5 takeaways:
➀ Legal firearm purchases soared during the pandemic but do not explain the increase in gun violence. It typically takes five to seven years for a weapon purchased legally to emerge in the black market and be used in a crime. “They’re stolen out of somebody’s car, then they exchange various hands,” said Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice. “They’re filtered through informal networks and ultimately they end up in a crime scene.” The evidence suggests that people are more likely to be carrying illegal weapons – and using them – than before the pandemic, Abt said. Homicides rose 29% in 2020 compared to 2019, then rose another 4% in the first nine months of 2021. Aggravated and gun assaults rose 3% and 0.4%, respectively. Yet these are still lower than the crime rates of the 1990s.
➁ Violence is concentrated. The spike in homicide is mostly due to gun violence among a tiny fraction of the population in poor communities of color where high levels of violence already existed, Abt said. “Study after study, in place after place, we find that crime and especially violence are concentrated,” he said. “… They cluster together among surprisingly small numbers of people and places. This is true everywhere in the United States. It’s true in many cities around the world.” In Oakland, California, 60% of murders occur within a tiny social network of 1,000 to 2,000 individuals – about 0.3% of the population. In Boston, just 350 people are driving most of the violence, which is happening in 75 or 80 locations. “The evidence in this space is so overwhelming that ultimately if you are not focused on high-risk people and places, your response to community gun violence is fundamentally non-serious,” Abt said. “There shouldn’t be any more debate about this. If you want to have a short-term impact on this problem, you have to go where the violence is.”
➂ There is no simple, single cause of gun violence or violent crime. Contrary to popular belief, community gun violence isn’t driven by delinquent teens; rather, it’s men in their 20s and 30s, Abt said. Mistrust of police and perceptions that police are abusive toward minority populations is a factor, Abt said. So is the failure by police to solve crimes. Each police department has what is known as a “clearance rate,” which is the number of crimes for which someone is charged divided by the number of crimes reported. In 1976, the national homicide clearance rate was 82%. In 2020, it was 50%. “That’s an insult to the victims of homicides and their families,” Abt said. For non-fatal shootings, the clearance rate is only half of that for murder cases. When victims do not get justice, it’s harder to disrupt cycles of retaliation, Abt said.
➃ There is no single long-term solution. Focused law enforcement, crime prevention and addressing the delegitimization of police – as well as underlying issues such as poverty and despair – are part of the answer, Abt said. Most offenders are “deeply disconnected individuals,” he said. “They don’t trust the police. They don’t trust the government generally. And so they often need some kind of intermediary to go … not just between them and the police, but between them and their family services worker or their social worker, or all of those things.”
➄ Community-based strategies can reduce violence. Abt said there is evidence that cognitive-behavioral therapy is effective not only in treating depression but also in addressing criminality. But such therapy must be customized and is hard to scale. The evidence for street outreach to mediate conflicts is “promising but mixed,” Abt said. It worked in Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, but in Baltimore and Pittsburgh, it actually increased violence. “Implementation matters,” Abt said. Closed-circuit TV does not appear to have a significant effect on violent crime but does seem to prevent car thefts in parking lots. Hospital-based violence intervention programs are promising, too, he said, but more research is needed. “It’s important not to oversell this stuff,” Abt said. “Most of this stuff is in the ‘promising, not proven’ category.”
Speaker:
Thomas Abt, Senior Fellow and Chair, Violent Crime Working Group, Council on Criminal Justice
This program was funded by Arnold Ventures. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
