Why Is Murder Spiking? And Can Cities Address It Without Police?

In 2020 the United States experienced a nearly 30 percent rise in homicides from 2019. That’s the single biggest one-year increase since we started keeping national records in 1960. And violence has continued to rise well into 2021. To deny or downplay the seriousness of this spike is neither morally justified nor politically wise. Violence takes lives, traumatizes children, instills fear, destroys community life and entrenches racial and economic inequality. Public opinion responds in kind: Polling indicates that Americans are increasingly worried about violent crime. And if November’s state and local campaigns were any indication, public safety will be a defining issue in upcoming election cycles. Liberals and progressives need an answer to the question of how to handle rising violence. But that answer doesn’t need to involve a return to the punitive, tough-on-crime approach that has devastated Black and brown communities for decades and led millions of people to take to the streets in protest last summer. Patrick Sharkey is a sociologist at Princeton University and the author of “Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence.” The central claim of his work is this: Police are effective at reducing violence, but they aren’t the only actors capable of doing so. Sharkey has studied community-based models for addressing violence in places as varied as rural Australia and New York City. As a result, he has developed a compelling, evidence-backed vision of how cities and communities can tackle violent crime without relying heavily on police. So this conversation is about what an alternative approach to addressing the current homicide spike could look like and all the messy, difficult questions it raises. It also explores the causes of the homicide spike, why Sharkey thinks policing is ultimately an “unsustainable” solution to crime, how New York City managed to reduce gun violence by 50 percent while reducing arrests and prison populations, whether it’s possible to overcome the punitive politics of rising crime, why America has such abnormally high levels of violent crime in the first place and more. Mentioned: “Community and the Crime Decline: The Causal Effect of Local Nonprofits on Violent Crime” by Patrick Sharkey, Gerard Torrats-Espinosa and Delaram Takyar “Reducing Violence Without Police: A Review of Research Evidence” “Social Fabric: A New Model For Public Safety and Vital Neighborhoods” by Elizabeth Glazer and Patrick Sharkey “Can Precision Policing Reduce Gun Violence? Evidence from “Gang Takedowns in New York City” by Aaron Chalfin, Michael LaForest and Jacob Kaplan Book Recommendations: The Stickup Kids by Randol Contreras The Truly Disadvantaged by William Julius Wilson Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse This episode is guest hosted by Rogé Karma, the staff editor for “The Ezra Klein Show.” Rogé has been with the show since July 2019, when it was based at Vox. He works closely with Ezra on everything related to the show, from editing to interview prep to guest selection. At Vox, he also wrote stories and conducted interviews on topics ranging from policing and racial justice to democracy reform and the coronavirus. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Andrea López Cruzado; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Alison Bruzek.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:19Ezra Klein?

  Hey, it is Ezra. So while I'm on paternity leave, as you know, we've got this all-star team of guest hosts, but this week, this is the week I am particularly excited about. Not to overhype it, but Rojai Karma has been with the show since July 2019, a long time now, back when I was doing the podcast at Vox. His official title is Staff Editor, but there isn't really a title that can describe how much he contributes to the show. So much of what you think is me being good at my job is Rojai being good at his. So I am very excited to hear what he does with the mic this week.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  It's really hard to overstate just how powerful a force violence can be in people's lives. Violence, it doesn't just take lives. It traumatizes children, it destroys community life, it entrenches racial and economic inequality. But violence isn't just destructive for people's lives. It can also be catastrophic politically. It can result in the kind of punitive, tough-on-crime policies that have devastated Black and Brown communities for decades. And that makes what's happening right now truly worrying. Last year, the United States

• 1:39Speaker 01

  experienced a nearly 30% rise in murder. That's the single biggest one-year increase since we started keeping national records way back in 1960. Homicide shot up in basically every major city in the US, and they've continued to rise well into 2021. And if the state and local races across the country earlier this month were any indication, this violence is going to be a defining issue in future elections.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Patrick Sharkey is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. And I've come to think of his 2018 book, Uneasy Peace, as really the book for making sense of this moment. Often, this violence is treated as if it came out of nowhere. But Sharkey's core argument is that the relative peace on American streets on the eve of 2020 was far more fragile and far less stable than is typically understood. It's not just that last year was unprecedented. It's that American society was already a tinderbox waiting to explode. At the center of Sharkey's thinking is what I've come to refer to as the dual realities of American policing.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  On the one hand, there's really robust evidence that police are effective at reducing violent crime.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  But in Sharkey's view, policing is also an inherently unsustainable way of dealing with violence. One that tends to undermine whatever peace it achieves for many reasons that we discuss here. The good news is that police aren't the only institution capable of addressing violence. And this is where Sharkey's work is truly distinct. He's done some of the most rigorous empirical analysis showing that community organizations were central to the great crime decline of the 1990s and 2000s. And he's developed a compelling, community-based vision of public safety as a result. One that tries to tackle the problem of violent crime without relying on the tools of state violence to do so. That last point is an important one.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  There's a deeply frustrating tendency in this conversation to downplay either the harms of violent crime or the harms of police brutality, depending on your political leanings.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  The reason I wanted to have Sharkey on the show, among other reasons, is that he starts from the position that individuals, families, communities can only truly flourish when they feel safe. When they feel safe from both violent crime and state violence. And he builds a model of public safety on top of that insight. So this conversation begins with the current murder spike and the dual realities of American policing.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  But a huge part of it is about what this alternative public safety model could look like, about what it would mean to try to address violence without relying so heavily on police, and about all the thorny, difficult questions that that raises. As always, the show email is azra kline show at nytimes.com. My conversation with Patrick Sharkey after the break.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Patrick Sharkey, welcome to the show.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Thanks, Rojai. It's good to be here with you.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  You've called violence the fundamental challenge of cities. Tell me about that. Why is violence so fundamental?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  What I mean is that the very idea of city life breaks down when public spaces carry the threat of violence, when cities are unsafe. So if we think about cities as places where public life is prioritized over private life, where people come together in shared spaces, whether they're subway cars, or playgrounds, or theaters, or baseball parks, whatever it might be, that idea of shared collective space starts to break down when there's the threat of violence. So people start to retreat from the subways, retreat back to their homes, keep their kids inside. Collective life starts to wither away. So I argue that violence is a fundamental challenge of cities because nothing about cities can work.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  The idea of cities doesn't work as long as people are worried about venturing outside their homes and going into public space.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  I think when we normally think of cities, now at least, we think of yuppie, urban, professionals, sort of college-educated elites. But you specifically focus in your work on how violence affects the most marginalized, on the relationship between violence and inequality. So can you talk to me about what violence and its effects actually look like in people's lives?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  I don't want to give the impression that I've lived it. And if you haven't lived in a violent environment, I think it's not possible to fully understand what it's like to have a family member shot or killed, or to live amidst the chaos of police sirens and police tape and blood on the pavement and everything that comes with the horror of violent crime. What I've done is I've gathered more and more evidence of how violence reverberates around communities, how it affects everyone within communities with its most pernicious consequences on the most disadvantaged segments of the population. I started down this line of research really because of one study I carried out where I was trying to assess

• 7:30Speaker 02

  how children are affected when there's a specific incident of extreme violence in their neighborhood. So this was done with data from Chicago, and I found that children who took a standard test of cognitive skills right after an incident of violence in their neighborhood looked as if they had missed about two years of schooling compared to kids who took the same assessment just before an incident of violence, a homicide, had occurred in their neighborhood. So the impact was so large that I thought it was wrong. So I replicated the study. And the second time I did the study, the impact was even larger than the first time. And that finding now has been replicated in dozens of studies since in different contexts and countries. And the research that's been done, and it's kind of built off that finding,

