Weeding Criminals or Planting Fear

• Author: Blaine Bridenball,Paul Jesilow
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016805275682
• Published date: 01 May 2005
• Date: 01 May 2005
• Subject Matter: Articles

10.1177/0734016805275682Criminal Justice ReviewBridenball, Jesilow / Weed and Seed Project

Weeding Criminals

or Planting Fear:

An Evaluation of a Weed and Seed Project

Blaine Bridenball

Paul Jesilow

This study employed a quasi-experimental design to test the effect of a “Weed and Seed” pro-

gram in a Santa Ana, California, neighborhood. The authors were specifically interested in

learning how it affected the residents’attitudes about their neighborhood and their fear of crime.

Interviews were conducted before and after a major “gang sweep” and Seeding in a targeted

community.The results of the analyses failed to reveal any positive effects of the program on res-

idents’ attitudes and may have had the unintended consequence of enhancing citizens’ fears of

gang activity and crime.

Keywords: weed and seed; community policing; arrest sweep; Operation Orion; qualitative

interviews; fear of crime; gangs; victimization; social control; Santa Ana Police Department;

problem-oriented policing; crime; neighborhoods

Weedand Seed projects are essentially designed to return the ostensible control of crime-

ridden neighborhoods to the law-abiding residents and local authorities. The programs

are meant to reduce citizens’ fears about crime in their neighborhoods. In some neighbor-

hoods today, the argumentgoes, residents are too frightened to pressure deviants to conform.

They fear that criticisms of deviants, particularly gang members, will result in retaliation.

Efforts to involve other residents in activities designed to censure malevolent individuals,

they worry, might prove dangerous. Similar concerns limit citizen efforts to involve the

police. As a result, criminals are allowed to control these neighborhoods. Weed and Seed is

designed to remove citizen fears by eliminating “violent crime, drug trafficking, and drug-

related crime from targeted high crime neighborhoods.” The goal is to “provide a safe envi-

ronment, free of crime, for law-abiding citizens to live, work and raise families” (U.S.

Department of Justice, 1998, p. 5). The logic is that weeding the worst offenders out of a tar-

geted area is a necessary first step in order for eventualcommunity revitalization programs to

64

Criminal Justice Review

Volume 30 Number 1

May 2005 64-89

© 2005 Georgia State University

Research Foundation, Inc.

10.1177/0734016805275682

http://cjr.sagepub.com

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http://online.sagepub.com

Partial funding for this project was made available by an Advance Community Policing Demonstration Project

grant (#9 7PAWXK003) made to the Santa Ana Police Department from the U.S. Department of Justice. Special

thanks are owed to severalCity of Santa Ana employees for their assistance, including VirginiaAdame, Regan M.

Candelario, Gloria Perez, Chu YenShou, and William Tegeler.Thanks are also owed to individuals who served as

project directors on the many years of data collection. These include John Cahill, Rowena Lo, Julianne Ohlander,

BeverlyTan, Kevin Tanaka,and Dan Yates. Wealso owe a debt of gratitude to the more than 100 student research-

ers whose work made the project possible.

be successfully implemented (Barr, 1992; Roehl et al., 1996). Such efforts, it is hypothesized,

will enhance public safety by reducing citizens’ fear of crime.

Theoretical Background

Emile Durkheim’s notions of social control and Robert Sampson’s (1997) evidence con-

cerning the effect of social cohesion and informal social control on criminal behavior are

matters that are applicable to Weedand Seed programs. In a theoretical sense, these programs

are efforts to reinstall the social control strength of the collective conscience. Durkheim

argued that many early societies relied primarily on informal mechanisms of social control,

which resulted in strong social solidarity. Durkheim suggested that, in these societies, the

strength of the collective conscience was such that individualswere not likely to deviate from

the general will. The United States’s Amish culture represents the early form of social soli-

darity, which Durkheim (1964) dubbed “mechanical.” For Durkheim, social control in such

societies was enforced by the collective conscience, which represents an aggregate of the

shared beliefs, ideas, and principles of the members of the society. This amalgam of collec-

tive ideas and norms stands outside and above the will of the individual. A collectivesense of

identity is made possible, according to Durkheim, because individuals within a single society

share similar living conditions and environmental influences (Durkheim, 1964).

Durkheim (1964) believed that, as society becomes more complex, informal mechanisms

of social control are no longer sufficient to discourage deviance. He observed that changes in

a society, including such things as immigration, industrialization, and urbanization, under-

mine the strength of the collective conscience. The levelof agreement concerning acceptable

behavior, which exists among members of the mechanical society, is dramatically reduced in

the complex version of social solidarity (Durkheim called this organic solidarity). In this

state, tertiary mechanisms of control (such as the police, courts, and corrections) are neces-

sary to prevent disorder. Formal mechanisms of social control, however, prove less satisfac-

tory at achieving conformity than the informal means prevalent in mechanical societies.

Durkheim’s ideas are echoed in a series of articles by Sampson and his colleagues. They

present evidence for a relationship between informal social control and social cohesion

(which they call neighborhood efficacy) and crime and disorder (Morenoff, Sampson, &

Raudenbush, 2001; Sampson, 1997; Sampson & Raudenbush, 1999). Sampson and his col-

leagues argue that the primary determinant of crime and social disorder is a condition that he

calls concentrated economic disadvantage. It is made up of multiple items such as high levels

of neighborhood poverty, need for public assistance, unemployment, and extensive female-

headed families. Sampson suggests that the effect of concentrated economic disadvantage on

crime and social disorder is mitigated by the presence of high social cohesion among com-

munity members and reliance, by neighbors, on informal methods of social control

(Sampson, 1997). Weed and Seed efforts are meantto increase the likelihood of such things

occurring by returning control of neighborhoods to the law-abiding citizens.

Weed and Seed in Practice

The initial concentration of law enforcement in Weed and Seed programs has been

described as the use of “iron fist” tactics, which is then followed by the use of the “velvet

glove” of community services (Kraska & Paulsen, 1997). The Seed component of Weed and

Seed projects is to involve neighborhood restoration efforts, using social and economic revi-

Bridenball, Jesilow / Weed and Seed Project 65