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Shifting Power to the Community: A Hopeful Experiment in Brownsville, Brooklyn


DA Gonzalez & others in Brooklyn (photo: Brooklyn DA's office)


What does a safe community look like? We know the answer, because such communities exist, usually in well-resourced, predominantly white neighborhoods where people have the resources to meet their basic needs—including healthy food, shelter, transportation, clean and inviting public spaces, childcare, education, and health care. A safe community is also a place where people know and trust their neighbors, take care of each other, hold each other accountable, and resolve conflicts peacefully when they arise.

Because safety is rooted in community wellness and community relationships, the work of building long-term safety can only be done effectively by the community, in the community. And that requires investment. Law enforcement, other government agencies, and outside civic institutions should play a supporting role by shifting their power and resources to community members to build the future they want.

Transferring power from law enforcement to community members is necessary because arrests and prosecutions alone do not create lasting public safety. Temporarily incarcerating someone who causes harm only prevents further harm while they are incarcerated (at great cost to them, their family, and the community). Even putting someone through a court-mandated program outside of jail often has little long-term impact on public safety if the program has no organic connection to the person’s life after the mandated period ends. While well-intended, such programs all too easily become exercises in checking boxes and jumping through hoops just to get out from under the court’s thumb rather than opportunities for real transformation.

Enduring public safety is achieved by integrating people into a stabilizing and supportive social network in their own community. It requires empowering grassroots organizations with the resources and autonomy they need to meet struggling people where they are and build trust without the threat of state force looming in the background. And it requires repairing the harm that has been inflicted on poor and working-class communities of color by generations of systemic racism and economic exploitation. Government must direct public resources into communities where poverty, trauma, and despair are fueling violence and empower community members to decide how public resources can best be used to enhance community wellness.

We have long known that good schools, family-supporting jobs, dignified housing, care for those who are mentally or physically ill, and neighbors who look out for and are accountable to each other are key ingredients for public safety. Resolving conflict by calling police and endangering a community member’s liberty, or even their life, should be a last resort. And yet the pervasive and coercive presence of law enforcement has been normalized in poor and working-class communities of color to a degree that would never be accepted in wealthy, predominantly white communities. The movement for Black lives opened up a serious conversation about shifting public resources away from the law enforcement responses that we know are harmful to investments in the basic civic goods and strong community connections that we know can produce lasting safety. Now we need to follow through.

As the Brooklyn District Attorney and as a long-time community leader in Brownsville, Brooklyn, we have come together to transform public safety in one community by shifting power. On one side of this transformation, the DA’s Office is giving up power over a significant number of misdemeanor cases—something prosecutors are normally loath to do—by diverting those cases to community-based organizations and declining to prosecute the individuals involved. On the other side, Brownsville Think Tank Matters (or BTTM, where Cyrus Smith serves Chief Operating Officer) and other community-based organizations are taking up the power and responsibility to redress harm and keep the community safe.

Cases include criminal mischief, petit larceny, possession of stolen property, and misdemeanor assault. They hold people accountable and support them through a sustained process of changing their life circumstances so that they will not harm the community again in the future.

When the DA’s Office first approached BTTM about partnering, Cyrus was skeptical. Like many in his community, he’d had negative experiences with law enforcement, and he was dubious that a partnership with a law enforcement agency could be positive for his clients. It took months of negotiation and baby steps to build the trust we now have, but it has been more than worth it.

The key to the success of our diversion partnership is that the DA’s Office declines to prosecute early in the process, instead of holding the threat of prosecution over the person’s head. The office hands over power and responsibility to BTTM and pays BTTM to stay engaged with the person beyond the duration of the case, keeping them on a positive path. Without law enforcement coercion, BTTM has the credibility to establish trusting long-term relationships with people using resources that would otherwise go to prosecutions.

BTTM’s engagement starts with an accountability conversation about what the person could have done differently to avoid getting arrested, and how they can avoid police contact in the future. Then they focus on how BTTM can help the person reach their life goals. They talk about how they can work toward the person’s individual goals in ways that will also advance community goals.

Many people who get arrested for misdemeanors are unemployed or underemployed, so BTTM helps them develop a 5-to-7-year plan for obtaining a good-paying job. It’s a very different mindset than “what can we do to make sure this person doesn’t get arrested again in the next six months?” Obviously, we don’t want the person to harm someone or have further criminal justice contact, but preventing those outcomes is really a byproduct of helping them look at their life holistically, establishing goals, and opening doors of opportunity for them to achieve their goals. When people have goals, and the tools to achieve them, they have hope. Giving people hope is transformative.