• 8:15Speaker 02

  shows that violence clearly doesn't make children less intelligent, but it occupies their minds. It makes children less able to focus, to concentrate, it affects their school attendance, their sleep, their levels of stress hormones, and it alters their trajectories. So that's what I started with. I was looking at the consequences of violence for children. As I did more research, I started to think more broadly and carry out more research on the consequences of violence across entire communities. And what I found is that violence doesn't just have a direct effect on young people. It undermines community life, makes families less willing to invest in neighborhoods, less willing to raise kids in a neighborhood. It makes teachers less likely to remain in a school district.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  It makes business owners less likely to set up shop. So there are fewer jobs available. It makes residents retreat from public spaces like parks, playgrounds, libraries, community centers. So, you know, I've said already that urban inequality creates the conditions for violence, but violence amplifies inequality. It undermines community life, undermines the very idea of city life.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  And that makes the current wave of violence even more worrying. In 2020, the United States experienced a 29% rise in murder, the single biggest one-year increase since we started keeping national records in 1960. And this increase wasn't driven by a handful of outliers, right? The number of homicides shot up in basically every major city in the United States. Give me a read of what's going on here.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  There was a huge increase in gun violence in particular. And I think, you know, it will take more research, I hate to say it, but it will take more research to figure out exactly the set of factors that had the biggest impact. But there were a few major shocks that the whole country went through. And the first was obviously the pandemic, when the country locked down in March of 2020. So it wasn't just about individual hardship or loss of life or sickness that went with COVID-19. It was also that the institutions that provide the foundation of community life started to shut down. I mean, schools, but I also mean libraries and community centers and parks and playgrounds in some cases. These are the institutions, these are the places that bring people together, that bring

• 10:33Speaker 02

  people out into public space. And again, I'll say this over and over, but when people retreat into their homes, when they feel like they're on their own, then communities become vulnerable to rising violence. So there was first the shock of the pandemic. Second was and relatedly was a rise in the prevalence of guns. So more guns were purchased last year than at any point in the history of the country. And as early as March and April, there's really good research from people like Jens Ludwig and Jeff Asher showing that police started seizing more and more guns despite fewer arrests in the early months of the pandemic. And so the prevalence of guns creates the conditions for more violence. And then lastly was the set of protests that spread across the country,

• 11:15Speaker 02

  the protests against racial injustice and police brutality in response to the murder of George Floyd. And when there is this kind of high profile protest against police brutality, then interactions on the street can start to change in multiple ways. First, police can change their behavior. They can choose not to get involved in incidents where they have any discretion. And that can lead to a rise in violence. But secondly, and this is the important change that I think doesn't get enough attention, residents can begin to check out. They can stop calling the police for help, to stop providing information, to stop going along with the way things worked before they watched what happened to George Floyd.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  And so both sets of processes can lead to a rise of violence. And so all of these processes came together last year. And it's very difficult to sort out which were the most important. But they came together and they resulted in a situation where I think a lot of Americans had the feeling that they were on their own. There was a sense of normalness, disconnection, what sociologists call ennemi, that pervaded public life. And I think this created the conditions for violence to start to rise.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  One of the possible causes that you didn't mention, and that I think is important to at least reference here, is that there's a tendency on the right to blame this spike on blue city governance or police defunding or progressive prosecutors, right? I was just looking at a morning consult poll from earlier this year that found that 74% of Republicans and 46% of independents thought that

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Defunding the police was one of the major factors contributing to the violence increase. So is there any merit to those explanations?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  There's no merit to those explanations for what happened last year. Police budgets had not fallen when violence started to rise last year, and violence rose to equivalent degrees in cities run by Democrats versus cities run by Republicans. So what happened last year was not about defunding the police.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  I think there's a real tendency, both on the left and the right, to view this spike monocausally, to look at, say, it was the pandemic, it was the lockdowns, it was the protests, it was guns. But something that I think you're getting at, and that I've come to see more and more, is that a lot of these different drivers of violence seem like symptoms of the same basic disease. You talked about Anne O'Me, and I see it as a pretty profound legitimacy crisis for the criminal justice system, especially in the communities most impacted by it. And there's good evidence to back that up, right?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  In 2020, Black Americans' trust in the police dipped to an all-time low. According to Gallup, only 19% of Black adults said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in police. For the criminal justice system as a whole, that number was just 11%. So you started getting at this earlier, but what happens when communities lose faith in those systems?

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I rely heavily on the ideas and the work of ethnographers, particularly a researcher named Monica Bell, who has done some of the best work on this exact question. And she uses a term that she calls legal estrangement, and it's based on her work in Baltimore. And what Monica argues, and what she shows in her work, is that longstanding mistreatment and hostility between police and residents creates this feeling of alienation, where many people in low-income communities of color see themselves as outside the purview of the laws, unprotected by the state, on their own, not full citizens in their city. And getting back

• 15:18Speaker 02

  To the question about what drove the rise of violence last year, I think this was a big part of it. As the institutions of collective life shut down, as after-school programs shut down and schools shut down, a growing sense took hold that people were on their own. And in New York City, in the early part of the pandemic, enforcement of social distancing rules was almost entirely focused on people of color. This is a symptom of what was going on. So millions of people bought guns. And a few months in the pandemic, when the nation rose up in protest and police departments responded in lots of places with just brute force, I think that feeling was reinforced. So there is something deeper here that has been growing for a long period of time and has become more visible in the

• 16:02Speaker 02

  past five or six years that underlies what we saw last year.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Let's step back and talk about that for a minute. For many people, I think it felt like this violence came out of nowhere. America went from experiencing its most peaceful era in decades, the product of the great crime decline, to a sudden explosion of violence. But you make a really different argument in your book, that on the eve of 2020, America was essentially a tinderbox waiting to explode. So tell me about that. How would you describe the public safety status quo in America on the eve of 2020?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Well, what I'd say is, I wrote my book on the decline of violence from the early 1990s to the mid 2010s. And that period, around 2014, was one of the safest years in the history of the country. But it's a serious mistake to focus exclusively on the benefits of the crime drop when more than 6 million people are under the supervision of the state, whether they're in jail or prison, on probation or parole, when something like one out of five black men who were born in the late 60s would go to state or federal prison at some point by middle age. And one out of 1,000 black men will be killed by the police. So there is something missing in talking exclusively about the decline

• 17:27Speaker 02

  of violence. And the conclusion In the book was that the fall of violence did have its greatest impact on the most disadvantaged communities in the US. But the dominant methods that we've relied on to deal with violence in this country, which includes aggressive and sometimes violent policing, intensive surveillance, targeted toward low-income communities of color, and of course, mass incarceration. These methods have created an enormous amount of harm. They undermine community life because they remove people from their families, from their neighborhoods. They weaken communities because young people often don't feel welcomed in their own neighborhoods. And the dominant actors switch. They become police and parole officers rather than parents and coaches. So the core argument, the core conclusion of the book

• 18:13Speaker 02

  is that the crime drop had enormous benefits that were targeted on the most disadvantaged communities, but that the methods that we have relied on for decades to respond not only to violence, but to all of the problems that come when you have extreme urban inequality, have created this version of uneasy peace, have left us in a situation where we have low levels of violence, but no one is content, and it's fragile, and it's precarious. And we saw that borne out over the past few years.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  I want to hold on that because I think that is a really important idea. This idea that policing is an ultimately unsustainable tool for dealing with crime. It's also a counterintuitive idea. And so I'm wondering if you can expand on that and particularly talk about some of the mechanisms here. When you say that the methods that we've relied on historically to deal with crime in America are unsustainable and produce this sort of fragile, uneasy peace, this tinderbox that's waiting to explode, what are you talking about?

