Emergency (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photo Office)
At the start of the 1960s, just over four out of every 100,000 Americans were murdered each year. The murder rate rose sharply during that decade, and then fluctuated between 8 and 10 murders per 100,000 for most of the 1980s and early 1990s, before it began to fall in the mid-1990s. By 2014, the murder rate had fallen to 4.4 murders for every 100,000 people, back to where it stood at the beginning of the 1960s.
That year, 2014, was one of the safest in our nation’s history. It is also the year when the trend shifted. In the years since 2014, the murder rate has risen by almost 50%, to 6.5 murders for every 100,000 people.
This is the latest headline that has been broadcast out to the nation. But the headline misses a fact about American violence that is crucial to understanding both its causes and its consequences.
In many cities with relatively high levels of violence, some communities are untouched by shootings and assaults, while others experience extreme incidents of violence on a regular basis. One of the most robust findings about violence is its concentration within a small number of street segments, intersections, city blocks and neighborhoods, characterized by racial and economic segregation.
The spatial distribution of violence is remarkably stable: In a study of violence in Chicago’s neighborhoods over 56 years, we found that the most violent Chicago neighborhoods in 1965 have continued to have the highest levels of violence in every period since, all the way through 2020.
Shifting our perspective from cities to neighborhoods changes the meaning of the latest national trends. From 1991 to 2014, when the murder rate fell by roughly half, the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, and the most disadvantaged segments of the population, benefited the most. Life expectancy rose most sharply for Black men, the racial achievement gap narrowed the most in states where violence fell the furthest, and economic mobility improved for young people who were raised in places where violence was steadily falling.
But as violence has risen over the last six years, the same communities have been hit hardest. When we analyzed data on fatal shootings from the 100 largest U.S. cities, we found that the recent rise of violence has been concentrated in areas characterized by poverty and racial segregation. Over this period, neighborhoods with lower poverty rates experienced a 59% increase in fatal shootings. High-poverty neighborhoods experienced an 89% increase. In neighborhoods composed of a majority of Black Americans, the rate of fatal shootings rose by 87%, while all other neighborhoods saw a 60% increase.
These trends are a continuation of a long-term pattern. When violence rose in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, it was felt most acutely in areas marked by concentrated poverty and racial segregation. When violence fell from the 1990s to the 2010s, it fell the most in these same communities. Violence continues to be concentrated in neighborhoods that experience multiple forms of disadvantage, from poverty to disease to segregation to joblessness. The question is why?
The answer takes us back to the middle of the 20th century, when a set of social and economic forces combined with federal, state, and local policy to create a crisis in American cities.
As jobs in the manufacturing sector began to disappear, middle-class families took advantage of subsidies to leave central cities, joblessness rose and poverty became more concentrated in central city neighborhoods left behind. As political power and government resources shifted to the suburbs, public housing complexes and schools deteriorated, sidewalks were not maintained, and public parks were left untended.
Instead of responding to this set of challenges with investments in central city communities, the federal government disengaged from urban issues and responded with punitive social policies that have exacerbated the problems faced by urban populations. The abandonment of central cities began under President Nixon, who argued that urban neighborhoods should be left on their own to deal with rising poverty and joblessness.
In the subsequent decades, federal investments in central cities have typically been implemented on a small scale and only for a limited timeframe. Never has there been a systematic effort to deal with the problem of urban poverty through sustained, large-scale investments in the people and the institutions of the nation’s city neighborhoods.
Punishment, on the other hand, has been the most consistent response to urban crime, violence, and poverty. Harsh state policies, such as eliminating parole and establishing mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses and violent crimes, combined with more aggressive policing and prosecution at the local level to push more Americans into the apparatus of the criminal legal system and to keep them enmeshed within this system for longer durations of time.
Our nation’s response to extreme urban inequality created the conditions for violence to rise. As political influence and public funding declines, core community institutions like schools, daycare centers, parks, playgrounds, libraries, and other features of the built environment are less likely to be supported and maintained. Flagging investment in local infrastructure leads to poorly lit spaces, abandoned lots, and empty buildings that are vulnerable to becoming areas of violence.
