Second of an
occasional series.
Rochester has the
highest murder rate in New YorkState — and, for
a city its size, one of the highest in the country. Overwhelmingly, the crimes
are committed by young, black males. Overwhelmingly, the victims are young black
males.
How,
in a city once known for its strong industries, good school system, and
superior cultural offerings, has this happened? What can be done about it? What
works?
In
a recent interview, RIT criminal justice professor John Klofas described the
factors that have shaped Rochester’s inner-city
neighborhoods, where most of the violent crime takes place. (That discussion,
published in the April 12 edition of City Newspaper, is online at
www.rochester-citynews.com.) He also described changes in the criminal-justice
system and other reforms — measures taken in some other cities — that could
begin to have an effect.
Klofas
is a longtime observer of criminal-justice efforts, in Rochester and
throughout the nation. He is frequently called on for advice by the
criminal-justice system here and in other cities, and he co-chaired the
public-safety committee of Mayor Bob Duffy’s transition team.
What
follows is the second part of an edited version of the interview with Klofas.
City:
What works and what doesn’t work to deal with a problem like this?
Klofas: One of the
most interesting things to happen in the last decade or 15 years is the growing
evidence that the criminal justice system can have an impact on serious
violence, even when underlying social conditions don’t change. I think there
are things that police departments do, that courts do, that prosecutors do,
that the criminal justice system does. I think when it focuses on keeping
people alive and preventing homicides and preventing crime, it can be
successful and still have the social conditions that give rise to these
problems in the first place.
What
kinds of things specifically?
Making
institutions effective — making the criminal justice system effective. Most
people growing up who have contact with the criminal justice system learn that
it doesn’t have very significant teeth for them. They get arrested 5, 8, 12
times before anything significant happens, and then it’s not much. And then
it’s excused because they’re a juvenile or a youthful offender, and then they
get into the serious stuff. So I think people get conditioned to the criminal
justice system not necessarily working very well.
I
think what works is convincing people who are in serious crime that the
criminal justice system is going to work: identifying people who are involved
in serious crime and providing a strong deterrent message. And parallel to
that, providing an alternative way of getting by, another approach so they
don’t have to find everything in the gang, or the group. You know, provide some
real future for them. That I think is one thing that works.
I
think early intervention can work. I think things that normalize life for young
people. For example, the evidence on visiting nurse programs — in particular,
visiting prenatal-care programs — is pretty strong for affecting crime 15
years down the line. It brings people into a home who then see and repair a
whole range of problems. If there’s violence in the home, that gets addressed.
If there are nutrition problems in the home, if there’s isolation: there’s a
sort of gentle normalization process that goes on that’s missing.
But
when you talk about making the criminal justice system work, it sounds like
you’re talking about harsh penalties.
I
think there’s some of that in there, in the process. There has to be, I think,
a realistic threat of harsh penalties for people to be convinced that
deterrence is in fact a reality. But I also think that if the whole thing
works, those harsh penalties are less numerous.
Is
this like what Rudolph Giuliani did in New York
City, cracking down on little stuff?
What
Giuliani did is not the same thing, but I think there’s a lot to be said for
what he did. As I figure it, before he started, there were 2,300 murders in New York
City. Now there are 550, and it’s held. It’s held for a long
time. They did a variety of things. They put resources where crime was
occurring in real time: today, where is it? That stuff. But second, it was a
very aggressive approach to policing, which had the effect of discouraging
people from carrying guns. That meant that when people were going out in the
street, they worried about being stopped by the police, getting either a local
or federal sentence for having possession of a weapon. So they would leave the weapon
home.
When
you talk about aggressive policing, you’re not talking about in-your-face
bullying by police?
I
don’t think you have to have that, but I think you have to have a police
presence and a police response to relatively low-level activity, which suggests
that if you’re carrying guns there’s a likelihood that you’re going to be
stopped and detected. And if you’re stopped and have a gun on you illegally,
there will be pretty sharp consequences.
People
always say they carry guns for protection, so there’s this sort of competition
between what matters most: the threat from the criminal justice system or the
threat from one’s neighborhood. Somehow you have to reverse the equation and
make it safer in people’s minds to not carry a gun than to carry a gun.
There’s
this sort of tipping-point effect; you reach a point where fewer and fewer
people are carrying guns, so you have less and less reason to even contemplate
carrying a gun, so you feel safer and safer, and safety grows exponentially.
And
you may still have the hardest of the hard-core criminals, but you’ve got this
ring of people out there who are not quite as committed to the gangs?
That’s
exactly right. You have people whose behavior now is more influenced by the
deterrent threat of the criminal justice system than by the perception of
needing to carry a gun for other reasons. I think that’s what happened in New York. I don’t
think it was the severity of sanctions as much as the risk of running into
police. All that low-level enforcement stuff meant that anybody could be
stopped anytime.
There’s
no question there’s a real competition between the individual liberty rights
— the right to not be hassled — and the aggressive models of policing.
That’s an unresolved situation. And in some neighborhoods, that equation gets
worked out very differently than it does in others.
Is
that what you would recommend to the new chief? That kind of aggressive
policing in the crescent and not on Park Avenue?
It’s
a very serious question. There’s really not an easy answer. At both ends,
you’re dealing with dreadful consequences. I think in the end, preservation of
life is the most significant value that you can pursue. I also think that all
of this can be done constitutionally.
Can
you do it without dramatically increasing the number of cops?
New York certainly
didn’t do it without dramatically increasing police. They increased the number
of police significantly. There are a lot of things you can do without
necessarily increasing the number of police. Some of the stuff they did here
was with the joint forces [state police assisting Rochester police
efforts in targeted neighborhoods]: borrowing cops, essentially, which has been
helpful, I think. I think there’s a lot to be said for community-policing kinds
of interventions that reduce social distance and engage neighborhoods in the same
process.
One
of the other significant findings in all of this is that the stronger the
neighborhood, the lower the crime rate. The Chicago studies have
clearly suggested that this is very important. It’s not entirely clear the sort
of chicken-egg combination, but certainly in neighborhoods where people won’t
respond to problems because they’re fearful on the street in front of their
homes, who won’t call the police or who won’t give police information about a
serious crime because they’re fearful: those circumstances become conducive to
more crime rather than less crime.
This article appears in Apr 19-25, 2006.