• 19:21Speaker 02

  So this goes back decades and it goes back to the way that in the US we have responded to the broader challenge of urban inequality. There were a set of changes that took place in policy decisions going all the way back to the 1940s, when urban economies began to de-industrialize and employment opportunities in central cities started to shrink. The federal government made several large-scale investments in suburban areas through the highway system, through subsidies for home mortgages. This provided a mechanism for central city residents to leave and to avoid rising property taxes. But it also allowed firms to escape the grip of big-city unions to take advantage of a labor force outside the city and land outside the city.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  At that moment, central city neighborhoods lost tax revenue. They also lost political influence. Funding for infrastructure collapsed, schools crumbled, parks, playgrounds, public housing complexes were not maintained, poverty became more concentrated, joblessness rose. And when all of these things happen, when central city neighborhoods are abandoned, left on their own, when poverty is concentrated, when institutions start to fall apart, this creates the conditions for violence to rise. So it's really important to kind of situate the problem of violent crime within this history. This didn't come out of nowhere. It's not a mystery why some neighborhoods are consistently dealing with high levels of violence.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  These are the neighborhoods that have been areas of disinvestment for decades, areas where institutions are starved of resources, where residents are less likely to come together to solve collective challenges. And as a result, these are the neighborhoods that are vulnerable to violence. So we had this long period of abandonment where resources were extracted from central city neighborhoods. And then we responded with this policy regime of punishment. And I put these two together to describe the dominant approach to dealing with violence over the past 50 years. This dual strategy of abandonment and punishment, which has put us in a situation that we see today.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  I think the long-term divestment in predominantly low-income black and brown neighborhoods is an incredibly important part of the story here that way too often gets overlooked. And so I want to come back to that. But I think this is where you'll run into the argument. You know, sure, it's great to talk about root causes, but at the end of the day, we need to address the violence happening right now. And policing is one of the most effective tools we have for doing that. And that's true, right? The evidence that policing does reduce crime is fairly robust. But you make the argument that at the same time policing reduces violence in the short term. It can also make communities much more vulnerable to violence in the long term.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Can you talk about those dual realities of policing?

• 22:16Speaker 02

  The first thing to say is that there's a large body of evidence that makes very clear that when you have more police on the street, there is less violence. So, police are effective at reducing violence. And that evidence comes from a range of different empirical approaches, usually taking advantage of natural experiments that lead to periods of time where there's more police on the street or funding that becomes available to bolster police forces. So, the empirical work shows very clearly that in a given neighborhood or city, if we add more police to the streets, there will be less crime. But it is not designed to tell us anything about the harm that arises from having more police on the street. So, people like Ali Asa Sewell and Amanda Geller and Yosha Legewi have all done really

• 22:58Speaker 02

  strong work showing how living in an area where there is aggressive policing, where young people are routinely surveilled and stopped by the police, weighs on young people's minds, hurts them in school, leads to psychological distress. In some communities, young people live their lives as suspects and it does enormous damage. So, there's a very clear conclusion from the literature that the effects of policing are not only to reduce violence, but they also generate these other consequence. And what I would say more broadly is that the dominant methods that we've relied on to deal with violence, which includes aggressive policing, but also includes this broader

• 23:42Speaker 02

  project of mass incarceration, they run counter to the basic ideals of what it means to be a citizen in the US. And they've created growing resentment as more and more people have watched the videos of their fellow citizens being killed by police officers and have come to the conclusion that they're not seen as full citizens of a state. They're not protected by this institution that is supposedly there to preserve their safety. You know, this was visible all the way back in 2014 when I started writing. A decline of violence that relies on the institutions of punishment, one that does not build stronger communities, one that doesn't deal with the larger challenges of extreme

• 24:23Speaker 02

  inequality is never going to be a sustainable way to create safe, but also strong neighborhoods.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  And I think this brings us back to the current crime wave. Because one thing that happens when that resentment builds up and builds up over time is eventually it just bursts.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  We saw this in 2014 and 15 in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, and we saw it across the country last year in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. And there's pretty good evidence from Roland Frye and others that violence tends to increase in the wake of these protests against police brutality. And that fact is typically wielded as a way to shift blame for the current violence on protesters, to warn that any efforts to scale back policing will result in huge waves of violence. But you're making a very different argument, that this pattern is actually an indication that we need a new model for dealing with violence.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  So can you talk a little bit more about the relationship between protests against police brutality and violence and the conclusions that you draw from that relationship?

• 25:35Speaker 02

  The central conclusion that I make is that when we rely on one institution to dominate public space, which we've done with law enforcement for the past 50 years, and then that institution, police officers step back from that role, then it creates the conditions where violence can rise. And so there's more nuance in what actually happens in the aftermath of high-profile protests. There are shifts in behavior that arise from police, and we saw evidence of these shifts in behavior. So as gun violence was skyrocketing in New York City, arrests for guns plummeted after the protests where violence really started to spike. So police can choose not to get involved.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Police can choose to step back from their role and make a statement, either because they're worried about getting in trouble and being the next viral video, or to make a political statement, to make the point that, okay, you're going to protest what we do, we won't do it anymore. We'll step back, we'll stop doing our job. But the second set of processes are equally important, and they involve residents. And in the aftermath of high-profile protests, when residents have this sense that they are not seen as full citizens of the state, residents sometimes start to check out. They can stop calling the police for help. They can stop providing information to police. So both of these processes can lead to a rise in violence in the aftermath of high-profile protests.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  This doesn't mean that protests lead to violence. It means, again, that when we rely on the police to dominate public space and control public spaces by force, and then the police step back from that role with no other institutions that step up, then we can see a rise in violence. And that last point, that we don't have a set of institutions across the country that are ready to step in and play a more central role in controlling violence and in supporting residents in advocating for their neighbors. So when I look at this, and we're going to get to the policy implications, I know, but when I look at the situation that we saw last year, when I look at the rise in violence,

• 27:50Speaker 02

  it brings me back to this point that this is not really about the police. It is about the absence of another set of institutions in our cities that can play a more central role in looking out over public space, making sure everyone is cared for, advocating for their neighbors. We don't have an institution that acts on the basis of well-being. We have an institution that we have relied on for a long time that relies on the mechanism of punishment and force. And so that is an unsustainable way to deal with violence.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  I think for someone hearing this argument about the costs of modern policing, about the way it sows distrust in communities, the way that it makes communities more vulnerable to violence, the way it creates illegal estrangement, the natural response people may have may be, "Well, sure, but that's only true of bad policing, right? When police are doing their jobs correctly, those things shouldn't happen." And if the problem is restricted to bad policing, and bad policing only, then relatively simple things, like making it easier for departments to get rid of, sort of, you know, bad apples, or hiring a wider diversity of officers, or making police training better, or adopting body cameras, right?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  That these things can fix the problems of bad policing, and ultimately, the problems that you're talking about. So when we're talking about these costs of policing, the harms that policing imposes, are we talking about policing in general, or are we only talking about, quote unquote, "bad policing"?

