"Uneasy Peace", book review (Issue #5)
Urban inequality, the decline of crime and the role of community organizations
📚 Introduction
“Uneasy Peace” is an interesting book. It discusses the urban crime decline in the past few decades until the mid-2010s, explaining the causes behind it and talking about the positive, negative and disproportionate effects it had on different American communities. The book tackles questions of how the decline was achieved, what it means for urban poverty, and the myriad of indirect effects that violence brings to people’s well-being, future prospects and social lives.
I thought of this book as addressing two main themes, which I’ll talk about in this newsletter: 1) understanding how crime and poverty are distributed unequally across neighborhoods and what that means for these residents’ future outcomes. 2) how policing, and preventing crime in general across US communities, can be done better.
Some background: Patrick Sharkey was the chair of the department of sociology at NYU, and his research focuses on urban inequality, violence and public policy. More on his work here.
Let’s get started!
Theme 1: How can we ensure that all neighborhoods are safe?
“Uneasy Peace” is, on the surface, a book about crime. It starts off by giving a few key statistics at the nation level: the sharp drop in murder rates in the 90s (to about 6 murders per 100,000 Americans), the fall in violent crime from 80 (per 1000) in 1993 to 19 (per 1000) in 2015 or the fact that, compared to the rest of the world, the United States is much safer and less violent.
However, it is also a book about the spatial patterns of inequality: what does it mean for crime to be clustered along similar lines as poverty? What do nation-wide statistics obscure about the neighborhoods where the crime decline has come at enormous costs? What can we learn by focusing our attention at just a few families’ economic outcomes? How about a couple of census tracts? One key takeaway is that all these phenomena are deeply interconnected: crime, poverty and people’s economic outcomes all influence each-other, and understanding them together is the key to coming up with fairer policies. The book balances between this nation-wide view and the microgeographical one, telling a story about the causes and the effects of these few decades’ crime decline and doing so at varying scales.
Here is a striking example on the impact crime has on those that are most vulnerable. The “Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods”, was an incredibly ambitious work lead by Harvard professor Robert Sampson in the early 1990s. This project worked on understanding how kids’ school performance and cognitive development was affected by living on some of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the United States. Sampson interviewed children over the course of their childhood and their formative years and focused on assessing key aspects of their neighborhoods, including “cultural values, informal social control, formal social control, and social cohesion”. The “neighborhood effect”, as Sampson finds, has a profound impact on levels of crime and violence. Stronger social bonds, or high “collective efficacy”, have more of an effect on levels of crime than even poverty or race, as the study finds.
Sharkey’s own work has built on this study, adding geolocated data on homicides and using the timing of the interviews (before/after a homicide) as a type of natural experiment. Specifically, what happens to children if they are assessed just days after a homicide down the street? They do substantially worse on measurements of cognitive skills after homicides near their homes. Exactly how worse is very revealing: black children given the test after a homicide in their neighborhood performed 4/5ths of a standard deviation (equivalent to 2 years of schooling) worse on their language skills compared to black children who had not experienced a recent homicide in their neighborhoods. This impact was worse the closer a child was to the homicide’s occurrence and if it had occurred closer to the test date. Additionally, the effects of violence were the worst for black children, who are also the most frequently exposed to it.
Clearly, all of these effects are not equal across society: while urban crime has substantially decreased in the period since the 1990s to the 2010s, the books questions whether this decline has lead to children having a better chance of rising out of poverty. Or has the decline in crime has simply made cities more comfortable for urban elites?
Here is an encouraging example: Sharkey’s 2019 study estimates that “the decline homicides led to a 0.80-year increase in life expectancy at birth for African American males, and reduced years of potential life lost by 1,156 years for every 100,000 African American males”. Potential life lost refers approximately to a person’s life expectancy - the age of their death. These gains represent “a 17% reduction in the life expectancy gap between white and African American males” and they also point at the relatively unstudied role of violence as a public health challenge.
Importantly, however, he notes that positive effects of the crime decline have had tremendous benefits to the most disadvantaged. The “crime drop has not reversed the rise of inequality in the United States, but it has changed its form and reduced its consequences”.
Theme 2: How can we reduce crime while also accounting for urban inequality?
One of the most interesting aspects of the book was the role of neighborhood communities and local nonprofits in lowering crime. Sharkey argues that, while policing is effective in lowering crime in the short-term, it is a clearly unsustainable method to ensure our cities are safe. The “punishment model”, as he calls it, which arose as a reaction to the spiking crime levels in the 60s lead to ever-expanding police forces and prison populations. Today, the US has the highest incarceration rates in the world. Community organizations have also played a role in declining crime by creating neighborhood support groups and targeted events (like after-school programs). How the US reached lower crime levels is a complex mix of policing and community nonprofits (among many other factors).
This approach is partly rooted in urban planning: the great urbanist Jane Jacobs said that social order is not kept primarily by the police, but rather by the people themselves. She talked about the ways that urban communities regulate and organize themselves, also known as the famous “eyes on the street”. In this model, the daily movements of people through an area lead to naturally safer communities just by casual observations and people looking out for one another. According to Jacobs, this level of safety was built when there was enough foot traffic on the sidewalks and when workers in the businesses were watching out for the people outside.
So then, how effective are these non-profit community organizations in reducing crime? To answer this question, Sharkey analyzed non-profits from 1990 to 2013 and the role they had in lowering all types of crime (note: he focuses on the cases when these nonprofits were formed because of new sources of funding). He finds that in cities with +100,000 people every 10 new nonprofits lead to 9% decrease of murder rates and a 6% decrease in violent crime rates. In addition, adding new community nonprofits has accompanied crime declines in many large cities, including places like NYC which added “25 nonprofits per 100,000 residents, Los Angeles 36, Chicago 47, and Boston 56”.
Other studies show that summer youth programs (implemented in New York) decrease the probability of incarceration and mortality among its participants by 54% and 18% respectively. In Chicago, the guidance initiative “Becoming a Man” helps young people address impulsive automatic behavior and has lead to a 50% decrease in violent crime arrests. Sharkey points at these examples for motivating a different type of policing: instead of fully relying on the criminal justice system, he advocates for public reforms focused around these community organizations. These arguments for a more “preventative”, rather than “punishing” approach are, in my opinion, much more fair and humane.
📔 Conclusion
Ultimately, the book asks “What really makes us safe?” It does a very persuasive job in answering that question and I have found many of the examples to be illuminating, sharing part of them with you. Crime trends are influenced by so many other important factors of our lived experiences, and it appears that the only way to build successful policies is to consider them as an interconnected network. Thinking in small-scale, putting solutions in local contexts and learning from past mistakes are some of the broad takeaways from “Uneasy Peace”, and I'd encourage you to read the book if you’d like to know more!
Thank you for reading!