....Chicago's muddled response frustrates David Kennedy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. He notes that in the 1990s Boston brought together federal, state and local agencies, community groups, religious leaders and others (including himself) to fight violence. A main feature of the scheme was to locate gang members and tell them that help and services were available, but that violence would be met with severe penalties. If someone was killed, not only would prosecutors pursue the killer, but police would nail other gang members for smaller crimes. This would create an economic disincentive to kill—shooting a rival would badly disrupt gang business. The programme was launched in 1996. Youth murders plummeted. Long-term studies show a two-thirds drop.
Chicago has its own version of this strategy in six police districts, but it has been all but ignored in the current cacophony. A federal initiative called
Project Safe Neighbourhoods (PSN) pays for the programme; the federal district attorney directs it.
Chicago's PSN includes tough gun policing, federal prosecutions and—most important, or so researchers found—meetings with former felons to deter them from returning to crime. Over PSN's first two years, the districts it targeted saw a 37% drop in quarterly homicide rates. The challenge now is to help PSN expand. Chicago's leaders must use many tools to fight violence. One is right under their noses.
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