Read the article; thanks. Thought about in comparison to Philly shootings cuz that’s my lens. “The average age of all fatal and nonfatal shooting victims is 29.” https://www.thetrace.org/2023/04/philadelphia-gun-violence-teens-kids/. Suicides (all causes) in Philly 10 in 100,000; murder victim 3x that rate, shooting victims 12x that rate. Felony assault victims, carjacking victims order of magnitude greater rates than suicide. If you wanted to die all you would need to do is walk in Kensington after 8pm. What a dilemma; trans is not a mental illness but requires therapy to prevent suicide. Udder (:D) nonsense. I am certain though that they want taxpayers to pay for the services.
I am focused on the city gun violence issue as well. There is a problem that is a true emergency, but it is like dragging a dead elephant to get any attention to it. Then you have this teeny, tiny, minority of trans people with their unusual personal crisis, and it is front and central to half the country! The direction of people's attention appears controlled by puppet masters. Brings back images from a lot of sci-fi novels.
Above link is to a report on Operation Ceasefire, which was part of the Boston Gun Project carried out in the Nineties, when gang violence was at a peak. I found it interesting and informative. I don't know much about criminal justice, apart from the fact that I treat law enforcement personnel in my psychology practice.
One of the findings of the report is that the majority of the most violent crimes, typically murders, were committed by a small number of repeat offenders based in a large black neighborhood. The social workers and non-profit liberal types who provided services in that community said that if one kid personally knew a shooting victim, the surviving kid had 9 times the risk of becoming a shooting victim himself, as opposed to peers who didn't know the victim.
I recall Glenn Loury and John McWhorter making similar statements, about a small number of young black criminals being responsible for the majority of violent crimes. I think this is a well established finding now, that the bulk of the crimes are committed by young black men who started their violent behavior in their teens and who become career criminals.
The Boston Gun Project was successful in reducing the number of shootings, but not in eliminating them. The authors also noted that the interventions they did were very intensive, resource expensive, and not practical to implement broadly in the way they were implemented during the Project. Some form of their model was recommended for use, however, and I was interested to see that Portland was one of the cities that planned to try it out.
I don't know what happened with the Portland experiment. The higher ranking police personnel who would have managed the project have all retired and many have died; I don't know if there is still anyone around here who remembers if the project was implemented or how it turned out. Officers who worked Portland's small black neighborhood during the Nineties have told me about the incredible levels of gang violence going on during that time. Oregon passed mandatory sentencing laws, and many if not most police officers credited those laws with getting the gang leaders out of the neighborhoods for a long enough time for some recovery to occur. The officers dreaded the dates when these guys were scheduled for release from prison, anticipating that the violence would explode again. That turned out to be not so true until recently, with the Nineties being a record peak for black gang violence nationally.
It does appear that removing the core violent criminals from big city black neighborhoods has been an effective strategy for reducing the extreme violence they perpetrate. There may be a lot of these guys in terms of prison cells needed, but they are a very small percentage of the young black men in our country.
Again, I don't know enough about criminal justice to offer a sophisticated comparison of black neighborhood crime organizations with twentieth century Italian American neighborhood crime, but prosecuting and imprisoning the Casa Nostra leadership did seem to diminish their power. I recently read, however, that the Detroit Mafia is still alive and kicking, albeit with a leaner organization. I think one of the differences between the Italian and black criminals, however, is that the Mafia children were able to transition into legitimate businesses. The Little Italy neighborhoods also transitioned as their citizens followed the usual immigrant paths to assimilation and middle class or better success.
Yup! That's Portland. Just recently (past month) the City has finally started moving the junkies, mentally ill and other so-called homeless people off the streets. They aren't exactly leaving town, however. The wokesters want all of us to pay for free permanent housing for all of them. This of course is not what most of the people on the street want, but the wokesters didn't ask them.
Meanwhile, a couple of locally based state legislators proposed a bill that would impose a $1K fine against anyone who "harasses" a street person or tells them to move their tent, and would also enable the street person to sue citizens or agencies for similar offenses.
Fortunately, this bill did get enough pushback so it has been stopped.
You are inferring that the criminal justice system should somehow be a preventative to what is a deep rooted psychosocial cultural problem. There is no enforceable prophylaxis for Honor killings and turf wars in a dysfunctional culture awash in guns cannot be forcibly without applying martial law like strategies anathema to our political ethos.
The police can attempt to only clean up the mess in the aftermath. Minds have to be changed. Cops walking the beat are useless. Storehousing thousands of young black men with the resultant lowering of crime statistics is very socially and politically problematic.
