Over 125 people listened to a webinar and discussion, hosted by Multnomah County’s Local Public Safety Coordinating Council (LPSCC), designed to deepen understanding of national and local trends concerning violence, and to identify localized solutions in promising public safety policies, programs and investments.
The featured speakers, on December 6, included two representatives from the Brennan Center for Justice: Ames Grawert, Senior Counsel and Noah Kim, Research and Program Associate. Anna Harvey, who serves as President of the Social Science Research Council and Professor of Politics, Affiliated Professor of Data Science and Law, and director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University, also presented alongside Hanna Love, a research associate at the Brookings Institution’s Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking.
“We are all at a point of real and true challenges about how to manage some crises in the communities, whether it’s about behavioral health, hospital systems, housing, violence, poverty,” said LPSCC Executive Director Abbey Stamp.
Describing the presenters as some of “the smartest and best brains in the world,” Stamp said that she hoped that they would share with attendees what they have learned on a national level about violent crime, what’s unique to the criminal legal system in the United States, and what they believe are some of the best ways to “support better, just, and equitable systems.”
Grawert began the presentation with an overview of the Brennan Center, a nonprofit, non-partisan organization based in New York City that works to repair the nation’s systems of law and democracy. The center’s Justice Program is an initiative focused on “ending mass incarceration, advancing the cause of criminal justice reform, and finding policies that can lead to a stronger, more effective and fairer criminal legal system,” he said.
Together, Grawert and Kim outlined nationwide trends in crime and violent crime between 2019 and 2021.
Murders jumped nearly 30% nationwide in 2020: “A very scary and real increase. Shootings and gun violence also spiked in major cities that track those statistics,” said Kim.
2020 also saw an increase in violent crime such as assaults driven by the increase in murders. “And oddly enough,” Kim noted, “property crime declined except vehicle thefts, and the two trends diverged.
While this is an enormous increase, we want to contextualize that it’s not as high as the heights of the murder and violent crime increase in the early 1990s, he continued.
The data used for the presentation only showed murders and violent crime through 2020 because the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) made a major change to their crime reporting system at the beginning of 2021, said Kim. Prior to that, data through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program included monthly and yearly totals from law enforcement, but operated under a hierarchical system where higher-level crimes such as murder would count as the worst offense, while other lower crimes like robbery would be subsumed underneath. But in 2021, the FBI implemented the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which includes more offenses and in much greater detail.
Due to the transition, the data only covered 50% of the nation’s population. In Oregon, 54% of law enforcement agencies covering 84% of the state population transitioned and reported a full year of data to the FBI, which is better than most states in the country, said Kim.
Because roughly half of law enforcement agencies did not report data, the FBI made estimates on national numbers for major crime categories, denoting larger margins of error across all crime categories.
“But what we see here does track with other studies like the Council on Criminal Justice, which conducted research on murders and saw a leveling off in 2021 from the increases in 2020,” said Kim. “It’s far too soon to tell the national trends for 2022.
National Blind Spots
Law enforcement reports to the FBI are just one way to track crime. There are other ways to measure crime, such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Criminal Victimization Survey, said Grawert. The survey, conducted every year, uses a nationally representative sample of households to ask people “simply what their experience has been with non-fatal crimes such as assaults, burglary, larceny.”
The survey offers somewhat of a complementary picture of crime trends in 2021, but doesn’t agree entirely with FBI data, rather showing a decline in crime in 2020, said Grawert. There were also methodological issues, particularly in 2020, when it was difficult to get accurate data during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the survey does shed light on the complexity of the experience of crime and victimization.
Grawert also outlined crime trends in Portland using data from the Portland Police Bureau, sharing that homicides in Portland increased sharply in 2020 and continued into 2021. However, compared to data from January to October 2021, the rise in homicides has been less sharp in the first 10 months of 2022, said Grawert.
He added that from 2020 to 2022, the sharp increase in motor vehicle theft in Portland was consistent with national trends.
“Motor vehicle thefts tend to go hand-and-hand with more serious offenses. For example, there are many cases where people will steal an automobile and then use it to commit a more serious crime,” he said.
Grawert went on to place local data in a national context. “You’ve undoubtedly heard narratives painting rising violence in 2020 as a coastal issue or city issue, but data show it is neither,” said Grawert. “The data show that when crime rose in 2020, it rose in all regions and all population groups.”
Rural communities have also seen sharp increases in violence, he said, demonstrating that it’s an issue affecting the entire country. “Simplistic, crass explanations that try to paint violence as a red or blue issue just don’t hold water,” said Grawert.
Socioeconomic hardship also continues to play a significant role in violence.
