Volunteerism and the decline of violent crime.

• Author: Friedman, Warren

1. INTRODUCTION

   This paper makes four general points. There are organized community anti-crime activities going on across the country. Neighborhood residents, acting together through community organizations, have made a serious contribution to the decline in violent crime nationally. If we invest in and support, the work of these citizens and their organizations, their activity can become more widespread, more sustained and can have a larger impact on violent crime. As an anti-crime strategy, this is the most effective, democratic, and humane path available to America--the one most likely to make communities safer and friendlier places to live.

2. DECLINING CRIME

   Violent crime reached its peak in the U.S. in 1993. That year, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 4.2 million violent crimes in this country.(1) In 1994, there were 75,000 fewer(2) By 1996, there were nearly 930,000 fewer violent crimes than in 1993.(3) Although rape, robbery, assault, and homicide have declined at different rates, they are all down.(4) When looked at as a group, violent crimes are at a twenty-three year low, the lowest since the agency has been collecting data.(5)

   This encouraging national trend does not mean that violent crime is down everywhere nor that Americans are relaxed and feeling confident in their ability to solve the problem of crime. According to Roper organization polling:

   crime still tops the list of concerns about the nation's welfare, and crime worries are well above the levels of the 1980s or 1970s.... The share of adults who name crime among their top two or three [concerns] rose sharply in the early 1990s.... Between 1991 and 1995, the percentage almost doubled, from 29 percent to a record high of 54 percent. Although the current share is 5 percentage points lower than the peak, crime still ranks much higher than other issues....(6) America's unease with the good news about crime is not paranoia. The trend is fairly recent and there have been other promising declines that have lasted a few years before the violence began increasing once again. The tentativeness of the news about violent crime has stimulated at least two significant discussions, partly captured in these Chicago Tribune headlines: "Is the Crime Drop a Blip, For Real, or a Ticking Bomb?" and "Violent Crime Takes a Tumble, Though Reasons are Murky."(7)

   One question raised here' is this decline part of a long term trend, like the decrease in property crime, which has been evident since 1975, or just a temporary dip that will reverse itself?(8) A second question: what is causing this decline? This causal issue, not so much murky as multi-faceted, is related to the first. If we can figure out what is responsible for the good news, we can, perhaps, do more of what works and increase the likelihood that the trend towards a less violent society is long term. We can also apply our understanding of what is working to some locations where the news is not so good.

3. WHY THE DECLINE?

   There are a host of reasons suggested for the decline: low unemployment, fewer young men in the crime-prone age group, stable and less violent drug markets, fewer handguns on the street, reduced alcohol and drug consumption, more people serving longer prison sentences, smarter policing, community policing, and community participation in anti-crime efforts.

   Most of these explanations have policy implications that beckon elected officials to invest tax dollars in particular strategies. As Roper's findings indicate, though the public is not yet convinced by the good news, the public is hungry for safer communities and seems receptive to solutions. So it is proper that there should be public debate about why crime is declining. It is critical that we invest energy and tax dollars to achieve this public good.

   But it is also clear that data are subject to varying interpretations, causation is hard to identify with certainty and the debate is complicated by a significant amount of individual and institutional self-interest in one argument or another.(9) In fact, the nation is presently engaged in a fateful discussion about what is driving this decline. In part, the outcome of this discussion will help determine where resources go and what cities, neighborhoods, and the criminal justice system will look like in the twenty-first century.

   Probably the most widespread explanations for the decline at present are that smarter policing, tougher laws, longer sentences, more cops, and a quadrupling of the prison population are the major causes of violent crime's decline. Getting smart and getting tough probably do make a contribution. After all, getting guns off the street is smart. Even if they are kept at home, this reduces the accessibility and decreases the likelihood of impulse shootings, serious injuries, and homicides.

   And getting tough has put more violent offenders in prison and the more in prison at any time, the fewer there are in the community committing crimes. If you keep people in prison long enough, the argument goes, they grow out of the crime-prone age range. In the jargon, they "age-out." Whatever the effect of "incapacitation," of larger numbers of people in prison for longer times, we hear about these solutions not only because of their social scientific merit. We also hear about them because taking credit for the decline in crime is a major component in the strategies of powerful political, ideological, and law enforcement groups.

4. ORDINARY PEOPLE

   Though sometimes appended as an afterthought, discussion about what ordinary people are contributing to this decline in violence is rare. I argue that they are a major force for safer communities. This suggestion runs into what appears, from a community organizer's perspective, to be a dominant cultural attitude, one that is dismissive of collective, grassroots efforts.

   Organized neighborhood activities are invisible on television's popular crime and police shows. Though there are sometimes helpful citizens in minor roles, for the most part non-police are portrayed as criminals, reluctant witnesses, or powerless victims in the story of America's criminal justice system. These shows never present an organized community as part of the solution. The few allusions to block watch or other neighborhood crime prevention activities are either accompanied by a sneer or depicted as a kind of vigilante effort.

   Television programs do not capture the excitement of neighbors figuring out, through democratic discussion, what to do about a neighborhood crime problem. Missing from the nation's visuals are community meetings that are punctuated, as they are in reality, by laughter, anger, and the satisfaction of collective insight. Television does not depict the pride and feeling of empowerment shared by a group of residents who have taken action and forced the police to pay attention or who have freed a park from gang domination and made it once again accessible to neighborhood people.

   Ironically, in an era that can't say enough about the virtues of shrinking government, on the topic of crime, officials and opinion makers are most comfortable with praising and spending on the criminal justice system. This does not reflect only the power of lobbies and ideology--though they are influential--it also reflects the belief among large numbers of government officials, criminal justice researchers, and media workers that ordinary people's efforts don't make a difference. Even worse, organized volunteers are potentially threatening, so the less encouragement, the better. Organized volunteers have opinions. They have policy preferences. They can mobilize and make demands. Keeping them at a distance and portraying citizens, as "eyes and ears," isolated, apathetic, and only moved by law enforcement's prodding is within the comfort zone of those who fashion our cultural images and provide us with information and analysis.

   The depiction of police, courts, and prisons, warts and all, as the major, if not sole, guardians of public safety, goes largely unchallenged. The community residents who do volunteer in their neighborhoods have no powerful lobby to call attention to the contribution they are making or provide them with a mechanism for participating in the national discussion.

5. THE IMPACT OF COMMUNITY RESIDENTS

   But ordinary people do have an impact on the national crime and violence statistics that we are currently celebrating and debating. They have an impact directly and they have an impact indirectly, through the sheer accumulation of private individual decisions. For health and other reasons, for example, people have reduced their drug and alcohol consumption.(10) Because substance abuse, especially in the case of alcohol, is implicated in much violence, these individual decisions have an impact on violent crime.(11)

   People also decide that, with jobs available, they will work in a legal instead of an illegal sector of the economy, where they are less likely to be a victim of violence, or a victimizer. Or, as Richard Curtis' study of the Bushwick neighborhood in Brooklyn illustrates, young people, frightened by the activities of their older brothers and neighbors, forced to retreat from public spaces by drug dealing, violence, police harassment, and neighborhood decay, reject the culture that they see on their streets and choose other, less violence-prone life styles.(12)

   Though they pay tens-of-billions of dollars each year to support the police, courts, and prisons, Americans have not delegated all public safety responsibility to the criminal justice system. In addition to private decisions by large numbers of individuals that have an indirect impact on crime and violence, many people decide to have a direct impact, to work together on shared problems. There are some case studies and some survey results on this topic, but the magnitude and impact of this organized activity is largely a missing part of the story of...