Cities Say Social Programs Reduced Homicides-Are They Right?

Highlights

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Opinion

Holy mother of God. The Washington Post ran an extensive article stating that murder is declining in cities because they engage in social work and provide services to potential or known offenders that most observers are calling violence interruption or prevention.

According to the WP and those commenting on the article via Facebook, we have just solved the problem of urban violent crime. Yea!!! You can all go home now. Problem solved.

“Homicides are down nearly 20 percent this year in the 52 major U.S. cities that report such data monthly, according to a Washington Post analysis. Reporters visited five cities with some of the biggest declines since 2021.”

I read all the Facebook comments attached to the article, and people are exhilarated that we now have the solution to violent crime.

However, according to the article, “Most criminologists say a combination of factors is driving the trend — pandemic-era investments in local violence intervention programs, the increased enforcement of tougher laws, reopened schools, demographic change and a rebound in employment.”

“There is no one reason or no silver bullet for what makes crime go up and crime go down,” said Insha Rahman of the Vera Institute of Justice, a liberal research organization. “Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.”

It appears that the WP writers and commenters disregarded Ms. Rahman’s warning about the absence of silver bullets. It’s more than possible that there are other reasons for the drop in homicides and other forms of reported urban violent crime.

Violence Prevention Projects Work? 

Violence prevention projects now work???? Who knew???

That assumption means that we have ignored decades of similar efforts to reach out to offenders to offer services, resources, and mentoring to convince them to leave a life of crime and violence.

There is nothing new about community-based violence prevention. Thousands of ministers, priests, rabbis, and imams, volunteer mentors, community leaders, and business people have poured millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours into economic development and “violence prevention” in cities for many decades.

The collective wisdom is that, despite the nobility of these efforts, they haven’t been effective in reducing rates of violent crime in the past.

But they are suddenly working now???

Defund The Police?

Implicit in reader comments is a rejection of the “heavy-handed” actions of law enforcement. It was evident in the article that there was a rejection of relying solely on the police.

Defund the police was cited by multiple Facebook commentators, something that Democratic strategist James Carville said was the three stupidest words in the English language. Defund the police was cited by many observers in national publications as a reason for Democrats losing the last presidential election.

Are There Other Explanations For The Urban Crime Drop?

Everyone in urban politics and the justice system is taking credit for the drop in urban crime, and if numerous media articles are to be believed, do they all deserve consideration?

A chief of police credits the drop to his officers going to high crime areas and turning on their emergency lights for an entire shift. Others claim that we now have 300 to 400 million firearms in private hands. Considering everyone is now armed, why would criminals engage in violent crime? Others suggest that over 100,000 yearly fentanyl and other hard drug deaths, per the CDC, have dramatically reduced the offender population. However, there is no direct evidence that overdose mortality drove crime declines.

Still more believe that President Trump’s crime interventions in cities should be credited with the national urban drops. Yes, there are early positive results, but it’s too soon to provide definitive results.

I have an article suggesting that alcohol consumption is dropping like a rock, and alcohol use has always been associated with violence.

There are signs that police officer numbers are stabilizing, and slightly more offenders are entering the criminal justice system, possibly because of proactive policing.

Which of the modalities above has hard proof that they are reducing crime? Only one.

Based on good data, which one seems most probable for working? It’s proactive policing, as per a National Academy of Sciences literature review (funded by the US Department of Justice) of over 1,000 evaluations with plausible or acceptable methodologies. At the moment, proactive policing is the best modality (at least in the short run) for reducing crime based on data.

Is There A Better Explanation? 

There is. It’s called a regression to the mean (or average). In layperson’s terms, what goes up must come down.

Per the Major Cities Chiefs Association, homicides increased 50 percent from 2019 to 2022, and aggravated assaults went up by 36 percent. Society can’t continue that level of increase in violent crime; our cities would become unlivable. Homicides and other forms of violent crime will inevitably decrease.

They always have.

So what cities are experiencing is a naturally occurring reduction in crime, regardless of the claims of mayors and others. 

To believe otherwise assumes that all cities with declines collectively agreed on a central strategy, and it worked via good evaluations. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. 

National Crime Statistics Need Explanation-Is Urban Crime Really Dropping?

There are two USDOJ measures of crime in the United States. One is based on crimes reported to law enforcement, as articulated by the FBI, and that’s what people are basing the reduction in violent crime on. Yes, homicides are obviously the most reported and reliable crime statistic. No one disputes the drop in homicides or the overall violence reduction in cities based on crimes reported to the police.

The problem? It would take several additional pages of explanations as to the endless problems surrounding the use of reported crimes, so I’ll stick with the most obvious: the vast majority of what we call crime is not reported to the police. Seventy percent of what we call crime are property events and, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics, only 30 percent of those are reported to the police. Close to half of violent crimes are reported.