This process isn’t a quick fix, but neither is jail. Most people come out of jail worse off than when they went in, and many cycle through the system dozens of times. If a BTTM client gets rearrested and goes to jail, that person and their family knows they will return to a supportive network that remains committed to their success. BTTM doesn’t give up on people, which encourages their clients not to give up on themselves.

The Brooklyn DA’s Office and BTTM are proud to be part of this transformation, but we are not alone. The 73rd Precinct of the NYPD, which covers Brownsville, is also giving up a degree of power to the community through an initiative called the Brownsville Safety Alliance. The Alliance is a coalition of community organizations that works to improve safety in specific neighborhood locations that have been plagued by crime while reducing contact between police and residents.

The Brownsville Safety Alliance relies on trusted community members to create safety without heavy-handed law enforcement. It identifies locations that have a lot of low-level criminal activity or a history of shootings. The police pull back from these locations for five days and community organizations take responsibility for the area. Violence interrupters (affiliated with the city’s Crisis Management System) maintain a presence to intervene and deescalate conflicts. Other community organizations provide referrals for social services and distribute free groceries.

The DA’s Office is present, but not to prosecute. Instead, the office provides information about re-entry services, victim services, and opportunities to seal convictions. Peer counselors, funded by the DA’s Office but employed by a community non-profit, distribute Narcan kits and train people on how to use them to reverse overdoses. The police are a few blocks away to respond if necessary.

So far, the areas that have been identified by the Brownsville Safety Alliance have experienced less criminal activity, and less contact between police and residents, than when police are on routine patrol.

During a recent Brownsville Safety Alliance week, a violence interrupter affiliated with Brownsville In, Violence Out saw someone pass a gun to someone else and noticed them eying a third individual. He approached the men with the gun and deescalated the situation. They had been selling drugs on that corner to support themselves and their families and were about to shoot someone else who had encroached on their turf. The violence interrupter peacefully secured the gun and promised the would-be shooter he would help him obtain food and counseling as well as training and certification for a better job than selling drugs. No one got shot and no one got sent to prison. Instead, a long-time community resident who has served time in prison for violence himself prevented others from going down that path.

Another initiative called NeighborhoodStat, launched in 2014 by the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, empowers neighborhood residents to set local budgetary priorities and then hold city agencies accountable for delivering on those priorities. By bringing both government data and local knowledge to the table, NeighborhoodStat can direct resources from all relevant agencies to the areas of greatest need and serve as a vehicle for residents to hold agencies accountable, both for long-term investments and for routine constituent service matters.

The next step in Brownsville is to integrate all of the efforts we have described here into a Neighborhood Safety Hub to manage community-based diversion.

Police will be able to take people who would otherwise be arrested straight to the Hub for services, so those cases will never come to the DA’s Office. The Hub will also be a visible one-stop shop where community residents can seek services and opportunities. It will provide help to those who are high risk (because of involvement with guns and gangs), and those who are just one bad break away from being destabilized. The Hub will provide the organizations that make up the Brownsville Safety Alliance a permanent home, institutionalizing their role in keeping the community safe.

This is a whole-community approach. Often in government and the advocacy community, we talk about breaking down silos—between government agencies and between government and the community. The Neighborhood Safety Hub will do just that, shifting power to the community and coordinating public investments to create a safe and healthy neighborhood. If successful, we hope that in the days ahead Neighborhood Safety Hubs will be replicated across the city. 

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Eric Gonzalez is the Brooklyn District Attorney. Cyrus Smith is Program Advisor at Brownsville Think Tank Matters. On Twitter @BrooklynDA.

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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Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

A New Normal for Our City’s Essential Nonprofits?


Emergency food (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


In the beginning of the pandemic, we longed to return to normal. However, after months of lock down, a racial justice reckoning, and a growing realization that concerns about political incivility needed to be replaced with legitimate fears about the stability of our polarized democracy, we started to think about all the reasons that going back to normal was no longer a viable option. It has become abundantly clear that “normal” never worked for everyone, and that this is by design. Our society’s definition of normal was built on the fundamentally faulty ideas of white supremacy and individual meritocracy.

“Normal” did not work for nonprofit organizations and their workers, predominantly women of color, who provide essential human services.

Just as the pandemic exposed inequities across our society, it highlighted major longstanding problems in the nonprofit sector. At the peak of the pandemic, nonprofit human services workers -- rightly deemed “essential workers” -- were sent out with inadequate supplies and asked to meet soaring demand with fewer resources.

Nonprofit organizations in New York deliver services to communities on behalf of the city and state through government contracts. Unfortunately, those contracts are underfunded, failing to cover the full cost of providing services. This fact harms nonprofit workers who receive low wages and communities who receive less robust services.

