The Informant

• How to eliminate gang violenceA discussion with David M. KennedyDownload

Rina Palta

Kennedy addresses a full house at First Unitarian Church in Oakland.

Last night, as the Oakland City Council’s chambers hosted a passionate debate about gang injunctions and youth curfews, a more subdued discussion about how to fight gang violence was taking place a few blocks away at the First Unitarian Church. As part of a series called “Literary Justice,” put on by the Alameda County Probation Department, scholar and violence worker David M. Kennedy read from his new book, Don’t Shoot, and fielded questions from the sizeable crowd. Kennedy is best known for pioneering Ceasefire, a project debuted in Boston at the height of the crack and homicide epidemic of the 1990s. He’s also a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. After Ceasefire was implemented, Boston’s homicide rate plummeted.

Yesterday, Kennedy told the assembled crowd–which included members of Oakland’s probation department, police department, and kids from the county’s Camp Sweeney–that despite a nationwide decrease in violent crime over the past few years, the problem of young, black men being killed on the streets is flourishing.

“We don’t live in a nation,” Kennedy said of the nationwide crime decrease. “We live in cities, neighborhoods, and on our blocks.” And on many of those blocks, no one feels any safer than they did a decade ago. What’s at work? Something Kennedy referred to as the “safety gap.”

The “safety gap” is akin to the “wealth gap,” Kennedy explained. As our society has become more economically prosperous, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown wider, leaving certain communities behind.

Similarly, while much of the country has gotten safer, in certain neighborhoods and certain communities, things have gotten worse.

For instance, homicide has declined by about 25 percent in New York City over the past few years. Meanwhile, young, black men make up about 3 percent of the city’s population, but 33 percent of the city’s murder victims.

“There are wonderful, vibrant cities where people are afraid to go outside, where mothers put their kids to bed in bathtubs to shield them from bullets,” Kennedy said. Yet the problem isn’t huge and amorphous, like we make it out to be, he said–there are solutions.

What does work? Things like the Ceasefire program he put in place in Boston, and then Cincinnati, and a number of other cities. (For more on the specifics, listen to the above audio.) What doesn’t work? Almost everything else.

Kennedy–who has spent his entire professional career thickening the thin strands of goodwill that exist between troubled communities and law enforcement –declined to discuss the debate over Oakland’s gang injunctions.