Community Involvement Stops Crime
Donnel Baird grew up in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and spent several years as a community organizer in Brownsville. He is a student at the Columbia Business School, an Echoing Green fellow and an entrepreneur in residence at Jalia Ventures.
Stop and frisk casts too wide and clumsy a net to effectively prevent highly organized violent crime.
Updated July 17, 2012, 5:12 PM
Brownsville, Brooklyn, can be a tough place. I was standing on a street corner a few years ago with colleagues and a New York deputy mayor when a group of armed men in a van pulled up, slid open their van door, and shot and killed a 16-year-old before speeding off. We thought that a car’s muffler had backfired until we saw schoolchildren diving for cover. It all happened two blocks from where we were standing.
The N.Y.P.D.’s effort to reduce the very real threat of gun violence in neighborhoods like Brownsville is to be commended. Stop and frisk, however, casts too wide and clumsy a net to effectively prevent highly organized violent crime like we observed that day.
The ad hoc search and detainment of a whole population — young black and Latino men — is a remarkably inefficient solution. While neighborhood residents are often comforted by increased police presence, this type of policing only pushes crime to the boundaries of the policed zone. If cops are on the street, crime moves into the stairwells.
At the Brownsville Partnership, we used social service data to identify vulnerable parts of the population. Truants are more likely than other high school students to become juvenile offenders. Want to stop high rates of juvenile incarceration? Focus on truants. Similarly, a small percentage of folks in a community, 2 to 3 percent, commit most of the of violent crime. Targeted interventions yield dramatic results.
The relevant data isn’t all housed in spreadsheets; community residents know which people and areas are at highest risk of violent crime.
A year after that shooting of the 16-year-old, a teenager was shot and killed in the courtyard of an affordable housing complex in Brownsville where a colleague of mine lived with her young family.
Residents of the complex had worked for many months with East Brooklyn congregations to organize a small team of neighborhood leaders to address the growing incidence of violent crime in their housing complex. In response to the shooting, they pushed local police precinct commanders to reorganize the length, frequency and volume of police patrols of their complex. They pushed to have fewer rookie cops on their beat, to have cops patrol the staircases in addition to the courtyards. They pointed out which apartments housed the vast majority of the drug activity that fuels gun violence. They worked together and reduced crime in the complex.
The real criminals are far too organized and savvy to be caught by a sloppy policy like stop and frisk.