Robert Sampson’s research on collective efficacy demonstrates how the concentration of social and economic disadvantage can undermine social cohesion and trust among residents, making it less likely that they will take active steps to reinforce shared expectations for behavior, work together to solve problems, and achieve commonly shared goals for the community.
The relationship between disadvantage and violence is reciprocal. Inequality causes violence, but violence amplifies inequality. Violence disrupts learning, leads people to retreat from public spaces, leads businesses to close shop, and leads parents to seek a way out of the neighborhood. In the U.S. context, the prevalence of violence frequently leads to a shift in the central institutions and actors within a neighborhood. Representatives of the criminal legal system, including police officers, parole officers, school safety officers, and detectives become dominant figures in public spaces, and squad cars, sirens, and police tape become common features of the landscape. When we mapped data on shootings with data on police violence and incarceration, we found that the neighborhoods where violence is concentrated are the same neighborhoods that have experienced extreme levels of imprisonment and police shootings.
It is crucial to avoid the tendency to report these statistics on poverty, race, incarceration, and violence without an accompanying explanation of the link. In the United States, long-term disinvestment in central city neighborhoods has reinforced segregation by race, ethnicity, and income, weakening community institutions and undermining community residents’ capacity to work together to solve common challenges.
Our nation’s response to violence, and to the challenge of extreme urban inequality, has relied heavily on the institutions of punishment. This has compounded disadvantage. Communities with high levels of violence are also places where police violence is more common and where a large segment of the population is entangled within the expansive apparatus of the criminal legal system. It is a mistake to look at this and conclude simply that where there is violence, we should expect high levels of incarceration. The pattern of compounded disadvantage is a result of the unique American response to the challenges that emerged in central cities in the late 1960s; a response that featured the dual strategy of abandonment and punishment.
The fall of violence from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s makes clear that high levels of violence are not inevitable. One of us (Sharkey) has argued that violence fell because of a set of efforts to transform urban space, through both aggressive policing and intensive surveillance as well as through the mobilization of local community organizations who worked to reclaim public spaces and build stronger neighborhoods. But the fall of violence was precarious, because the dominant methods to respond to violence haven’t changed over time. The United States has not undertaken a large-scale, sustained agenda of investment to confront extreme urban inequality.
Our national approach has meant that when violence falls, the most disadvantaged communities will benefit the most, and when violence rises, it is these same neighborhoods that suffer the most severe consequences. And through the ebbs and flows, our reliance on police and prison means that a large segment of the population will experience the dislocation that comes with a period of imprisonment, and entire communities will continue to feel the resentment that comes from seeing their neighbors and family members mistreated by the police.
The trends that we have documented, and the spatial convergence of violence, segregation, poverty, institutional decline, and incarceration, lead us to the following conclusion: it may not be possible to address the challenge of American violence in a sustainable way without addressing the much larger challenge of extreme urban inequality.
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Patrick Sharkey is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and the founder of AmericanViolence.org. Alisabeth Marsteller is a pre-doctoral research associate at Princeton University. On Twitter @patrick_sharkey and @aamarsteller.
This column is part of a series published by Gotham Gazette and appearing in the inaugural issue of Vital City, a policy non-profit focused on developing practical and actionable solutions to public safety problems.
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Mayor Adams & President Biden discuss gun violence (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
In 2020, there were 375,800 fewer serious crimes in America compared to 2019, about a 5% decline. Amidst the overall decline, one specific type of crime ran counter to trend: murders, most of which are committed with guns, were up by 5,000, a rise of nearly 30%.
How should we think about these statistics? Should we be happy that serious crime is down or concerned about the increase in homicides? We argue this trend is actually bad news overall. As Berkeley criminologists Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins have noted, crime is not the problem – gun violence is. This distinction has a number of implications for how we think about criminal justice.
Our logic might be easiest to see through analogy. The U.S. in 2020 also saw a decline in the total number of respiratory viral infections, driven by a massive reduction in the seasonal flu. But amidst this overall decline, there was an increase in one new, specific kind of respiratory virus: COVID-19. The result is that amidst a large decline in illness, the number of deaths from flu increased from the normal level (30,000-60,000) to over 600,000.