Per the USDOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics recent report, 38 percent of urban violent crimes are reported.

Based on unreported crimes, it’s theoretically possible for the 3-4 percent decrease (2023-2024) per the FBI in national violent crime to actually be an increase.  

Per the USDOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey (what the US Census calls the premier method of counting crimes in America), we had the largest increase in rates of violent crime in our nation’s history in 2022 (44 percent), and rates have remained almost unchanged for 2023 and the latest-most recent report for 2024.

The National Crime Victimization Survey states that urban violence has increased in its latest 2024 report.

One source claims the increase in rates of violent crime is 80 percent beginning in 2020, based on the National Crime Victimization Survey. That finding, however, includes a baseline of 2020 when the pandemic raged, and surveys and counts of crime were impacted.

So it’s plausible, based on the totality of crime as measured by the National Crime Victimization Survey, that there have been historic increases in violent crime during recent years. The NCVS does not count homicides (you can’t interview dead people), and it excludes business crimes, those under the age of 12, and other categories.

We should also note that per Gallup, the overwhelming majority of those polled indicate a fear or concern about crime, with half expressing serious concerns.

But let’s get back to violence interrupters as presented in the Washington Post article.

Violence Prevention Efforts Deserve Consideration

I have no objections to community-based violence prevention projects, “if” they are properly evaluated and replicated.

I have no issues with providing services to potential and existing people engaged in violence and other forms of crime. Our religious and ethical values and teachings do not suggest we create services for those engaged in criminality; they dictate them, which is why religious leaders have been at the forefront of community-based programs for decades.

The problem?  From an empirical point of view, there is little methodologically sound evidence that a social services approach to violence prevention works. One can cheer that the Washington Post offered reasons that a social problems approach to crime is effective. But there’s little hard proof that it does based on independent and replicated research.

Endless people advocate for correctional programs for offenders, but per a USDOJ review of 600 evaluations with methodological merit, most do not reduce recidivism, and when they did, the results were meager.  Some of these programs were community-based. The programs failed most offender participants. Rather than admit failure and re-evaluate, advocates continue to promote programs, which raises ethical concerns.

The 600 evaluations need to be a baseline for programs claiming success in the provision of programs to offenders.

However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t data from reputable researchers on the effectiveness of violence reduction programs. See evaluations from Johns Hopkins and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Chicago. 

The results of a Chicago program are impressive. Offenders or potential offenders were 73% less likely to be arrested for a violent crime upon program completion. But the large majority of participants dropped out, the rate of violence against program participants did not change, the evaluation was based on hand-picked participants, and they used violent offenses only as indications of continued participation in crime (70 percent of crimes are property events).

In the Hopkins evaluation of Baltimore efforts, the researchers found that in the five longest-running sites, homicides were, on average, 32 percent lower in the first four years of program implementation, but there was no significant change in homicides in the six newer program sites.

Chicago Sun Times, Chicago’s crime decline is part of a national trend, researchers say. Mayor Brandon Johnson has touted the numbers as proof that the city is “doing the things that work” when it comes to shootings and murders.

Some have credited investments in community anti-violence efforts, but Lopez (a senior research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice) said there is not enough evidence to support that violence intervention is driving this decline, nationally or in Chicago.

“For any city, when we analyze these city trends, we try not to ascribe a specific cause to either the increase or to the decrease, without having better data. And so while it’s encouraging that cities are implementing a variety of programming, we do not have much confidence to say that they’re effective without clear evidence,” Lopez said.

Most violence reduction programs claiming success base their findings on in-house data or dubious methodology. We have a long way to go before we fully understand how these programs work, and if they work. 

Risk Assessments

The other issue is that these programs rely on lists of the most violent or potentially violent, while researchers acknowledge that many are inaccurately included on similar lists.

The US Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice has spent years developing a risk assessment instrument that can be used by the entire justice system, including for sentencing recommendations, to accurately estimate a high probability of future criminality. It was supposed to save the justice system endless of millions of dollars by focusing resources on the most dangerous. 

The instrument is not being used because it overestimates minority involvement. In essence, it suggests that the creation of lists of offenders by the cities mentioned may be discriminatory. 

Project Safe Neighborhoods

When I read the evaluation of Baltimore’s community-based violence interruption efforts, it sounded exactly like a USDOJ-supported program called Project Safe Neighborhoods, which also used lists of offenders with the promise of social programs for those wanting to escape criminal activities or enhanced prosecution for those refusing to participate. Community leaders participated.

