PA Bill Number: HB829
Title: In preliminary provisions, further providing for definitions;
Description: An Act amending the act of April 12, 1951 (P.L.90, No.21), known as the Liquor Code, in preliminary provisions, further providing for definitions;
Last Action: Signed in House
Last Action Date: Jul 3, 2024
Taking Aim at Gun Violence, With Personal Deterrence :: 04/03/2018
A month ago on a college campus in Newburgh, N.Y., an unusual group gathered to talk about gun violence: community leaders, social service providers, the police chief, the district attorney, a staff member of the United States attorney’s office — and 11 of the most dangerous individuals in Newburgh.
A few years ago, this town of 30,000 had the highest rates of violent crime and homicide in New York State. The gathering — the seventh since October 2015 — was part of the city’s response: its Group Violence Intervention.
The 10 men and one woman had been required to attend by their probation or parole officers. They were nervous. A few had brought along a mother, aunt or uncle. The police chose them because they were members of the gangs or crews most likely to shoot someone, or be shot — usually active gangs in active disputes.
Lt. Cortez and Ms. Rojas review messages that offer services to high-risk individuals to help them stay out of trouble.CreditVincent Cianni for The New York Times
Each individual had received a personalized letter signed by the police chief and district attorney, warning of this peril. “We want you safe, alive and out of prison,” the letter said. It then laid out the long prison terms they faced if caught with a gun or committing a gun crime.
At the meeting, Police Lt. Joseph Cortez showed slides with photos of men arrested recently in Newburgh, along with the sentences they were serving. “They didn’t take the opportunity to get out of the lifestyle,” he said, urging the people in the room to choose differently. “Now you and your group are going to be getting a lot of scrutiny.”
“You can see them really lean forward at that point,” said Isabel Rojas, a former New York City police officer who runs the intervention out of the district attorney’s office.
Ms. Rojas, Lt Cortez and Newburgh Detective Y. Rodriguez (center) talk to the father of a high-risk individual at a home in New Windsor.CreditVincent Cianni for The New York Times
Then Ms. Rojas introduced staff members from the organization Exodus Transitional Community and urged people to call for help with resumes, job training, graduation equivalency diploma preparation, housing — whatever they needed.
A pastor, a mother who had lost her son and a formerly incarcerated man spoke about the impact of guns. “Some guys just sit there and look like they’re bored to death,” Ms. Rojas said. “But most, you can tell it’s getting to them. They drop their heads down. That’s the voice of pain, and they’re thinking, ‘I wouldn’t want my mom to go through this.’ ”
And then food: wrap sandwiches, salad and brownies. “Something nice,” Ms. Rojas said. “We have it catered. Not pizza.”
The March for Our Lives, with its diverse speakers, remembered something that is often overlooked in the national debate over guns: killings by school shooters and terrorists make up less than 3 percent of the nation’s gun homicides.
Many people can envision getting in the path of a mass shooter. But few with any influence imagine themselves threatened by everyday urban violence. As has always been true in criminal justice (see most recently: Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La.), the United States values a black life far less than a white one.
Florida, for example, just passed a $400 million bill to arm school employees and fund school safety programs, in addition to adopting some small gun-control measures. It contains no money for urban gun violence.
Yet a child is statistically safer in school than anywhere else. A school can expect a shooting once every few thousand years. If police officers are moved to schools from other places, safety overall will decrease. (It can also lead to stoking the school-to-prison pipeline through more arrests of children — usually African-American boys — for ordinary acting out.)
We do not know how to stop mass shootings. But we do know how to reduce urban gun violence. Strong evidence exists for several programs. Perhaps the best-proven is what Newburgh does, a strategy called focused deterrence.
A new paper surveyed 24 studies of focused deterrence initiatives and found “noteworthy crime control” and “solid support for the adoption of such programs by police agencies.” Other studies — reports are available here, here and here — have found the same.
Focused deterrence is the opposite of “zero tolerance” policing, which seeks to punish disorder and minor crimes, often with mass arrests, on the theory that disorder sends a message that crime is tolerated.
Instead, focused deterrence targets the very worst behavior of the most violent. It doesn’t seek to dismantle gangs — just to keep them from shooting. No mass arrests are necessary to send a message that the community condemns violence. Mothers, pastors and youth leaders tell criminals so, directly.
More than 80 cities are using the strategy, which often goes by the name Ceasefire. Many more would use it if they had help and funding. It’s a lot cheaper than hiring more police, but it does require some money, especially to set up. After that, many cities run it with no additional resources.
Newburgh could do it because New York State has its Gun-Involved Violence Elimination Initiative, which gives cities with high rates of violent crime money and technical support to use evidence-based programs.