• 29:27Speaker 02

  It's a great question, and I think there are things that can be done to improve policing and to change policing tactics and reduce the number of worst-case outcomes. But I will say, there's a bigger issue here. So we have created this completely decentralized institution of law enforcement, where there are 18,000 different law enforcement agencies, operating mostly independently, mostly from local resources, and we have asked that institution to solve all of the problems that come with concentrated poverty. This is remarkably unfair to law enforcement. It results in wildly divergent practices of policing, because police officers are asked

• 30:08Speaker 02

  to deal with a range of problems that go well beyond gun violence, but include mental illness, addiction, intimate partner violence, self-harm, the foster care system.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Police officers are not trained to deal with all of these challenges. And we don't provide the supports, meaning social service providers, other agencies that can assist with the homeless population, with the mentally ill, with addiction, with substance use. And as a result, we treat every Department of Justice investigation as if it's an isolated case, but it's not. It is about the institution of policing and the spatial structure of inequality in the US. It is about the fact that every law enforcement agency operates on its own with its own funding stream that arises from local sources. That is the cause of the extreme inequality that we see in policing across the country.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  I think that's a good bridge to talk about how we address this homicide spike. The leading answer right now, even among liberals, it seems, is more policing. Cities are increasing their police budgets. Many lawmakers are pushing for additional officers. And I think the argument you'll hear from liberals on this is that, sure, policing is highly imperfect and inflicts all kinds of terrible harms, but the harms of violent crime are worse. Homicides are responsible for orders of magnitude more deaths than policing. And so I think the thinking goes, if there is a choice between police violence and violent crime, then policing is ultimately the lesser of two evils, so we should choose it.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  And so what we've been talking about complicates that story. But the question I have for you is, is that the trade-off that we face?

• 31:57Speaker 02

  I think there's lots of evidence to indicate that it's not a real trade-off, that it's not the choice that we have to make. Back in the summer of 2015, I sat down with three graduate students and we looked at as much data as we could find on what was happening in the places where violence was falling. And we saw the rise in police forces, we saw the rise in incarceration, but we also saw another trend. In the 1990s, as violence was falling, nonprofit organizations were forming all over the country.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  That were formed to deal with violence itself, but also to build stronger communities, organizations that were dealing with addiction, mental illness, homelessness, housing. And what we found is that the growth of nonprofit organizations in the 1990s stands alongside the other changes that we've talked about as a central reason for why violence fell. So in a typical city with 100,000 people, every 10 organizations that were formed to build a stronger neighborhood, to deal with the problem of violence, reduce violent crime by about 9%. And this finding is reinforced by lots of rigorous empirical work evaluating the work of nonprofits using randomized controlled trials,

• 33:14Speaker 02

  looking at interventions like after-school programming, summer jobs programming. So we now have a body of evidence that makes it very clear that although the police do reduce violence, they are not the only actors that reduce violence. Community organizations mobilized at the local level have an equally or stronger impact on violence. But these organizations just have never been thought of as central actors, central institutions in the effort to control violence.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  I think that causal analysis is really important as a proof of concept. But let's get specific here in terms of what these alternatives actually look like. My understanding is that there are sort of three main buckets of interventions that have a real track record of reducing violence. The first is basic social service provision. And I think this is a set of interventions that will probably be most familiar to listeners. Things like expanding Medicaid, access to mental health counseling and addiction services. All of these things have been shown to reduce violent crime. But then there are a set of interventions that we can think of as more community-based. So these are things like violence interruption, cognitive behavioral therapy, summer jobs programs, all of which are examples

• 34:31Speaker 01

  of community institutions stepping up to engage those most at risk of violence with tools other than force. And then lastly, there's this bucket of really sort of counterintuitive interventions where relatively modest changes to the built environment can have shockingly impressive anti-violence effects.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  So can you just walk me through the sorts of interventions that fit into each of those buckets and the actual evidence behind them?

• 35:00Speaker 02

  So there are a bunch of programs and organizations that have been evaluated with randomized controlled trials. And these get all the attention because this is the gold standard for evaluation research. And so some of the conclusions from that work are things like cognitive behavioral therapy plus after-school sports programs, like for instance, in the Becoming a Man program run in Chicago, reduced arrests for the middle schoolers who took part by 45 to 50%. So just these extraordinary benefits of taking part in this program. Similarly, with summer jobs, combined with cognitive behavioral therapy or other youth

• 35:42Speaker 02

  programming, these programs have been evaluated in both New York and Chicago. The Chicago version, Sarah Heller, evaluated and found that it reduced violence by 43% over the following 16 months after participation. And then you have a set of experimental programs that have done things like redesign abandoned plots of land or abandoned buildings. So this was a program in Philadelphia where plots of land were, again, randomly assigned to receive a treatment where they were redesigned and greened. And Charles Branus and John McDonald and others have evaluated this work and found that in higher poverty neighborhoods, redesigning abandoned plots of land, places that used

• 36:26Speaker 02

  to signal that an area was not cared for, that was not maintained, when those plots are redesigned, violence falls by up to 30%. Improved street lighting around housing developments in New York City, Aaron Chalfin and several co-authors evaluated the sighting of improved lighting around housing developments and found that they reduced nighttime felonies by over 30%. So this is kind of the evidence for the skeptics. This is the evidence that's coming from randomized controlled trials. What I want to make clear is that These are not the only programs out there. There has been work going on for a very long time in neighborhoods across the country that hasn't been evaluated in the same way,

• 37:09Speaker 02

  but that has generated extremely strong evidence of transformation at the local level. So groups like Save Our Streets in New York or Advance Peace in Richmond, California, the Detroit Justice Center, there are lots of these organizations across the country that have shown over a long period of time that they can play a central role in transforming their neighborhood and providing services and support to residents without the cost of policing. So this work has been going on for a very long time. It's just that it's never been seen as a central approach, a central strategy to confront violence. And that has to change.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  These organizations deserve the same funding, the same commitment that the police have received. We've just never given it to them.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  So I think people hear that list and the size of these effects. And it sounds almost too good to be true. But I think the pushback you'll get here is, can they scale? The evidence we've been talking about is largely from, you know, small controlled randomized control trials. Most of these interventions have never been tested on anything like a citywide level. And the success of a lot of these, best of these programs, like Becoming a Man or Ready Chicago or Advance Peace, it seems really tied to the fact that these organizations have incredible leadership, extremely talented staff, that they're uniquely equipped to deal with the environments that they're operating in,

• 38:41Speaker 01

  which is great, but scaling up that kind of success is extremely difficult. So I'm wondering how you think about that challenge moving forward.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  I think it is extremely difficult. They can't scale without years of planning. So there's absolutely no reason to think that a different set of institutions can emerge and be immediately effective without being given the same commitment and the same resources that we devote to law enforcement. So in my work, I've made the case that we don't move toward this new model by targeting police budgets, by seeking to exact revenge against the police. When you rely on one institution to deal with the problem of violence and then you try to weaken that institution without first building an alternative set of organizations and institutions that are ready to deal with violence, then you're going to create a destabilized community.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  You're going to see a rise in violence. So the argument that I make is that we need to seek a better form of policing, and that is very clear. But at the same time, we need to start investing in a new model. We need to start investing in a new set of institutions that over time, with sufficient resources, can begin to play a more central role in looking out over their communities.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  I want to talk about a major city that has at least tried to do something like this, and with some success, I might add. When most people think of New York City's approach to crime, they think of Rudy Giuliani and Bill Bratton. They think of this really brutal, broken windows, stop and frisk style of policing. But you've written about the ways that New York has been taking some pretty significant steps towards a very different model, or at least was before the pandemic. So can you talk about how New York's approach to public safety has changed over the last decade?