Nonprofits and their workers are essential to New York’s pandemic recovery. We’re joining forces to uplift and strengthen our sector so we can support all communities on this journey, and it is time for our city and state government partners to step up for the good of all.

The Nonprofits Make New York campaign is highlighting the vital role nonprofits play in every New York City neighborhood, and the Just Pay campaign is working towards fair compensation for our city’s hard-working human services employees.

Nonprofits have been disrespected because of who we serve and who we employ – our workforce is predominantly women (66%) and people of color (68%). Nonprofits are too often considered “less than” by our for-profit partners, those who equate a lack of resources with a lack of innovation, capacity, or know-how. We have been taken advantage of by public partners who consistently underestimated (or ignored) our economic contributions, and used our desperation to keep services and programs in place as an excuse to offer contracts with unfair, insufficient terms.

We are ultimately caught in a no-win cycle, in which our work is undercompensated by the market because we are motivated primarily by mission and often at the whim of governments, but then our expertise and abilities are undervalued in large part due to having lower salaries than our for-profit counterparts and the types of services we provide, often helping the New Yorkers who are most in need of support.

Nonprofits need to change. We need to demand that our public partners and private funders provide the respect and support warranted by the multi-faceted work we do and reject the scarcity mindset that justifies and requires us to do more with less.

Nonprofits cannot critique the old normal in the passive voice. We cannot gloss over the inherent contradictions of fighting poverty while paying poverty wages. If we do, we continue to perpetuate the cycle we have vowed to break. While the government is often the primary driver of salaries, we must insist that our ability to provide high-quality services depends on our ability to offer equitable, livable wages to the people who make these programs possible.

Currently, human service workers with a high school education and higher, core human services workers, generally make about $20,000-a-year less than a public sector worker with a comparable education, and 15% of nonprofit human services workers qualified for food stamps in the 2016-2018 period.

We all must move beyond the rhetoric of returning to normal and start accepting that things really truly will not and should not be the same as they were. Leaving normal behind means throwing out the rule book and building something new.

Mayor Eric Adams and Comptroller Brad Lander* took a major step by convening a task force with key stakeholders and recently releasing a series of important recommendations for addressing contract procurement issues in the sector. That's the kind of partnership we need and we look forward to seeing the recommendations like establishing time-frames for contract registration and maintaining the Indirect Cost Rate Initiative through to completion. The government must also pledge to end poverty wages for human services workers starting this budget season with key investments like a cost-of-living adjustment to match the State’s investment

Those who dedicate their lives to making New York a better place to live should not have to starve in order to do so. We can, should, and must pay our nonprofit employees a just and fair wage for all of the hard work they do.

The Human Services Council and Nonprofit New York are working together to make these ideas the new nonprofit reality. Nonprofits Make New York. Every day. In every neighborhood. For every New Yorker. It’s about time we compensate the people who make that happen.

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Michelle Jackson is the Executive Director of the Human Services Council of New York. Meg Barnette is the President & CEO of Nonprofit New York (*and Meg is married to Comptroller Lander). On Twitter:
@mpjackson of @HSC_NY and @nonprofitnyPREZ of @NonprofitNY.

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Stemming Violence by Investing in Civic Goods


Summer Youth Employment Program rally (photo: William Alatriste/City Council)


The criminal justice system is not the only entity that contributes to public safety. There is evidence from across the United States on “civic goods” — interventions, unrelated to the criminal justice system, that have been shown to have meaningful effects on violent crime in the short- to medium-term. 

Interventions for Children and Teens
Many kids don’t feel safe going to school each day due to violent crime. As argued by Jane Jacobs, simply having more eyes on the street can deter crime and make streets safer. Chicago's “Safe Passage” program built on this insight by placing civilian guards along pedestrian routes traveled by students to and from schools. Safe Passage not only reduced student absenteeism (which could have beneficial public safety effects in the longer-term), but it also reduced violent crime by up to 20% while the program was underway.

Supplementing school with targeted programs in social skill development can also reduce crime. In Chicago, researchers conducted two large-scale, randomized controlled trials to measure the efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy for high-risk teens. The specific focus was the Becoming a Man (BAM) program, developed by the nonprofit Youth Guidance.

The two studies found that BAM reduced violent-crime arrests during the year of program participation by 45–50%. BAM appears to work by helping teens slow down and reflect on whether their automatic thoughts and behaviors are well-suited to the situation they are in, or whether the situation could be construed differently.

Providing summer jobs to teens reduces violent youth crime not only during the period of employment, but also afterwards. There is now strong evidence from three major cities that summer jobs are an effective intervention.