What’s immediately obvious from this analogy is that every virus is not the same. The public health consequences of the seasonal flu versus COVID-19 are vastly different. Because COVID-19 is so much deadlier than the seasonal flu, billions of people around the world fundamentally changed how they lived their lives. Online replaced in-person, with devastating effects on social life and the economy. A whole generation of schoolchildren were unable to make normal progress in their studies, or in learning how to get along with their peers. The elderly lost contact with their children and grandchildren.
A CDC-sponsored survey in the summer of 2020 found that 40% of American adults were struggling with their mental health during the pandemic. Among people ages 18-25 the figure was more like 70%; fully 1 in 4 young people said that they had considered suicide. Meanwhile, as a direct result of our behavioral responses to COVID-19, the global economy was devastated. In the U.S., the unemployment rate of 3.7% in 2019 surged to 8.9% in 2020.
As with COVID-19, so with crime. Property crime accounts for around 80% of all crime in America. For the victims of a pickpocket or a break-in, crime is a major irritant. For retailers, protecting and insuring against shoplifting and employee theft is a real cost of doing business. But property crimes are rarely life-changing events for the victims. And while the threat of property loss might lead us to take extra care to lock our cars, or install an alarm system, it doesn’t substantially impair the quality of our lives.
In contrast, the fear of gun violence substantially distorts the way that millions of people live their lives. There is increasing evidence that children who witness gun violence tend to underperform in school and have a variety of psychological problems that interfere with normal development. In response to gun violence, families that can afford to move often do. One estimate by economists Julie Berry Cullen and Steve Levitt suggests that, on average, a neighborhood murder has 70 times the effect of other crimes in persuading households to relocate.
A high-violence neighborhood suffers reduced property values and business investment. Employers and people of means seek more attractive places to locate. Reduced tax revenues make it harder for the surrounding city to address these challenges. It is easy to see the linkage here between endemic violence and poverty.
The Nobel-laureate economist Thomas Schelling came up with a way to measure the total social harms from different social problems – what people would be willing to pay to avoid or have less of them. A reduction in serious violence would have tangible effects on property values and the cost of the myriad activities to avoid and mitigate victimization, such as long commutes to the suburbs.
“Contingent valuation” studies, where a cross-section of the public is asked how much they would be willing to pay for reductions in different types of crimes, provide further evidence. One study of this sort by Mark Cohen of Vanderbilt and colleagues estimated the public’s willingness to pay for each prevented crime equaled: $5,098 for larceny, $21,666 per stolen car, $44,606 per burglary, $108,329 per aggravated assault, $356,849 per armed robbery, $369,593 per rape, and fully $15.04 million per murder.
Crime overall may have declined by about 5% in 2020, but the social harm from the rise in murders, most of which were committed with guns, more than offset the reduction of several hundred thousand fewer reported crimes total. The result is that, on net, the total costs or harms of crime in America (murders plus all other crimes) increased by $72 billion according to the willingness-to-pay framework.
If the problem of crime in America is indeed first and foremost a problem of gun violence, several important implications follow. The first is to ensure that law enforcement agencies prioritize violence prevention. “Public safety” begins with protection against fear, injury, and death.
Further, the victims of gun violence, most of whom are from low-income communities of color, need help of all kinds. They also need to believe that their cases are being taken seriously. Ensuring accountability for gun violence can improve public safety without exacerbating the problem of mass incarceration; murders account for only about one-tenth of one percent of all arrests. In a country where the share of unsolved murders increased from 1-in-20 in 1965 to 1-in-3 today (and is more like 1-in-2 in cities like Chicago), law enforcement in America for some reason made 1.5 million arrests for drug charges in 2019 – the vast majority of which, research suggests, have very little public safety value.
We must account for the consequences on crime, especially violent crime, when we are thinking about how much to invest in social policies. New York’s summer jobs program for teens is a case in point; knowing that this program not only provides valuable income and work experience to young people, but also reduces homicide, is surely relevant for decisions about how widely to scale those efforts. Another example is the effort to clean up vacant lots in Philadelphia, which might initially be thought of as a ‘nice to have’ in a city struggling with so many other big problems – until we see in the data that such beautification efforts reduce gun violence.
