ST. LOUIS — A crime summit attended Wednesday by local political leaders, top police brass, business executives and academics could lead to a regional partnership with a University of Maryland program focused on reducing urban violence and the high murder rate.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, who has said violence is the top issue facing the city, called for the summit late last year. Organized by regional planning arm East-West Gateway Council of Governments, it was another nod by much of the area’s political and business leadership to a growing consensus that the top issue facing the region is violent crime.
The gathering, held at the Washington University Medical Campus, was an audition of sorts for Thomas Abt, a criminologist and author who leads the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland.
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Abt’s center has worked with cities including Boston and Knoxville, Tennessee, where two very different political environments existed. In Knoxville, the challenge was convincing conservative county and state leaders to fund and support social service programs to stabilize living conditions for those likely to commit violence. In Boston, the challenge was convincing progressive leaders that police intervention was still an essential component to violence reduction.
In a speech to dozens of area leaders and experts Wednesday morning, Abt implored them to stop the “either/or†conversation on public safety, in which some on the Left want only social service programs deemphasizing police and some conservatives focus only on more police and tougher sentences. Both carrot and stick are necessary. No city has programmed away violence, Abt said, and no city has arrested and incarcerated its way out.
“The research says you must have both,†Abt said.
An approach called focused deterrence, which targets those at high-risk of committing violence with a choice between social services and community support or “swift and certain sanctions†from police, has among the strongest evidence behind its effectiveness, Abt said. But other approaches such as hot spot policing and behavioral therapy to prevent recidivism can be combined with focused deterrence or community development and place-making “cleaning and greening†investments to drive down violence.
“I’m a big fan of focused deterrence, I just don’t want the message to be, hey, no problem, just do focused deterrence,†Abt said. “It’s not that simple.â€
East-West Gateway Executive Director Jim Wild said the group could vote at its next monthly meeting to begin working with the Violence Reduction Center.
As long as political leaders truly are open to the process, Abt said his organization provides a short, intense planning process for no charge to help cities develop a strategy and connect with the leading experts in the field.
That’s a collaboration both Jones and the city’s new police chief, Robert Tracy, welcome. As the jurisdiction with the vast majority of the region’s homicides, St. Louis will be at the center of any comprehensive crime reduction strategy.
“What we’ve learned through the Office of Violence Prevention is that one strategy isn’t what we hang our hats on,†Jones told reporters after the summit. “One approach isn’t always the right approach. We have to have multiple approaches.â€
Tracy, who began in January, said the mayor’s launch of the Office of Violence Prevention, led by Wilford Pinkney, is an essential first step for his job. , , along with other strategies such as CURE Violence, a health department program that uses community members to intervene and prevent violent altercations.
Tracy has experience with focused deterrence and said he is “all about†the group violence intervention approach.
“We want to keep those with the highest propensity from going back to crime, but we’ve got to give them options out of crime,†Tracy said. “If they want to continue to cause carnage or harm to people in the community, then comes incarceration and arresting through cases. Because it’s a very small amount, very very small amount, committing most of the violent crime. And if we concentrate on those individuals, we’ll bring crime down overall together.â€
In order to expand that policing strategy, Tracy said he would “like to get budgeted strength†in a department down about 200 officers from budgeted positions. But he said he knew the department’s realities when he took the job, and “I have to get the job done with the amount of officers I have.â€
With the right resources and focus, reducing homicide by 10% a year is very doable, Abt said. That can have a transformative effect in just a few years. But it is up to St. Louis leaders to commit to the violence reduction effort for the long-term and avoid letting it morph into an anti-poverty program or an anti-crime-in-general program that loses its focus on the people most likely to commit violence.
And, in a nod to St. Louis’ fractured political environment, he warned that the places that haven’t succeeded tend to have one thing in common.
“The key issue is that they cannot seem to work together,†Abt said.
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