• 40:35Speaker 02

  So what happened in New York, I think, is crucial to remember because there were a set of changes that took place from the start of the de Blasio administration through 2019 that represent what I think of as really a proof of concept, that a different model to create stronger neighborhoods to deal with violence is possible. And it took several different forms in New York. So first, it was It was a lighter touch style of policing and prosecution, where the number of arrests plummeted, where stops by police officers basically ended as a central tactic of the NYPD, and where summonses fell and the jail population fell. So people don't realize this, but the jail population in New York

• 41:20Speaker 02

  has fallen to a level where it is closer to the levels in Western Europe than it is to the rest of the country in the US. And at the same time, there was a turn toward the community. And again, that's took several different forms. The most notable ones being the emergence of what the city called the crisis management system. And secondly, the mayor's action plan for neighborhood safety, both which focused on building, turning to the strengths of neighborhoods and residents to play a central role in responding to violence. And it's important to kind of go back and look at the predictions for what was going to happen by people like Ray Kelly, the former commissioner, Rudy Giuliani, and others,

• 42:03Speaker 02

  who argued that if you end stop, question, and frisk, violence is going to explode. Well, when stop, question, and frisk ended, violence kept falling. When the jail population declined, violence kept falling. And it fell to record lows all the way till 2019. And it showed very clearly that a different model, a new model that no longer relies on the institutions of punishment can build stronger neighborhoods, and it can also reduce violence.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  And I think it's important to point out here that this wasn't just a small decline in crime, right? Gun violence in New York City declined by around 50% between 2011 and 2018. The city experienced what was essentially a second great crime decline at a moment when it was simultaneously scaling back the footprint of its criminal justice system in all the ways that you just mentioned. That's pretty astounding. So I want to talk more about what this effort actually looked like. Can you tell me more about two of those institutions you just mentioned, the crisis management system and the mayor's action plan for neighborhood safety? What did they actually look like on the ground?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  What were the kinds of problems that those institutions addressed?

• 43:20Speaker 02

  They did a range of different activities, but some of the actual programs put into place included interrupters who were out in the community, making connections with residents, helping to defuse conflicts, helping to interrupt patterns of reciprocal violence. But there were another set of actions that I think took on great importance in New York. So one was after a shooting took place in a given neighborhood. This city had these close connections with local leaders and residents and would organize vigils in neighborhoods where a shooting had taken place to make the statement that

• 44:01Speaker 02

  this is not tolerated in our community, that gun violence is not acceptable, that we will retake public space in our community. Those kinds of efforts, which involved building trust between the city and residents and local leaders, were part of a broader system of shifts that represented, in my mind, a turn toward the community. And the mayor's action plan was another form that this took, where Liz Glazer was the director of the mayor's office of criminal justice. And what she did is she dreamed up this program that came to be called Neighborhood Stat, where residents, local leaders, representatives from the city, representatives from law enforcement,

• 44:44Speaker 02

  all came together in the same room to look at data, to look at what was happening in their neighborhood, what was causing problems in their neighborhood, what was leading to violence, and then to take steps to deal with it, to make sure that the Department of Sanitation was accountable for dealing with a pile of trash that accumulated outside a housing development, to make sure that residents were out recruiting kids to take the summer jobs that were being made available by the city. So it was a whole set of changes that took place. And in that sense, I think it was a very meaningful shift in responsibility, a move away from the idea that the police were solely responsible for responding to violence,

• 45:26Speaker 02

  and toward the idea that communities and residents should start to play a more central role.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  The New York model we've been discussing was undeniably a major improvement over the previous model for public safety in New York, the Rudy Giuliani model, the broken windows policing model. But it also, we can't deny the fact, it had plenty of shortcomings. There were still flagrant abuses. The NYPD is still viewed by many communities as a highly authoritarian, very problematic institution. And so even though these programs had some success, I think it's fair to say I don't think either of us would ultimately choose New York as our ideal model of public safety. But I'm wondering, taking that model as a baseline, how would you build on it? What would you change? Clearly, New York showed that this can work,

• 46:41Speaker 01

  that you can have both a reduction of crime and a scaling back of the criminal justice system, that communities can be empowered to do this. But I'm wondering where you would take that further and what you would change about it. Give me the Patrick Sharkey vision of public safety here in an ideal world.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  I see the New York model as a proof of concept. So as you say, Rozé, it did not fulfill the kind of lofty ideas of turning toward the community, and it was not sustained to the degree that one would hope. The next step is to take seriously the idea that we as a nation need to invest in a different set of actors. So despite the evidence telling us that local organizations have tremendous capacity to control violence, we've never given them the resources, we've never given them the commitment to do this job in a sustainable way. We need to move toward a model

• 47:45Speaker 02

  where we are investing in community organizations in the same way that we're investing in police departments. And I think that's the next step.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  So what would the role of police be in that vision? And in particular, we've talked a lot about violence in this conversation. But police currently do a lot more than just prevent and address violence. So I'm wondering, how do you think more broadly about this project of disaggregating or unbundling the current role that police play? And what's the role that you ultimately see them playing, both in this new model and also in the transition period while we move towards it?

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Yes, I differ from a lot of colleagues on this question, but I think police are going to have to continue to play a central role in dealing with violence. And the primary reason why that's the case is because there are so many guns in circulation in the US. You know, there's somewhere between 300 and 400 million guns in circulation, which means that lots of incidents where the police get involved carry the threat of a shooting. And we don't have another set of institutions that can deal with the problem of gun violence, or at least we don't have many institutions that can deal with the problem of gun violence. So I think police are going to have to continue to be a central institution for dealing with gun violence.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  What I would argue is that they should move to the background and police should be called when a gun is involved. They should be called when residents or leaders or outreach workers from an organization request the presence of a police officer. I don't think patrols should be carried out by police officers. I think patrols should be carried out by advocates in the community, people who are out in public space, looking out for the well being of their neighbors. So this is a very different role for the police, but I think they will continue to be a core institution in our cities.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  So as you're describing this, the way I'm imagining it is moving away from this one size fits all model, where policing is the sole institution responsible for responding to everything.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  To maybe something more like a three or four-layer approach. And I want to outline what I think that could look like and get your thoughts on it. So first is an outer layer of individuals who occupy public spaces in the role that police do now, right? Violence interrupters, community mediators. A lot of European countries like the UK and the Netherlands have what they call peace officers or community support officers, which are basically unarmed public employees that deal with low-level disputes and other issues. And then in the background, you'd have this more like violence prevention layer, cognitive behavioral therapy programs operating with at-risk youth, summer jobs programs, teams

• 50:37Speaker 01

  that are in charge of cleaning up neighborhoods, greening neighborhoods, all of the interventions that we talked about earlier that have been shown to reduce violence. But then it seems like another part of this would be when there are actually calls for service, when someone calls 911, that there is another group of individuals, of institutions, that can respond to nonviolent calls. Something that really shocked me when I started reporting on this issue was that only a fraction of calls for service actually involve violent crime. The vast majority are nonviolent incidents. And so the idea would be you'd have a different set of actors, whether it's mental health