Your post is consistent with what I have learned. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that the application of these methodologies for countering violence in black neighborhoods follows the same path as most other programs developed to address public problems. Namely, the interventions happen during times when the problem becomes intolerable and there is pressure on bureaucrats to do something about it. The interventions work well or not at all, but either way they get dropped when the heat is off the politicians. Then some new fad is implemented which may be the opposite of the one that worked.
In Portland during the Nineties and thereafter we had a very active Gang Unit in the police department. Officers who worked in it had a special interest in working with kids who were in the gangs or at least peripheral, but were not hardened criminals (yet). In the summer of 2020 Joann Hardesty, who is a black activist and former elected City Council member, decided that anti-gang interventions by the police were racist because "they targeted black people" and pushed successfully for defunding and dissolution of these police units. The people of Portland also elected as D.A. Mike Schmidt, who campaigned on a platform that included his opposition to incarceration. (Yes, seriously!) Hardesty was voted out of office in November of 2022, and a guy named Rene Gonzalez, who campaigned on a relatively harder law and order platform won her Council seat. I was surprised and relieved that Portlanders were actually willing to get rid of Hardesty, but I am not seeing much reduction in gang related violence and theft so far. Gonzalez can't do it all on his own, obviously, when the D.A. continues with his anti law enforcement stance, as does a high percentage of Portlanders, and their elected representatives in the state government.
I see. I haven’t seen the particular data you refer to but anecdotally I haven’t had the sense that there has been any meaningful reduction in black on black killings in gang affiliated areas like Chicago.
Ask yourself, If there was a reduction why would the Floyd incident ramp it up again? You imply the Ferguson Effect has diminished police proactivity. Perhaps so but that implies the police are only putting a bandage on a dysfunctional cultural hemorrhage which doesn’t get to the causal heart of the problem.
I also question, considering the significant number of revenge homicides, that there are only a handful of bad actors or, if so, they are readily replaced like a Hydra’s head.
Perhaps the answer is not only more intense strategic policing but better community policing that doesn’t catalyze the populace into rioting. A negative feedback loop.
Read the article; thanks. Thought about in comparison to Philly shootings cuz that’s my lens. “The average age of all fatal and nonfatal shooting victims is 29.” https://www.thetrace.org/2023/04/philadelphia-gun-violence-teens-kids/. Suicides (all causes) in Philly 10 in 100,000; murder victim 3x that rate, shooting victims 12x that rate. Felony assault victims, carjacking victims order of magnitude greater rates than suicide. If you wanted to die all you would need to do is walk in Kensington after 8pm. What a dilemma; trans is not a mental illness but requires therapy to prevent suicide. Udder (:D) nonsense. I am certain though that they want taxpayers to pay for the services.
I believe tax payers are already paying for these services...
I am focused on the city gun violence issue as well. There is a problem that is a true emergency, but it is like dragging a dead elephant to get any attention to it. Then you have this teeny, tiny, minority of trans people with their unusual personal crisis, and it is front and central to half the country! The direction of people's attention appears controlled by puppet masters. Brings back images from a lot of sci-fi novels.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles1/nij/188741.txt
Above link is to a report on Operation Ceasefire, which was part of the Boston Gun Project carried out in the Nineties, when gang violence was at a peak. I found it interesting and informative. I don't know much about criminal justice, apart from the fact that I treat law enforcement personnel in my psychology practice.
One of the findings of the report is that the majority of the most violent crimes, typically murders, were committed by a small number of repeat offenders based in a large black neighborhood. The social workers and non-profit liberal types who provided services in that community said that if one kid personally knew a shooting victim, the surviving kid had 9 times the risk of becoming a shooting victim himself, as opposed to peers who didn't know the victim.
I recall Glenn Loury and John McWhorter making similar statements, about a small number of young black criminals being responsible for the majority of violent crimes. I think this is a well established finding now, that the bulk of the crimes are committed by young black men who started their violent behavior in their teens and who become career criminals.
The Boston Gun Project was successful in reducing the number of shootings, but not in eliminating them. The authors also noted that the interventions they did were very intensive, resource expensive, and not practical to implement broadly in the way they were implemented during the Project. Some form of their model was recommended for use, however, and I was interested to see that Portland was one of the cities that planned to try it out.