While some criminologists have disputed large estimates for the social costs of gun violence on political grounds, fearing that they may be used to justify policies they don’t like (such as imprisonment), the large burden gun violence imposes on society is equally an argument for more spending on social programs.
The direct victims of gun violence tend to come from a fairly narrow slice of society, but the threat of gun violence has far-reaching implications. It is serious violence that does the most damage to our quality of life. We recall the “crack” era a generation ago and shudder. As gunplay once again becomes common in formerly peaceful neighborhoods, peace of mind is among the victims.
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Philip Cook is the ITT/Terry Sanford Professor of Public Policy Emeritus at Duke University. Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Thanks to Elizabeth Rasich for valuable assistance.
This column is part of a series published by Gotham Gazette and appearing in the inaugural issue of Vital City, a policy non-profit focused on developing practical and actionable solutions to public safety problems.
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Mayor Adams & an NYPD officer (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
Those who live, work, and visit New York City deserve to feel safe, whether walking to the store, visiting a park, or taking the subway. For those who commute to work in the city, like many union construction workers, they deserve to feel safe and know they will go home to their families at night. Unfortunately, right now in New York City, crime is rising, and violence is permeating our normal way of life. It feels like every day, headlines are filled with stories highlighting preventable and tragic loss of life. In fact, the NYPD recently reported that crime in New York City spiked 38.5% in January of this year compared to January 2021, with 9,566 reported ‘major crimes’ in the first month of 2022.
This problem is not unique to New York, it is happening nationwide, and the trend remains troubling.
Unfortunately, the uptick in crime recently hit close to home. A young and talented union carpenter was killed just at the end of January while on his way home from the store. He was only 25 years old and had his entire future in front of him. His father, who is also a union carpenter, mourns his only son. I speak for the entire District Council of Carpenters when I say our thoughts and prayers are with his family. Any loss of life is heartbreaking, but it is truly devastating to see one of our own union brothers have his young life cut short.
As union carpenters, we work both on and off the job to keep our members safe, which is why we advocate for protections and safety measures for hardworking New Yorkers every day. Now, it is time to come together as a city and make a change before we lose more precious lives. New Yorkers have never shied away from a challenge. We have lived through tremendously challenging times -- 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, the COVID-19 pandemic, and more. The recent increase in crime is no different. We refuse to let our way of life and pursuit of happiness be derailed by those whose intentions are to tear communities apart, rather than build them up.
It is time that we support and invest in common-sense programs that will make the city safer. When the NYC Carpenters Union endorsed Eric Adams to run New York City, not only did we understand we were endorsing a pro-labor mayor, but also, we knew he would work tirelessly to keep us safe. We are proud to support Mayor Adams’ efforts to ensure public safety as a top priority.
In the union, we offer our members access to treatment for mental health issues, so we speak from a place of knowledge when we say that as a city, we need renewed investments in mental health treatment and care. Likewise, we require our members to participate in trainings and certifications to maintain safety standards, so we feel strongly that there should be investment in education, community building, and enforcement.
The bottom line – we must construct a safer city and create a stronger economy for all New Yorkers.
We have endured a long couple of years of COVID-19 pain and restrictions that have upended our lives. Now, spring is around the corner, and people are ready to re-enter society in a new way, but only if we feel safe to do so. More people are returning to work in the city and construction is resuming, but a lot more people who live in the city and beyond want to return to spend money shopping, seeing Broadway shows, visiting loved ones, going out to dinner, and taking advantage of all the city has to offer. These activities are the lifeblood of our city and its people.
The NYC Carpenters Union built this city over the last 100 years, and alongside New Yorkers, we have weathered a lot of ups and downs. We believe that to properly revitalize our economy, there must be safety measures in place, so that people feel safe doing everything from using mass transportation and to simply walking around their own neighborhoods.
Facing this problem head-on and forging long-lasting solutions will not be easy, but with new leadership at the helm, we could turn over a new leaf and build a safer city for everyone. Let’s work together to invest in our neighborhoods and communities, create connections, and build each other up. That’s the union carpenters’ way, but most importantly, that’s the New York way.
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Joseph Geiger is Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the New York City & Vicinity District Council of Carpenters. On Twitter @CarpentersNYC.
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