Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice Science, Practice, and Policy (2023) / Chapter Skim
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6 Community-Driven Safety and Reducing Harm
6 Community-Driven Safety and Reducing Harm
Pages 197-226
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From page 197... ...
The organizers of these efforts often view the aim of their work as not just reducing crime but also reducing racial inequality in crime and criminal justice involvement by increasing a community's capacity, through the community's own methods of decision m aking, to determine what safety is and how it is achieved. This chapter builds on findings from Part I of this report by exploring ways that community members, community-based organizations, and community representatives (formal and informal)
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From page 198... ...
This chapter assesses the state of the literature on collective efficacy and neighborhood social organization, including "bottom up" approaches that seek to build informal social controls and cohesion among residents in the community. It then reviews several community initiatives for defining and producing safety and assesses their implications for reducing racial inequality in the criminal justice system.
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From page 199... ...
Due to their local character, community initiatives vary enormously in their implementation and in the environments in which they operate. Considering this heterogeneity, the committee draws some general principles that might effectively be adapted to local conditions, with the goal of reducing racial inequality in the criminal justice system.
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From page 200... ...
The committee characterizes pro grams or practices as "promising" if they approach the work in ways that are known to build informal social controls and cohesion among residents in a community. Further evaluation is needed to determine whether or how such programs/practices do so and the impact of these programs/practices on producing safety and mitigating racial inequalities.
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From page 201... ...
358) .2 COLLECTIVE EFFICACY AND NEIGHBORHOOD SOCIAL ORGANIZATION As introduced in Chapter 3, the theory of collective efficacy is based on a "bottom up" approach to community anti-violence, grounded in informal social controls and cohesion among residents in the community rather than in "top-down" law enforcement by the state (Sampson et al., 1997)
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From page 202... ...
A challenge, then, is to address such structural conditions and increase collective efficacy without unintended consequences and to identify community-driven interventions that reduce crime and racial inequality without undue reliance on the criminal justice system. This involves under standing how community action can create conditions that foster collective efficacy, and how collective efficacy may be undermined by violence, the harms of system contact, and racial inequalities generated by increased vulnerability to the system.
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From page 203... ...
all share the goal of reducing violence through informal mechanisms of control and local organizational partnerships. While the evidence is mixed, some of these efforts offer strategies that deserve further testing and evaluation (Urban Labs, 2022; Bell, 2021; John Jay College Research Advisory Group on Preventing and Reducing Community Violence, 2020)
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From page 204... ...
COMMUNITY-DRIVEN INITIATIVES In this section, we review community-driven initiatives aimed at defining and producing safety and assess their implications for reducing racial inequality in the criminal justice system. The main efforts reviewed include: • Creating systems of accountability for both law enforcement and community organization efforts;
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From page 205... ...
Interventions in neighborhood ecology and local social service efforts are also community-driven approaches with similar goals, and they are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7. This section examines how community members take a leading role in providing safety and reducing racial inequality.
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From page 206... ...
Others operate in tandem with formal systems by diverting individuals away from law enforcement or formal court proceedings. When compared to the principles of control, confinement, and retribution that animate formal criminal systems, many of the community approaches described in this chapter are premised on fundamentally different understandings of justice and safety.
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From page 207... ...
For example, the State of California exercises criminal jurisdiction over Yurok Territory under a federal law called Public Law 280.4 In building its own system, the Yurok have disinvested in incarceration and directed financial resources to a restorative system, including a Wellness Court. Through an agreement with the state, Yurok tribal members may be removed from the state court system and redirected into the tribe's system (Clarren, 2017)
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From page 208... ...
452) contrast Indigenous systems with Anglo-American criminal systems: "whereas the former seeks to reduce crime through punishment, restorative justice seeks to re-establish balance and harmony within each individual affected by an offensive act, within the perpetrator as well as the victim and the community." Due to their emphasis on community definitions of safety, healing, and restorative practices, Indigenous-led efforts to reform criminal and juvenile systems offer alternative approaches to traditional models of criminal justice that deserve evaluation (Braithwaite, 2000)
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From page 209... ...
created a task force to create a roadmap for what it would look like to shift a portion of its law enforcement budget toward community-based programs. Since the creation of that task force, the sustained increase in murder rates has shifted local politics surrounding this issue, with several local city officials critically reconsidering this proposition.
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From page 210... ...