I don't know what happened with the Portland experiment. The higher ranking police personnel who would have managed the project have all retired and many have died; I don't know if there is still anyone around here who remembers if the project was implemented or how it turned out. Officers who worked Portland's small black neighborhood during the Nineties have told me about the incredible levels of gang violence going on during that time. Oregon passed mandatory sentencing laws, and many if not most police officers credited those laws with getting the gang leaders out of the neighborhoods for a long enough time for some recovery to occur. The officers dreaded the dates when these guys were scheduled for release from prison, anticipating that the violence would explode again. That turned out to be not so true until recently, with the Nineties being a record peak for black gang violence nationally.
It does appear that removing the core violent criminals from big city black neighborhoods has been an effective strategy for reducing the extreme violence they perpetrate. There may be a lot of these guys in terms of prison cells needed, but they are a very small percentage of the young black men in our country.
Again, I don't know enough about criminal justice to offer a sophisticated comparison of black neighborhood crime organizations with twentieth century Italian American neighborhood crime, but prosecuting and imprisoning the Casa Nostra leadership did seem to diminish their power. I recently read, however, that the Detroit Mafia is still alive and kicking, albeit with a leaner organization. I think one of the differences between the Italian and black criminals, however, is that the Mafia children were able to transition into legitimate businesses. The Little Italy neighborhoods also transitioned as their citizens followed the usual immigrant paths to assimilation and middle class or better success.
Yup! That's Portland. Just recently (past month) the City has finally started moving the junkies, mentally ill and other so-called homeless people off the streets. They aren't exactly leaving town, however. The wokesters want all of us to pay for free permanent housing for all of them. This of course is not what most of the people on the street want, but the wokesters didn't ask them.
Meanwhile, a couple of locally based state legislators proposed a bill that would impose a $1K fine against anyone who "harasses" a street person or tells them to move their tent, and would also enable the street person to sue citizens or agencies for similar offenses.
Fortunately, this bill did get enough pushback so it has been stopped.
https://ktvz.com/news/national-world/cnn-national/2023/05/08/a-huge-homeless-camp-will-be-cleared-after-neighbors-sued-what-happens-to-its-vulnerable-residents-is-an-open-question-2/
You are inferring that the criminal justice system should somehow be a preventative to what is a deep rooted psychosocial cultural problem. There is no enforceable prophylaxis for Honor killings and turf wars in a dysfunctional culture awash in guns cannot be forcibly without applying martial law like strategies anathema to our political ethos.
The police can attempt to only clean up the mess in the aftermath. Minds have to be changed. Cops walking the beat are useless. Storehousing thousands of young black men with the resultant lowering of crime statistics is very socially and politically problematic.
Your post is consistent with what I have learned. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that the application of these methodologies for countering violence in black neighborhoods follows the same path as most other programs developed to address public problems. Namely, the interventions happen during times when the problem becomes intolerable and there is pressure on bureaucrats to do something about it. The interventions work well or not at all, but either way they get dropped when the heat is off the politicians. Then some new fad is implemented which may be the opposite of the one that worked.
In Portland during the Nineties and thereafter we had a very active Gang Unit in the police department. Officers who worked in it had a special interest in working with kids who were in the gangs or at least peripheral, but were not hardened criminals (yet). In the summer of 2020 Joann Hardesty, who is a black activist and former elected City Council member, decided that anti-gang interventions by the police were racist because "they targeted black people" and pushed successfully for defunding and dissolution of these police units. The people of Portland also elected as D.A. Mike Schmidt, who campaigned on a platform that included his opposition to incarceration. (Yes, seriously!) Hardesty was voted out of office in November of 2022, and a guy named Rene Gonzalez, who campaigned on a relatively harder law and order platform won her Council seat. I was surprised and relieved that Portlanders were actually willing to get rid of Hardesty, but I am not seeing much reduction in gang related violence and theft so far. Gonzalez can't do it all on his own, obviously, when the D.A. continues with his anti law enforcement stance, as does a high percentage of Portlanders, and their elected representatives in the state government.
https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-mayor-ted-wheeler-changes-city-police-bureau/
I see. I haven’t seen the particular data you refer to but anecdotally I haven’t had the sense that there has been any meaningful reduction in black on black killings in gang affiliated areas like Chicago.
Ask yourself, If there was a reduction why would the Floyd incident ramp it up again? You imply the Ferguson Effect has diminished police proactivity. Perhaps so but that implies the police are only putting a bandage on a dysfunctional cultural hemorrhage which doesn’t get to the causal heart of the problem.
I also question, considering the significant number of revenge homicides, that there are only a handful of bad actors or, if so, they are readily replaced like a Hydra’s head.
Perhaps the answer is not only more intense strategic policing but better community policing that doesn’t catalyze the populace into rioting. A negative feedback loop.