Project Safe Neighborhoods (backed by good evaluations) did reduce crime, but by much smaller amounts than the Washington Post article and others claimed for community-based programs.

In essence, what Baltimore did was to rely on proactive policing and avoid the controversy of creating lists of offenders by claiming that it was a community violence prevention approach rather than a law enforcement strategy. 

Other Programs That Worked Until They Didn’t

Project Hope in Hawaii focused on a judge’s direct intervention in the lives of those on parole and probation while offering enhanced services to those in the program. It worked wonderfully with a dramatic reduction in criminality. 

Those of us in the justice system went to seminars in Washington, D.C., and throughout the country, talking about the immense potential to save lives and endless millions of dollars in criminal justice spending. We celebrated Project Hope’s potential.

Then the program was replicated in multiple locations and was shown to be a disappointment. It didn’t recreate Hawaii’s recidivism reductions. Something that was widely heralded as a savior of the justice system was discredited. 

There are a variety of programs that were tried but failed (correctional boot camps, intensive parole and probation supervision, community intervention strategies, criminal rehabilitation) that were thought to have immense promise but failed under the hot light of rigorous evaluations.

The lesson is simple; it’s easy to get caught up in the moment of programs claiming success. It takes time and money to investigate further.

The vast majority of the literature addressing the effectiveness of programs has been dismal.

So when I read that offenders or potential offenders in the community simply agreed to cease being violent, I am doubtful.

Why Am I Doubtful?

I have experience interviewing hundreds of criminal offenders at length, including time spent as a street counselor in Baltimore while going to college as a violence interrupter (we were called street counselors), and short periods working for Job Corps and a state prison criminal rehabilitation program.

My public affairs jobs included correctional and parole and probation programs, along with law enforcement and emergency management entities. I once sat with hundreds of offenders charged with violent crimes in the Baltimore City Jail, doing research for a Governor’s crime summit. It’s there I learned that violence was an embraced, trusted tool in crime and life.

I was told over and over by justice professionals that rehabilitating criminal offenders was massively difficult. This observation is based on comprehensive literature reviews of programs for offenders. 

The overwhelming percentage of people released from prisons are re-arrested and re-incarcerated, per the USDOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and the judiciary’s US Sentencing Commission, regardless of the rehabilitation programs they participated in. The data on people doing well on parole and probation (same study) is not impressive.

Massively Challenged

The criminological literature is filled with descriptions of people in the justice system as being massively challenged by life circumstances. Once you include child abuse and neglect, substance abuse, mental health, brain damage, PTSD, histories of being victims of violence, and high rates of sexual abuse of females, it’s not a population that tends to produce favorable results through programs.

Family and community dysfunction are common. I spoke to many offenders who said they were discouraged or ridiculed by family members or peers for entering programs. 

“The connection between the family and crime is not a new idea. Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson — whose work on the link between institutions like the family and crime spans decades — observed that “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictors of … violence across cities in the United States.”

As one parole and probation agent once told me, “Most of these guys have a chip on their shoulders the size of Montana.”

Having said that, I interviewed people from those backgrounds who were successful in dealing with very troubled histories, who are now productive, crime and drug-free citizens. When I asked what separated them from those who were unable to “cross the bridge,” they routinely said that they had demons they could not control.

The Best Possible Methodology

The National Criminal Justice Association offered an article titled, Do Studies Show ‘Lasting Benefit’ Of Anticrime Programs? Summation:

“A new paper by University of Virginia law Prof. Megan Stevenson surveys more than 50 years of “randomized controlled trials” (RCTs) in criminal justice research and argues that almost no interventions have lasting benefit, and the ones that do don’t replicate in other settings.”

“RCT, a form of experiment used to control factors not under the direct control of researchers, is often called the gold standard of research methods.”

“Writing in the Boston University Law Review, Stevenson says that the relatively few RCT studies of anticrime efforts that survive the academic review process “are biased toward showing that the intervention evaluated was more successful than it actually was.”

“This article is built around a central empirical claim: most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting impact when evaluated with gold-standard methods of causal inference.”

“This claim will not be controversial to anyone immersed in the literature (emphasis added). But, like a dirty secret, it almost never gets seriously acknowledged or discussed. Nor is it widely known beyond the small circle of people trained in statistical methods of causal inference. The research that people hear about shows the rare cases of success; the remainder gets filtered from public view.”

“When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions evaluable via RCT  and other quasi-experimental methods, the engineer’s view appears to be mostly a myth. More than fifty years of RCT evidence shows the limits in our ability to engineer change with this type of intervention (emphasis added).”

The essence of her argument is that it’s tough to engineer social change through programs, and crime evaluations based on random assignment of participants routinely fail.

Conclusions