Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of participating in the
“What Works Summit: (Re)Building Trust Between Communities and Police” here in
Newark. The event, sponsored by the Center
for Collaborative Change (CCC), brought together academics, advocates and
law enforcement agencies to consider how poor urban communities are harmed by a
lack of trust in law enforcement and to explore best practices that address the
problem. The event was chock-full of
impressive panelist, highlighted by Connie Rice, civil rights attorney and
author of “Power
Concedes Nothing: One Woman's Quest for Social Justice in America, from the
Courtroom to the Kill Zones” and David M. Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention
and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Ms. Rice mesmerized the
audience with her account of a career advocating for “bus riders, death
row inmates, folks abused by police, school kids, whistle-blowers cops and
sufferers of every stripe of discrimination.”
Professor Kennedy is perhaps
best known for creating two of the most effective and innovative violence
reduction responses of the last 20 years including: the Boston Gun Project, a problem-oriented policing initiative expressly aimed at taking on homicide victimization among young people in Boston; and the Drug
Market Initiative, a strategic problem-solving initiative aimed at permanently
closing down open-air drug markets. David’s presentation laid out in stark
relief how our fixation on measuring violent crime nationally has blinded us
to the realities on the ground. So, although we have succeeded at national crime reduction, people don’t live “nationwide”. We live in communities
and neighborhoods. And from 2000 to 2007, in poor neighborhoods in big, medium
and small cities the homicide rate among young black men has increase by a third.