Reflecting the local heterogeneity of violent crime, rates of lethal gun violence have since dropped in some cities that saw increases in 2020, while other cities have seen additional increases. These recent patterns indicate a large increase in serious violence concentrated in Black and Latino communities.
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From page 211... ...
Since the programs depend on the development of trusting relationships, often in the face of threats to safety, successful implementation can be difficult to achieve. In the sections that follow, we describe three violence prevention programs that have drawn great interest in recent years: Operation Ceasefire, Cure Violence, and Advance Peace.
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From page 212... ...
. Operation Ceasefire is a program where law enforcement collaborates with identified community leaders to work with individuals most involved in violent activity, in neighborhoods across the country, to reduce gun violence.
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From page 213... ...
. Cure Violence: A public health model to reduce gun violence.
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From page 214... ...
Operation Ceasefire-style pro grams that partner with law enforcement typically demand change within a short window of time -- if someone engages in criminal activity again, they are severely punished. By contrast, the Advance Peace model operates from an engagement paradigm, one that is informed by an appreciation of the time that relationship-building takes.
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From page 215... ...
. Outcomes Programs organized around these sets of practices show some promise in preventing the involvement of participants in future gun violence and reducing harm done by the criminal justice system, though these results remain mixed and vary based on the program, location, and time frame of the evaluation.
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From page 216... ...
, which is based on a Cure Violence model, show an association with significant increases in violence in three locations in the city (Buggs et al., 2022; Webster et al., 2018, 2013)
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exacerbate racial inequalities in the criminal justice system and more broadly. Like community-led efforts for preventing gun violence, community driven responses to intimate partner violence seek to address the mecha nisms that drive these processes.
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From page 218... ...
As an example, SBI facilitated this type of authentic listening in a circumstance where a sexual assault survivor felt unsafe with local law enforcement. In that case, the district attorney agreed to send investigators to meet with the survivor, listen to the story, explain the process, and a nswer questions.
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From page 219... ...
M.H. First operates a weekend hotline with the aim of interrupting and minimizing the need for law enforcement in mental health crisis first response by providing mobile peer support, de-escalation assistance, and nonpunitive and life-affirming interventions.7 Additionally, one study conducted in Denver (CO)
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From page 220... ...
First, the City of Oakland is also establishing its Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland program that is informed by the CAHOOTS model, which is targeted to help the people most impacted where they are with obtaining the referrals for assistance they need.8 Taken together, these approaches seek to reduce formal interaction with the criminal justice system and address health and behavioral health needs through other systems, including community services. As discussed in Chapter 4, increased exposure to criminal justice surveillance and enforcement among poor and racial and ethnic minority groups and decision making in key phases of the system reinforces and exacerbates racial inequality within and outside of the system.
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From page 221... ...
EXPANDING THE EVIDENCE BASE Many of the community-led efforts discussed above are designed as non-punitive interventions for reducing contact with the criminal justice system, and thus reducing racial inequality, though many lack rigorous evaluation. A major barrier to the expansion of effective community solu tions and continued innovation is the mismatch between what may be the most promising solutions and the knowledge base that is available for communities to draw on.
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From page 222... ...
Measuring Community Social Organization and Views on Safety Part of these efforts would include taking seriously the input of community members in the definition and production of safety. To do so, researchers will need to create a better science of assessing the nature of those members' viewpoints.
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From page 223... ...
As one review puts it, existing research has "data blinders" that result from the fact that too much of the knowledge base for reducing violence depends on studies that measure public safety with data generated by law enforcement and subsequent processing within the criminal justice system (John Jay
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From page 224... ...
Vacant homes are a strong correlate of crime rates and residents have demanded their remediation. One recent study suggests that collective efficacy leads to lower crime in part because of its influence on the built environment, specifically fewer vacant homes (Lanfear, 2022)
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From page 225... ...
, reductions in them are a mechanism for reducing racial inequalities in crime. These pathways are examined in more detail in Chapter 7.
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From page 226... ...
Any investments in community initiatives will need to acknowledge and address the limitations and unintended consequences of efforts to involve "the community" in this work, including how such collaborative efforts may exacerbate preexisting community fault lines. A need for accountability for community-based efforts, like criminal justice responses, exists when setting up funding sources, resource allocation, and evaluation metrics for community-based efforts to address crime outside the purview of criminal justice.
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