But New York is virtually alone, one of only a few states that do this. At the federal level, there have been very few grants for urban gun crime prevention. The administration’s budget for 2019, however, calls for a major increase in money cities might use to fund focused deterrence programs.
The father of focused deterrence is David Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and the leader of the National Network for Safe Communities, which spreads focused deterrence, among other strategies. In 1994, Mr. Kennedy and other academics went to the Boston Police Department and asked to start a working group to combat youth homicide. Two years later, Operation Ceasefire made its debut there and produced an immediate and sustained drop in youth homicide and shootings, unlike that of any other American city.
David M. Kennedy is a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and the director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay.CreditAnn Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor, via Getty Images
“Ceasefire recognized that homicide and gun violence overwhelmingly are driven by a very small network of very high-risk people,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It’s not about dangerous neighborhoods full of bad people. The community wants to be safe and hates violence.”
Antonio Cediel, an educator and community organizer, runs urban anti-violence programs at the PICO Network, a national organization of faith-based groups. PICO is helping a dozen cities start Ceasefire-type programs. Mr. Cediel said that in his home city of Oakland, Calif., with 420,000 people, “between 250 and 350 people are responsible for a majority of the shootings.” And at any moment only about 50 to 100 are responsible — depending on which disputes and grievances are running hot.
Late in March, two gangs in Newburgh had a run-in, during which shots were fired and a man in a car ran over two people. (Nobody died.) “There was going to be some major retaliation,” Lt. Cortez said. He and Ms. Rojas spent Monday visiting the homes of individuals likely to be involved.
In what is called a custom notification, they knocked on the door and asked to see the individual. “If someone doesn’t want to talk to us, we talk to a sister or brother or mother,” Ms. Rojas said. The message is the same as in the call-in: If you retaliate, a long prison sentence awaits. We want you alive, safe and free. Here’s the number to call, 24/7, to get any kind of help you need.
“We visited nine guys, and eight ended up calling for help,” Ms. Rojas said. “Some people say, ‘Don’t knock on my door again.’ But 90 percent of the time, people are welcoming. It’s heartbreaking to hear from family, ‘I don’t know what else to do. This is a blessing.’ ”
In Pittsburgh homicides hit a 12-year low in 2017; the mayor credited Ceasefire.
Detroit’s homicide rate hit a 50-year low in 2017. Its police chief, James Craig, said in an interview that the city had started Ceasefire in two high-crime precincts in 2015 and has gradually expanded it. “I wasn’t much of a believer when I first got to Detroit,” he said. “But what we have in place now is probably one of the better-working Ceasefire models. It has had a profound impact on sustaining violent crime reduction.”
In Newburgh, statistics in a voluminous New York State report show shootings are way down (See pdf, page 1202) — from 55 victims in 2015 to 17 last year. Violent crime, especially firearm crime, has plummeted.
In 2012, the year Oakland began its current version of Ceasefire, it was the third-most dangerous American city, with 126 murders. Last year it had 74. In 2017, Oakland had 277 nonfatal shootings — down from 557 in 2012.
Many cities are on their second or third try at Ceasefire. In Boston, it perished of its own success: After its leaders became celebrities and left the city, the homicide rate went back up.
In the past, Oakland, Newburgh and Pittsburgh had all used Ceasefire, but abandoned it when it didn’t lower violent crime.
Why didn’t it work then? For Ceasefire to be effective, a city needs to do a lot of things well. But cities sometimes concentrate only on law enforcement — the easiest part, because it’s business as usual.
David Muhammad, a community organizer who worked on Ceasefire in Oakland — he now trains people in the practice with the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform — said that Oakland’s earlier attempts were disorganized, unfocused and too reliant on law enforcement. He and others said that it’s succeeding now because the city uses better data, a full-time administrator and top-level social services.
Reygan Cunningham, who runs the new Ceasefire Oakland, points out that the services predated Ceasefire and are open to everyone. “The difference is that they’re now tailored to people at the very highest risk of violence,” she said.
Perhaps most important, though, is the involvement of local people from high-crime neighborhoods. Mr. Cediel credits the community groups with bringing Ceasefire back to Oakland. “They filled up one of the biggest churches in the city and had the mayor and police chief and D.A. at the front with cameras and made them commit to doing it, publicly,” he said.
Mr. Muhammad said that Oakland focuses on the message that the community condemns violence. The police play only a minor role in call-ins. Community members handle the custom notifications.
“The moral voice of the community is way more powerful than the police,” Mr. Kennedy said. When he trains police officers, he often asks if they were afraid of the police when they were growing up. A few people raise their hands. “Then we ask: Who was afraid of your mother? Everybody raises his hand.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/gun-violence-personal-deterrence.html
