A New Effort to Understand and Reduce Community Violence

At a personal level, what drew you to this line of work and your particular research questions about community violence?

I care about reducing inequality. That’s why I got into academia. All the data I was looking at told me that dealing with violence is probably the most important way that we can make progress on reducing urban inequality. As this work has led me to start talking with people who are impacted by violence and by our policy responses to it, that understanding has just been reinforced. Seeing the pain and sadness that violence causes, and seeing the struggles of the people who are working on the ground to reduce violence, has made it a meaningful project and agenda that I believe has extraordinary power to change people’s day-to-day experiences, to reduce inequality, and to reduce the everyday crisis of violence that goes on in lots of communities. Even despite the media coverage, it’s mostly invisible to those of us who live outside of those communities.

How did your project with Arnold Ventures originate?

In the summer of 2020, as gun violence started to rise in many cities across the country, I did a whole bunch of interviews and media appearances. Several years earlier, I had written a book, Uneasy Peace, on the historic decrease in violence. And as the pandemic continued and the protests around George Floyd’s murder intensified, I was consistently asked, ​“How do you explain what’s happening? What should we expect?” I put together some ideas, but ultimately I came to the realization that the research community was not equipped to give a persuasive answer. Our data sources and our methods and approaches to studying violence were simply not able to give either journalists or policymakers confident explanations for trends in a neighborhood or a city, let alone what could be done to respond. The research infrastructure wasn’t there. That experience led me to think seriously about what would actually be necessary to respond to this kind of spike in violence.

What problems and gaps in the field does the project aim to address?

The first problem is that we need a data infrastructure that’s more useful for the study of violence and responses to violence. We don’t have data that provides anywhere close to real-time estimates of how things are changing. We don’t have data on the factors that make violence more or less likely at the local level. And the data sources that we have in individual cities are wildly different and inconsistent. 

The second problem is that we don’t have researchers doing continuous research on the ground. That gap became highly visible in summer 2020. There were no qualitative researchers in cities to help make sense of how attitudes, behaviors, and interactions between residents and law enforcement were shifting, nor how the prevalence of guns and behavior around carrying weapons had shifted. 

Finally, we know that violence is an infectious phenomenon, but we don’t study it that way. Violence is what researchers call an ​“emergent phenomenon,” meaning that when an act of violence occurs it can change people’s behavior, so that it builds on itself. When violence rises in a community or city, it can make residents more likely to carry a weapon and more likely to act first instead of being victimized. These changes can lead to a surge of violence. Epidemiologists have made huge advances in studying infectious diseases like COVID-19, modeling how a virus spreads over time and how interventions are likely to change that spread. But those methods have not been applied to the study of violence in the same way.

What’s novel about the approach you and your colleagues in the research network are taking?

We’re starting with the goal of making research more useful for city leaders and communities that are dealing with the challenge of violence and don’t have all the tools they need to understand what’s going on and respond effectively. That involves developing an advisory board of people who are on the ground dealing with the problem. Our task throughout this project is to make certain that we’re being guided by the people who are affected the most by violence. We want to begin by building trust, building relationships, and being conscious of the history within communities, as well as the politics and the emotional impact of violence. There’s a danger of approaching this from a purely academic perspective and missing the pain and trauma that people are going through.

What can we hope to learn that advances our collective understanding of the problem of violence and solutions to address it?

The real hope is to make progress. The data challenge is severe, and this group is not going to solve it. What we can do is provide a path forward and build a data infrastructure that is more useful and more accessible. We can begin to develop data sources on the factors that make violence more or less likely. In other areas of the project, we want to develop a set of research strategies that can make our work directly useful for policymakers by giving them estimates about how different interventions are likely to affect violence within a neighborhood or a city — estimates that better account for violence as an emergent phenomenon. That hasn’t been possible before because of the ways that we typically study violence. We want to get to a point where policymakers turn to our qualitative researchers to get a better understanding of what is shifting on the ground, and what is creating spikes or lulls in violence. 

How does this work connect with some of the other violence intervention efforts out there?

Projects like the Violence Reduction Center (VRC) at the University of Maryland and the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) are doing important work, with a real focus on making the research more directly useful and relying on the most rigorous evidence that’s available. That has definitely been a focus of Thomas Abt, the VRC’s founder, for a long time. His book Bleeding Out did a great job of laying out the most effective interventions for addressing violence. Our project will be looking at some of those interventions, as well as some different interventions that focus more on community groups. These approaches are all complementary. Violence is a fundamental challenge of cities and I believe that nothing about city life works if public spaces carry the threat of violence. That’s why we have come together to do this work.

When you’re not considering these incredibly complicated questions about community violence, what else do you like to do?

My family and I try to volunteer around Princeton, where we’re located. We started a mutual aid organization during COVID-19 that’s designed to bring resources from Princeton into the surrounding communities. We also do basic stuff like serve meals at soup kitchens and deliver meals nearby in Trenton. I bring my kids along. Since we moved to Princeton, the kids don’t see inequality in the way we did when we lived in Manhattan. We need to make more of an effort to live in accordance with a set of values that’s about addressing inequality, and I am trying to do so in my day-to-day life with my kids.

What have you been reading lately that you would recommend to our readers?

I always recommend this book The Stick Up Kids, by Randol Contreras. It’s about his time growing up in New York City a few decades ago, right at the tail end of the crack epidemic, and I think it gives the best combination of a personal memoir of what it was like to grow up in that time and place along with a sociological perspective on all the forces that came together to impact the trajectory of his life and the lives of his friends. It’s a really beautiful book, and it’s relatively unknown, so I like to point to it instead of some of the classics.