Reddit reviews Don't Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America

Yes we do need to focus on the immediate problem. What if we didn't just throw around ideas that sound good in theory but actually tried evidence-based solutions that have been proven to work in other cities? Like focused deterrence or "safe streets"

P.s. stop-and-frisk sounds good to some but there's no evidence that it works. All it does is make minorities feel like cops are out to get them. NYC dropped it by 97% after it was declared unconstitutional and crime went down. Surprisingly - or maybe not so surprisingly - the evidence-based stuff that seems to work also seems to be the stuff that involves treating people like rational human beings and trying to understand the reasons behind their choices (i.e. stealing a gun b/c you're afraid someone wants to shoot you first) and working to change those incentives (i.e. coming up with ways to disrupt the social dynamics of retaliation), rather than ideas that assume, either explicitly or implicitly, that criminals are just evil people that need more 'justice system' thrown at them.

Urban communities of color are over-policed, and our sentences for almost everything are too harsh. I know, I know, this sounds like liberal SJW party line talk, but the facts bear it out.

The US has the highest rate of incarceration on the planet (and by far a higher rate of incarceration than any industrialized/European country we view as our social peers). If you start parsing out demographics, black and latino Americans have incarceration rates that somewhere around 10x any comparable nation. I'm talking gulag/apartheid level incarceration rates for these subgroups. (Sorry for the lack of figures throughout this post, but it's too much work to bust out the books each time. In general, these figures are what I remember from Crime and Public Policy). To me, the most convincing piece of evidence is the disparity between arrest rates for drug use of adolescents by race. White and black teenagers use at about the same rate, but black teenagers are arrested far more frequently. Are black teenagers made safer by that higher arrest rate? Are white teenagers made worse off by their lower drug arrest rate?
I think the answer (on aggregate) is a resounding no on both counts. That's over policing right there, where fewer contacts results in better outcomes.

So what do we get from this? We lock people up for far longer than any of our peer nations do for similar crimes (the common anecdote here is a life sentence in the UK is only 15 years) and for far longer than we did historically (again, anecdotal but look at some of the sentences in an old crim law casebook. I'm talking 7 years for 2nd degree murder). Yet, we also have a middling to high rate of crime (particularly homicide). Either American's are particularly criminal, particularly insensitive to incarceration, or other nations have a better system (i.e., one that achieves better/comparable results with less incarceration). That's what I mean by draconian charging; we could have less incarceration and the same or better crime rates with the right system. And these excessive sentences create other problems as well, such as giving prosecutors disproportionate power to dictate punishment.

So where can we trace these phenomena to? The explosion of inner-city crime from the 1960's to the 1990's. This unprecedented level of violence and crime caused an overreaction of law and order, so this is where we start getting 10-25 year sentences for possession of drugs. Just think about that, we are penalizing simple possession more harshly than most of sister nations do for murder. This escalation in drug sentencing caused an escalation in everything else, because once you're getting heavy sentences for mere possession it seems weird to give out a lighter sentence for manslaughter or assault. The concentration of violence in the inner cities (the cause of which is still up for debate, see When the Work Disappears or Don't Shoot or even lead) means that we concentrate these harsh sentences on on inner-city residents who are primarily minorities.

Finally, if you have any interest in this area at all, read "When Brute Force Fails" by Kleiman. It's only like 80 pages, but it lays out the theory and the basic stats for why our current system should be considered to over-police but under-protect.

Thank you for the DoJ source and for acknowledging its limitations, as well as the FBI's.

>Crime statistics on CCW are pretty spotty at the moment, and I am not confident as the CCW gun homicide rate.

Yeah, most states don't track the stats of their permit holders vs. the general population. The only one I'm aware of right now is Texas. You can see their full conviction rate reports as well as the population counts from 1996 onward so you can calculate relative rates per 100,000 population.

>What this tells me is that you’d agree with me that more CCW permit holders means more people getting shot to death.

I'm not sure what to tell you other than that from 1996 onward the total Texas CHL homicide rate has been below 1 while the total Texas homicide rate per 100,000 went from 7.7 in 1996 down to 4.4 in 2012 while the national average was 7.4 in 1996 down to 4.7 in 2012. If you removed the Texas CHL population from Texas, the state and national average homicide rate per 100,000 population goes up, not down. I encourage you to explore the Texas CHL stats and the FBI UCR data tool if you haven't already.

You'll notice the overall drop in crime and homicide across the US went on as states moved from prohibited or may-issue to shall-issue for concealed carry. To make it crystal clear, I don't think gun ownership or CCW has a significant impact on crime in either direction.

As I said from the beginning, crime is rooted in social inequality and disenfranchisement. Desperate people turn to crime when they can't make an honest living, and once they're on that path it's hard to turn back. Many criminals weren't given the requisite opportunities in their formative years to be competitive in the job market.

In Canada, the Pathways to Education program attempted to address this in urban centers, with success. Programs like this go far in preventing crime from new generations.

Also David Kennedy's community integration work in Boston and its success is slowly spreading to other US urban centers. I'd like to see programs like these flourish, because they've proven effective in reducing crime and violence.

The only thing I admit is that I'm surprised at how far you were willing to project onto me. I would never do the same to you.

Homicide is homicide; the causes are what's important, not the means. I'm not sure why you're so fixated on "gun homicides" instead of just homicides in general. Again, the solution to around 60-80% of crime and homicides in the US involves uplifting people, ensuring equality of opportunity from an early age, and expanding freedoms rather than taking them away. Why not focus your efforts there?

This is exciting. I'm glad to hear Oakland is finally implementing Operation Ceasefire, having recently read David Kennedy's book Don't Shoot. I hope it can work. Nabbing these 8 will hopefully have a ripple effect.

I HIGHLY recommend reading his book.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1608194140#

Here is the mobile version of your link

David Kennedy has some really interesting stuff:

http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Shoot-Fellowship-Violence-Inner-City/dp/1608194140
http://www.c-span.org/video/?303600-1/book-discussion-dont-shoot

You're right: it's a little bit hard to know without looking at the original study or at least an accurate summary thereof. I am assuming that these studies are not in laboratory conditions and are rather interpretations of real-world data. When I said "cannot," I assumed (wrongly?) that you cannot cause crime in order to study crime-fighting techniques.

BTW, this book is the best thing I've read on the subject.