Random assignment of youth applicants to a summer jobs program in Chicago led to 33-42% reductions in violent-crime arrests in the year after program participation. In Boston, a similar study found that a summer job offer reduced the number of violent-crime arrests by 35% during the 17 months after program participation. And a New York City study found that a summer job offer reduced the likelihood of a future arrest or incarceration during the four years after program participation. It also reduced the likelihood of dying during those years by 18%; this effect was due to a reduction in deaths by external causes (such as violent crime).

We could also do more to help families create a safe living environment for their children. For example, when children test positive for high lead exposure, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends they receive a bundle of services, including help with lead remediation and nutritional counseling, to reduce future lead exposure and to mitigate the effects of previous exposure. Using data from Charlotte, North Carolina, researchers found that children who received the CDC-recommended intervention had fewer subsequent arrests for violent crime, as well as other delinquent behavior, when compared to similar children whose blood-lead-levels were just under the threshold and so did not qualify for services. 

Economic Stabilization
Economic insecurity can increase crime. When individuals don’t have a safe place to live, it is more difficult to maintain employment, and the likelihood of violent altercations in shelters or on the street increases.

In Los Angeles County, single adults experiencing homelessness are randomly assigned to caseworkers. An evaluation documented that providing housing assistance substantially reduced the number of jail bookings and criminal charges over the following 18 months. These beneficial effects are driven primarily by permanent housing programs. It appears that 80% of program costs are recouped by direct savings to various public agencies (including the criminal justice system) within the first 18 months of housing provision.

Providing short-term financial assistance is also helpful. For example, Chicago's Homelessness Prevention Call Center connects families and individuals who have experienced a negative economic shock with immediate, one-time financial assistance, but the availability of funding varies unpredictably. A study found that when funds were available, callers were 51% less likely to be arrested for a violent crime, relative to similar callers who received no funds. The decline in crime appears to be related, in part, to greater housing stability.

The timing and mode of distribution of short-term financial assistance can matter. For example, providing social benefits electronically rather than via cash may reduce violent crime. And staggering the payment schedule for social benefits over the course of a month also helps reduce crime.

Health Care
Increasing access to health care has important violence-reduction benefits. For example, researchers have found that expanding access to substance-abuse treatment facilities can reduce violent crimes, particularly homicides.

Another study documented that expanding Medicaid eligibility to include more low-income adults led to sizable reductions in rates of robbery and aggravated assault. A similar impact was seen when Medicaid expanded after the Affordable Care Act: states that expanded Medicaid saw annual violent crime rates fall by 5.3% relative to non-expansion states.

When low-income young men in South Carolina lost access to Medicaid at age 19, their likelihood of incarceration in the subsequent two years increased by 15%. This increase spanned multiple categories of criminal behavior, including violent crime. The social cost of this additional crime exceeded the costs savings from reduced Medicaid eligibility. The effects of Medicaid access were primarily driven by men who relied on Medicaid for access to mental health medications.

Neighborhood Improvements
Reducing neighborhood foreclosures and vacancies can reduce violent crime. A study of New York City found that additional foreclosures led to additional violent crimes nearby. A similar project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania found that violent crime rates increased by roughly 19% when foreclosed homes become vacant, an effect that increased with length of vacancy.

There is growing evidence that “greening” vacant lots and installing better lighting have important crime-reducing effects. One experiment found that shifting daylight from the morning to the evening via Daylight Saving Time led to a 7% decrease in robberies. A randomized controlled trial that placed temporary street lighting in New York City housing developments found that improved lighting substantially reduced street crimes.

A growing body of evidence shows that pollution increases violent crime. For instance, moderate- to high-levels of lead exposure for kids increases violent and delinquent behavior later, presumably by affecting brain development. In addition, day-to-day variation in exposure to pollution – such as air pollution from factories or cars – increases local violent crime on the days of exposure. Reducing exposure to such pollutants can thus have immediate violence-reduction benefits.

Traditional law enforcement tools such as police and incarceration continue to play an important role in fighting crime. But as we consider what to do about rising violent crime rates in cities across the United States, the evidence suggests that investing in civic goods such as education, health care, and neighborhood improvement can reduce violent crime in the short- to medium-term.

Of course, the crime-reduction benefits are often only a fraction of the overall benefits of the interventions studied; these efforts can also improve educational outcomes, employment, and health as well. But even if we only focus on the crime-reduction effects, it is clear that we are dramatically underinvesting in such programs. New York City and other places would be smart to change this.

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Anna Harvey researches criminal justice and judicial decision-making and is the President and CEO of the Social Science Research Council. Jennifer Doleac studies crime and racial discrimination as a Professor at Texas A&M University and is the host of the Probable Causation podcast. On Twitter @annalilharvey & @jenniferdoleac.

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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Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.



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