Mike Mills). And a song that is, in fact, a cover. To make what is old new again, here’s the original Superman, by The Clique, from 1970.
It’s easy to look at the pictures of Kensington above and think, hey, this is really just about gentrification. But, what this isn’t about is gentrification, at least not really. Gentrification is definitively not about directly supporting the people in disadvantaged micro-places—it’s not about removing big dangerous risks, and it’s not about creating a rising tide of resiliency. It’s about displacing people. And that’s not a solution to crime, violence and victimization. There needs to be better alignment across all people’s interests at the intersection of policy-making and practice.