• 51:17Speaker 01

  clinicians, or social workers, or some other set of responders handling those calls. And then there's this last layer, which is police, who, if I'm understanding correctly, their role would be to respond to calls for service for violent crimes, right? For things like shootings, homicide, et cetera. Does that sound like the right sort of way to be thinking about this? I'm just trying to paint a picture for listeners of what this could look like.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think there's a continuum from where we are now, where police dominate public space and respond to most calls for service, to a model where the police are entirely absent and community organizations are responsible for public safety. And I fall somewhere within that continuum. Where I would make the case that a different set of actors should be the first to be out in public space greeting their neighbors, a different set of actors should be responding to mental health crisis responses, should be providing traffic safety, should be trying to deal with conflicts in public space, providing school security and so forth with the police in the background.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Meaning that if a situation becomes dangerous, if a social service provider goes out to a home and is worried that there's a gun involved, then police are on call and can be asked to come in and help with a call for service. And so in that model, police are in the background, but they are still present. So if this is proposed not as an attack on the police, but as a call for investment in a new set of institutions, it generally has widespread support among the police officers that I've talked to. And I think will make the job of law enforcement safer, more fair, less stressful and more effective.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  So I think the challenge you'll get to that vision is that if you really want to deal with violence in a systematic way, you need policing to play a much more outsized proactive role than what you've been describing here. Let's take New York as an example because it's the place we've been discussing. When you ask criminologists about what drove down violence in New York City during the 2010s, something they'll cite is that the NYPD really doubled down on its efforts to deal with violent crime. Not through something widespread like stop and frisk, but by taking a more surgical, aggressive approach towards the individuals most likely to commit violence. One example of this is the department's highly controversial campaign of gang takedowns,

• 53:54Speaker 01

  in which suspected members of criminal gangs are arrested in highly coordinated raids and prosecuted on conspiracy charges. One recent study by Aaron Chalfin at UPenn and others found that gun violence in and around public housing communities fell by approximately one third in the first year after a gang takedown. Now, these takedowns have long faced criticism from activists and civil rights advocates for things like unfairly targeting too many young men of color, sowing mistrust in communities, even hardening gang ties. And yet, the researchers estimate that they explain nearly one quarter of the decline in gun violence in the city's public housing communities over the last eight years. So I'm wondering how you think about that tension. On the one hand, it's incredible

• 54:39Speaker 01

  that New York was able to successfully move towards this new public safety model. But at the end of the day, it seems like at least part of its success was built on top of this controversial tactic. And I think that raises the question of whether it's really feasible to move towards a model of public safety that relegates police to the background, or whether that kind of move would ultimately put people in danger and lead to more violence.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  It's a very real tension and a huge challenge. So let me answer this in two ways. First, I've talked to community organizers who have worked in New York City for decades, who have told me how they worked with the police to make sure they're focusing only on the tiny number of people who are engaging in gun violence. And so, standing outside these communities, it's very easy to criticize these kinds of policies like gang takedowns. But residents who live there have a different perspective. And I think there are lots of examples of efforts where residents are playing a more central role in working with the police to actually focus on the problem of gun violence. So that's one part of the answer.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  But secondly, it's important to be clear that the research done by Aaron and his co-authors, and Aaron is one of the best researchers out there in criminology, but the research that he's carrying out there gives an estimate of the effect of a gang takedown in comparison to no gang takedown. Okay, so that's the counterfactual that they're estimating. And that's inherent. That's, you know, you can't avoid that. That's what the research design gives you. But one could imagine a different counterfactual. Instead of relying on the police raiding a public housing development and arresting people, one could imagine engaging a very small number of people in the development at greatest risk of becoming involved in gun

• 56:26Speaker 02

  violence, giving them intensive support, mental health services, transitional jobs. So this is a model that is actually being implemented, for instance, in the Ready Program being run in Chicago by a group called the Heartland Alliance, which- Again, is a randomized controlled child and is showing extremely strong results, at least in the preliminary analysis. So we have had one way of doing things for a long time, and it's really hard to imagine a different world, a different city where we're responding to the very real threat of gun violence with some institution other than the police. But I argue that we have to start doing that and think about different models to deal with the same challenge.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  So first of all, I will say the early results for the READY program that you just mentioned are pretty amazing. The official evaluation of it is still underway, but one early analysis of the program found an 80% reduction in shooting and homicide arrests for participants, which is just astounding. But I think now is the time where we have to bring reality back in and point out that it's hard enough to build out an alternative model like this in times of relative peace. But we're living through a spike in homicides right now. So I think the pushback you'll get here is we don't have time to scale up programs like READY.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  We don't have time to build out these kinds of alternative institutions like Neighborhood Stat. And we certainly don't have time or the leverage to pick fights with police unions that would be needed to get some of this stuff done. So let me put it to you this way. Say I'm a liberal policymaker, a mayor of a blue city, for example. I need an answer for how to stop the bleeding tomorrow, not five, 10 years from now. And from that vantage point, policing, you know, it may be costly, it may be imperfect, but at least it's a tool we know well and that we can deploy right now at scale. What would you say to that policymaker?

• 58:32Speaker 02

  I would say start that shift right now. When the Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety in New York City began to be implemented, this was a situation, there was a spike in shootings that took place. And the question was how to respond right now. And what they did was they opened community center hours for longer periods of time. They reached out to organizations across the city to see who could play a bigger role in being out in public space and talking to young people. And this didn't happen separate from the police. This happened with the support of the police. So again, like there are a set of models that have been implemented over time that

• 59:16Speaker 02

  involve the police that have shown to be effective, have proven to be effective. And some of that involves, you know, hotspot policing, some of that involves what's called problem oriented policing. But we've never given a different set of actors a chance. And so again, I would pitch this as it is not an argument to reduce police budgets. It is not an argument to scale back police forces right now. It is an argument to begin to build an alternative set of institutions. And it will take time, but much more important than time is resources.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  And until we devote the resources to that alternative model, I think we are going to turn back to the police and for good reason.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  I take your point that we've never given these organizations a real chance. But I'm not sure right now people are willing to. And I think a lot of this comes down to how you read the politics of the current moment. And to be frank, it doesn't look great from my view. The historical evidence we have here is pretty clear that increases in violence tend to produce a more punitive public. And to some extent, it looks like that's what's happening right now. A recent Pew survey found that 47% of adults say spending on police in their area should be increased, up from 31% in June 2020. In Minneapolis, voters recently rejected a proposal to replace the police department with the Department of Public Safety.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  And in elections earlier this month, some moderate pro-police mayoral candidates defeated more progressive opponents, most prominently Eric Adams in New York, but also in places like Buffalo and Atlanta and Seattle. And of course, there are some trends in the opposite direction, right? The reelection of Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, you know, voters in Austin, Texas rejecting a proposal that would have required the city to hire hundreds of more police officers. There was an issue 24 in Cleveland where voters chose to create a civilian review panel for the police department. So there are some trends in the other direction here, but nothing even remotely close to the kind of transformative investments we've been talking about. And so I'm wondering what

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  your read is of the politics at this moment and how you think it affects the viability of a new model for public safety, because to be frank, I I'm worried about this. I'm really worried that the politics here are going to turn and are turning in ways that absolutely take away any momentum we would have had, that result in a double downing on police and that take us right back to the very uneasy peace sort of situation that got us into this mess in the first place.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  So I think the danger is in thinking about the investments in police forces and the investments in communities as trade offs, as in either or choice. And, you know, there's lots of support for investing in a different set of institutions to deal with things like mental health, to deal with addiction. There's support for relying on a different set of actors to respond to calls for service. So rather than framing these choices as either or, I argue that we should continue to fund police departments. And if anything, police departments may need additional resources to change the way

