Mass murder. Child abuse. Spousal battery. International conflict. Schoolyard bullying. Aggressive driving. Sexual assault. Police misconduct. Suicide.
They’re all forms of violent behavior, and they’ve all been the subject of study by university researchers trying to figure out how to reduce their incidence.
But do they have other significant traits in common? Might researchers find more success studying them collectively than by continuing to treat them individually?
The answer, according to some experts in the field, is a resounding “Yes, but.” That’s because reducing economic inequality, a widely recognized key to deterring various forms of violence, is largely outside the purview of researchers in the field.
“If we are looking for long-term, more or less permanent, solutions to the violence problem in the United States,” said Richard B. Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, “then we have to be thinking about greatly expanded economic opportunities.”
And if a coherent antiviolence strategy exists beyond the reduction of inequality, it’s the idea of thinking small: concentrating resources in limited areas, where the potential gains are most promising.
The big problem there, however, is that effective programs are costly and appear to benefit primarily the politically marginalized. That makes it tough to maintain funding for them, even when they show success.
“Sustainability is a real challenge,” said Thomas Abt, a senior research fellow and adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Center for International Development at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “I don’t think there is any place that has been practicing focused deterrence without any interruption for 20 years.”
Boston is a chief example. After tallying 150 homicides a year in the early 1990s, the city used findings from federally funded research to create a program called Operation Ceasefire. It hired young adults to meet with gang members in violence-plagued neighborhoods to get them to the services they needed to turn their lives around.
The effort was a success, giving Boston an 18-month period without a single youth killed.
Even so, the program then withered, as organizers moved on and attention waned. Homicides again rose. So in 2010 the city created a new program, this time called StreetSafe Boston, largely as an attempt to replicate the up-close-and-personal approach of Operation Ceasefire. Again violence rates fell.
Concentrated Attention
While frustrating, the experience nevertheless affirms that research does produce useful answers for reducing violence, and that those solutions require concentrated attention in specific high-need areas, Mr. Abt said.
Boston’s strategy, he said, stemmed from two key recognitions by researchers. First, 1 percent of youths aged 15 to 24 were responsible for more than 50 percent of all shootings across the city. Second, 70 percent of total shootings over a three-decade period took place in an area covering about 5 percent of the city.
Helping those people and areas — jobs, education, government services — is expensive but clearly works, Mr. Abt said. Yet programs that do that can quickly become victims of their own success, he said, as violence ebbs and others in the city begin questioning the financial outlays.
That basic experience has been repeated elsewhere, said Mr. Abt, who led a review that covered more than 1,400 antiviolence initiatives. The most successful programs, he found, identify problems down to the level of individual people and direct intensive resources at them, while stepping up enforcement and penalties for those who still refuse to abandon violent behavior.
Criminology would be better off with more systematic and sustained attention to the big picture.
Other recognized examples of concentrating resources on leading incubators of violence include the Nurse-Family Partnership, a government-funded nonprofit group that gives expectant mothers from difficult backgrounds a nurse assistant and then counseling during their children’s infancy. The program pays for itself many times over, largely through eventually lower crime rates among their children, Mr. Abt said.
Researchers need to pay close attention to what the data show to be effective, Mr. Rosenfeld said. Then they must resist the temptation to hunt for alternative strategies that might satisfy policymakers operating on short-term reward systems, he said.
“I do not claim that knowledge of the cultural and social conditions that influence crime rates is to be preferred over knowledge of individuals and their immediate social settings,” he said in a 2010 speech as president of the American Society of Criminology. “I maintain simply that criminology would be better off with more systematic and sustained attention to the big picture.”
Another recognized expert on violence, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, said he saw little value in trying to deal collectively with disparate types of violence. But even so, he said, there’s far too little cross-talk among researchers studying different kinds of violence. “Few authors or institutions do so at present,” he said. Studies assessing violence can be invaluable, he said, for calibrating responses that are based on the actual threats posed by each type.
Without better comparisons, he and other researchers said, policymakers and the public worry far too much about statistically low-level threats such as terrorism and mass shootings while paying too little attention to more common forms of violence, such as suicides and single-victim homicides.
The police may not be able to directly prevent many homicides and suicides, Mr. Rosenfeld said. But reducing all kinds of violence and improving the public trust in the police through programs like StreetSafe Boston might, over time, make people less likely to feel the need to carry weapons or settle disputes with violence, he said.
Beyond that, he said, solving violence is a matter of economic commitment. And that must involve significant involvement from the public sector, because the private sector alone cannot create all the jobs that are needed.
“It’s a question of whether the will is there to do it,” Mr. Rosenfeld said of confronting violence holistically. “But jobs has to be at the top.”
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.