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  they do their job. But at the same time, we need to start to build support. For community organizations that can begin to play a central role.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  I take your point that a lot of this comes down to framing. And it strikes me that, looking from the outside, the politics of this moment seem incredibly uphill and impossible in many ways. But to your point, I don't think they have to be. And to add to what you were saying, in my reporting on this, I've waded through dozens and dozens of public opinion polls on policing, many of which were conducted in the last year and a half. And, and when you do that, like, a really common pattern emerges. First, if you ask people about abolishing or defunding the police, you consistently get substantial majorities opposed, which explains why even the most progressive candidates are running away from those labels.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  If you ask people, on the other hand, about diverting funding from policing to social services, it's closer, but usually you, you lose by a bit, depending on the exact language. But if you ask people about just investing in alternatives, like you're saying, without mentioning police budgets at all, you usually get overwhelming support, bipartisan support. So I think the problem here, to your point, is that the question of police alternatives has far too often been framed as part of the zero-sum story, right? A politics of scarcity. But it really does seem like there's a positive-sum politics, a, a politics of abundance that's at least possible here, a way of, like you were talking about, framing this as a set

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  of investments to reduce pressure on police, to actually help cities and communities address crime more effectively. And again, the, the polling seems to indicate that that can be quite a popular message politically.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  I think it can be, and I think you're right in interpreting those public opinion polls. There is lots of support for funding local community organizations. It's just we've never seen this as a strategy to deal with the problem of violence. And so, you know, I argue that we should begin to see these groups as central actors in that effort. And That requires an investment on a much larger scale than what has been proposed. All of the funding that goes to these kinds of organizations is at a level where it leaves them in a position where they are fighting to survive, where residents don't know if they're going to be there in 10 years or 20 years.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  And so it undermines the role that local community organizations can play. And that really has to change if they are going to become central institutions in the effort to control violence.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  I think that brings us to one of the key pieces of federal legislation that's on the table right now. At the time that we're taping this, one component of the Build Back Better bill currently being negotiated in Congress is a $5 billion, that's billion with a B, investment in community-based violence prevention, which would ostensibly go towards the kinds of programs and institutions we've been talking about. And it seems to me that's one way out of this politics of scarcity mindset, right? If cities don't have to take from their police budgets in order to fund these alternatives because they are getting federal funding,

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  that is what makes this sort of politics of abundance, this positive sum politics, possible. And needless to say, that $5 billion is a lot more funding than these kinds of interventions have ever seen in the past. So assuming it doesn't get cut out, which is a very real possibility, what kind of impact do you think that $5 billion could have?

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  It's very meaningful because it is the first time in a very long time that the federal government has proposed an approach to dealing with the problem of violent crime that is not just centered on the police. And $5 billion is not trivial, but here is the reality. It reflects the fact that we are not thinking about these groups in the same way that we're thinking about law enforcement. So we spend about $120 billion on the police each year.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  And again, the organizations doing this work on the ground are fighting for every dollar they get and just trying to stay afloat. So I would make the case that in order to be effective, in order to play a central role in cities across the country, this group of organizations needs the same resources that police departments get. Like, we should start with that assumption. They should not be expected to be as effective as police departments without the same resources. Until we get to that point, we're sending the message that these are marginal organizations that aren't seen as central in the effort to deal with violence.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  I think people who believe in the "defund the police" mission will hear this conversation and be skeptical. Like you said, this is not anywhere near the amount of money that we put in police. And there's no telling, there's no guarantee at least, that this funding will result in a reduction of police presence. That's nowhere in the bill, right? But I sometimes think about these kind of investments as the backdoor to defunding. And the theory here is this: by leading with federal investment, you really sweeten the deal for cities. They can begin to build these alternative institutions and programs without having to touch their local police budgets, because if anything, these programs are there to

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  support the police. And so you avoid fights with police unions, you avoid the political backlash of scaling back policing during a crime wave. And then, the theory is that once these programs are up and running, and working, and succeeding, that they'll build political momentum for themselves, that police will appreciate the fact that they're dealing with less violence, that residents will appreciate the fact that their communities are safer, and other cities maybe will look over and say, "Hey, like, maybe we should try that too." And then a few years down the line, the city government looks around and says, "Hey, wait a minute. Why do we have so many police officers when crime is so low? Maybe we don't need this big of a police budget after all."

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  I'm wondering if you find that vision of how these kinds of investments can change the politics compelling.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  It's a possibility, but what I'd say is if you look at, so let's use the example of New York where, you know, there used to be 2,200 murders every year and then a few years ago, there were less than 300. Over that time period, the police forces just expanded, police budgets expanded, the funding for the correction system expanded substantially. So there was not this kind of recognition that, okay, this problem is much less severe. Let's scale back. And the unions are very strong in New York and elsewhere, and that's part of the reason why. But there was a widespread sentiment that extracting funding from police departments

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  was not a good decision, even in times where violence was lower, even in times where there were other institutions that had stepped up. And to be honest, I would not argue against that. I have seen police departments that are doing great things. You know, I toured a center for addiction that was created and funded by Kevin Tom, who's the sheriff in Pennington County in South Dakota, who saw people in his district getting arrested night after night and coming in and out of the system over and over. And in a deep red state, he raised funds for an alternative approach to dealing with the problem of addiction and alcoholism in his community and created this amazing center

• 1:11:05Speaker 02

  where people get the services they need as a, instead of being arrested. So I would not be opposed to a scenario where we build up alternative institutions and the police continue to do their job and continue to have the same levels of funding as long as they're doing their job differently, as long as they are shifting to the background and playing a secondary role. And community organizations and residents of communities are given the commitment and the capacity and the resources to play the central role in building stronger neighborhoods.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  I think a lot of what we've been talking about here has been the optimistic take on things, right? The idea that a better politics of public safety is possible, that we don't have to live in a zero-sum world, that we don't have to operate in a framework of scarcity. And I think that's certainly true, at least on a normative level. But at the same time, my read of the history of the last 50, 60 years of criminal justice politics, it makes me pessimistic. And that's because it's not like this is the first time people are asking for these kinds of investments, right? One of the central themes of James Forman's locking up our own is the way that the black community and black politicians have for decades been asking for these kinds of both-and solutions.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Not only more police officers, but also investments in jobs and poverty alleviation and mental health and addiction services, et cetera. And yet, the story he tells in the book is that every single time they asked for both-and, they were just given more policing in prisons and never really any of those other things. So I'm wondering how you think about that problem. Like, why do policing and incarceration seem so baked in, so dominant, so sticky as a set of solutions, even when a lot of the evidence points in the other direction?

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  It's a really challenging question. And, you know, I think the answer is that we started down this road in the late 1960s. So instead of responding to all of the problems that became so visible in the 1960s, and that includes concentrated joblessness, but also rising pollution, rising violence, social unrest of many different forms, fiscal distress in cities. So instead of developing a response that asked Americans to come together, to mobilize, to invest, to try to solve the problems that come with extreme inequality, we've instead gone down this road where we've given Americans a whole set of mechanisms to separate themselves

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  from all of the problems that come when you have extreme inequality. That includes investing in highways, that includes exclusionary zoning, that includes the formation of gated communities. So We have developed what I call a spatial structure of inequality, where there are a whole set of pathways by which Americans can avoid, can separate themselves from the problem of violence, and also from the correlates of it, like police violence or aggressive policing. And I think that's a big part of the explanation. Because we have built up this spatial structure of inequality, it makes it extremely difficult to break down, to take another path, to think about how to bring people together

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  and to mobilize around this problem. And I think that's a big part of the reason why it has been so persistent over time. Even as more Americans have seen the worst examples of police violence, even as Americans have become aware of mass incarceration, it is really hard to break down this system of spatial inequality that we've built up over time.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  I think that point you made about spatial inequality is super important. There was this period in the 1960s, I think about a lot, when crime rates were beginning to rise, but the prison population in the US was actually going down. And the most convincing explanation I've heard as to why that happened was from the late Harvard criminologist, Bill Stuntz. He used to argue that this divergence occurred because many of the people who lived in high-crime neighborhoods at the time, mostly white immigrant communities, like the Irish and Italians, those communities also tended to have political control over their own neighborhoods. They chose the prosecutors, they elected the local sheriff, they elected the mayor. And the result was that these

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  high-crime communities weren't overpoliced because the people who were being policed were actually in charge of the policy.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  But to your point about spatial inequality, the suburbanization of American cities has really flipped that dynamic. The legal scholar John Faff makes this point in his excellent book, Locked In, that criminal justice policy in many urban centers today Is disproportionately controlled by, you know, white, upper-class suburban voters who don't live in the inner city and who don't face the downsides of the punitive policies that they vote for. And something Faff likes to point out is that almost all of the progressive prosecutors in the United States have been elected in cities that don't really have suburbs, or

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  at least don't really have suburbs that have political influence. So that seems like a real part of this dynamic you're talking about, that when the people who are actually the recipients of these policing and incarceration policies, when they aren't in democratic control of the response to crime, you just get a much more punitive set of responses. Whereas maybe if they were in control, you'd get much more of this balanced holistic approach.

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  That's right, and it's a great point. You can't deal with this problem jurisdiction by jurisdiction. You have to understand that all of the challenges that we're talking about are directly intertwined with the larger challenge of spatial inequality. And that's what John points out in his observation about where progressive prosecution becomes possible. There is this larger challenge of spatial inequality that sustains all of these other problems.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  So we've been talking a lot about the reasons that this political project of reimagining public safety is going to be a challenge. But I want to end with a vision of what the world could look like if this project succeeds. So can you tell me about your visit to Perth, Australia, and what you saw there?

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah, I'd be glad to. So I went to Perth in Western Australia because I'd been reading about models from different parts of the world where groups have created local institutions other than the police to look out over public space, to de-escalate conflicts, to help people in their community. And I'd been reading the work of Harry Blagg, who's a researcher at the University of Western Australia and has documented the work of what are called outreach patrols or night patrols among Aboriginal groups in Australia, groups that have experienced centuries of mistreatment from the state and from the police in that nation. And You know, to be clear, these are not neighborhood watch groups. This is the first thought that Americans tend to have when they talk about these groups.

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  So we have to get that image out of our heads. These are groups whose central task is to go out in public space, to find people in need, people in difficult circumstances, people at risk of coming into contact with the police, and to connect with them, to provide help, to get them the care they need, to reach them before they interact with the police. And so I went out in Perth in March 2017, I believe, with two remarkable outreach workers, Annie and Rachel. And what struck me first is the professionalism. So everyone on staff was there ahead of time to talk through potential issues, to coordinate schedules.

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  When we started the shift, we met with social service providers, we met with the police to discuss the plans. And every member of the outreach teams is of Aboriginal descent, which means they have deep ties to the community. They know where teenagers were holding house parties, they knew about feuds going on that night, or things to look out for. So what's important to note is that law enforcement in the US operates with legal authority, but the outreach teams operate on the basis of cultural authority, to use the term that Harry Blagg uses. And this becomes manifest when you go out with them. So their goal was to look out for people in their community, to help people.

• 1:19:48Speaker 02

  And it doesn't always work perfectly. So there was one man who was shirtless and belligerent and drunk, out on a public sidewalk. And Annie and Rachel tried to talk to him, but they couldn't get through. He ended up getting picked up by the police. But then there were other men who were sick, and Annie and Rachel sat with, asked questions, learned about him, ultimately called an ambulance and waited with him. There were groups of teens who were on the verge of a brawl, and they walked in, spoke to the groups, and broke it up, dispersed the group before they got arrested. There was a woman- Who didn't want to go home because she didn't think she would be safe. They found a safe space for her to sleep.

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  So I want to be clear that, you know, you don't have to go to Perth to see this in action. There are lots of groups doing this work in the US. And this idea has been around for a while. It's expressed in the foundational literature of the police abolition movement and the movement for black lives. It's going on in this country. But what was distinct in Australia is that this group was seen as a core institution for public wellbeing and safety. They were professional, they were well-funded, they were well-trained, they had the respect of the community and of law enforcement. They had the commitment of the state behind them. And I think we have to emphasize that creating safe and strong neighborhoods can't just be about tearing down what we have,

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  about exacting revenge against the police. It has to be about creating and supporting new institutions to look out over neighborhoods. Make sure everyone is cared for, every space is safe, residents get the services they need, no one falls through the cracks. And the Nungar Outreach Services provided that model, in my mind, of what this looks like when a group has the capacity to do this work, to help people, rather than punishment. So there's this idea of switching from warriors to guardians. They were not warriors out on the streets of Perth. They were really advocates for the people of their community.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  I think that's a great place to end. So let me ask you the last question we always ask on the podcast, which is, what are three books that have influenced you that you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  Thanks for giving me this chance. So I picked three books that have had a big influence on me at different points in my life. And the first and most relevant to this conversation is a book by Randall Contreras called The Stick-Up Kids. And it is about a group of the author's peers in the South Bronx who reached early adulthood at the moment, right after crack cocaine had hit its peak, right as the police had started to crack down and the market began to dry up. And it is a beautifully written book that illuminates what I think of as a core idea of sociology. Which is how our lives unfold through the interaction of our own decisions in combination with a set of forces that lie outside ourselves. So that is my, my favorite, with apologies to other colleagues who have written great

• 1:22:47Speaker 02

  books. That is my favorite book of social science of the past decade, I think. The second book that I'll mention is the book that made me want to be a social scientist, and that's William Julius Wilson's book, The Truly Disadvantaged. And this was published in 1987, and it was the book that first put forward an explanation for how urban poverty had changed over time. And I read this book in college, and I'm from a family where my parents kind of conveyed this idea, and my brothers and me, that part of what made life meaningful was to work against inequality. And they did that through public education. Well, I read Wilson and thought, maybe it's possible to work against inequality by understanding

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  it, by trying to explain it in order to confront it. And so The Truly Disadvantaged is what first inspired me to go down that road. That's the second one. The third is a book going way back. My great high school teacher, Mr. Evans, my English teacher, assigned Herman Hesch's novel Siddhartha, which is loosely based on the story of the historical Buddha. And this is a book that I loved, and one that I think a lot of teenagers love. But it also opened my eyes to a very different tradition of thought, and it kind of led me to explore the ideas from that part of the world. So I'm always grateful to Mr. Evans for assigning that book.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Patrick Sharkey, thanks for coming on the show.

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Bruce.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by yours truly, Annie Galvin and Jeff Geld. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez-Gusado and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld and Isaac Jones. Special thanks to Kristin Lynn and Alison Bruzek.