A recent analysis by Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton, found that even as crime declined significantly from 1990 to 2014, the overall concentration of crime — and especially the overall concentration of crime and violence within cities — did not change as significantly.
Grawert likened the fluctuations in data to a rising and falling tide. So when the tide of violence fell in 2014, it fell roughly the same everywhere, meaning areas that were especially violent remained especially violent relative to the remainder of the city.
“That suggests to me that there are very significant problems that remain unaddressed in these communities in our city for the preceding 30 years,” said Grawert.
“And I think it points to the need for long-term thinking of how we can build safe, urban environments that can stand up to long-term social trends that may lead to rising crime.”
Causes and Explanations
Grawert cautioned against putting too much stock in simple or tidy explanations for the trends in violent crime.
“We know there is no single explanation for rising crime or violent death in 2020. And anyone who tries to present to you a single cause explanation that wraps up everything in a neat little theory, I’d advise you to be very suspicious of those claims,” he said.
“Even when my colleagues and I studied the great crime decline between 1990 and 2014 with decades worth of data, the authors of the report that we eventually published were unable to ascribe that great decline to any single factor. Similarly here, we should not be looking for one factor, but a combination of causes.”
One factor that we do know contributed to the rise in violence in 2020, Grawert said, is guns. A recent study by the Wall Street Journal found firearm fatality rates hit a multi-decade high including gun suicides and homicides.
It’s the latest bit of evidence in mounting proof that the proliferation of guns has helped drive the increase in violence in 2020. Guns were sold, carried and turned up at crime scenes at remarkable rates, said Grawert.
According to Grawert, while rising crime can’t be solely attributed to local policies, they can have some effect on ameliorating or exacerbating crime rates. The breadth and nature of rising violence in 2020 works against those hyperlocal explanations.
Further, Grawert stressed that it is far too simple to say that poverty, unemployment, and other forms of socioeconomic hardship translate directly to crime.
“However, the two do relate to each other and confer inertia on each other. Some communities — especially those that have faced violence for years — have developed tools to help mitigate violence,” he said.
Those strategies include:
- “Third places” that are not work or home, where community members can safely congregate
- Friend and work networks
- Community violence intervention or violence interrupters programs that are community led and help defuse tension before it escalates to violence
- Government support services
“They create informal processes or norms that bind communities together and make them more resistant to hardship,” Grawert explained. “These tools were difficult to use or sometimes impossible during the pandemic. You simply can’t do these interventions aside from face-to-face. Thus, socioeconomic hardship during the pandemic may have exacerbated crime or violence in our cities and country as a whole.”
Effective and Equitable Violent Crime Reduction
Harvey, the President of the Social Science Research Council and NYU professor, began her presentation on the myths of violent crime reduction, including the myth that violent crime victimization is not that prevalent.
When we look at crime statistics of any kind, we don’t usually get information about the victims, said Harvey. The only FBI data for which you can get information on victims is homicide information. However, that information is disproportionately concentrated with Black residents. Black residents in the 250 largest U.S. cities are four times more likely to be homicide victims than white residents, she said — a racial gap that widened during the pandemic.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps data on homicide victims, as well. The rate of homicide incidents among Black men is “orders of magnitude higher when the CDC data is separated by race and by gender,” Harvey.
“The distribution of victimization is very unequal, as are many things in our society,” she said.
Harvey also shared another myth: That the only way for law enforcement to affect violent crime victimization is through actions that come with lots of collateral consequences such as criminal records and incarceration.
However, she said, “It’s entirely possible for law enforcement to deter violent crime without having a lot of the collateral harms that travel along with those actions.”
“The things that work best to deter criminal activity happen very close to the point in time that the activity is happening,” said Harvey. “If you increase the likelihood that someone is going to be detected committing a criminal act, that dramatically decreases the probability that they take that act.”
Increasing the probability of detection to crime includes:
- A visible, sentinel police presence in neighborhoods
- Faster response times
- Higher clearance rates after a crime has occurred. Producing an arrest sends a signal about the probability of detection.
There is a connection between having more officers and lower rates of violent crime: the police presence itself is the deterrence.
“You not only get fewer index crimes,” said Harvey, referring to the crimes that the FBI tracks and includes in its yearly crime statistics, “but fewer index crime arrests.”
Faster police response times increase the probability of detection and deterrence, but response times increased during the pandemic due to staffing shortages. For example, emergency response times in New Orleans, Louisiana, climbed to an average of 32 minutes and non-emergency response times averaged 172 minutes. In other cities, the gold standard is to respond in five minutes.
Clearance rates are also a significant factor. The more officers assigned to crime, the higher the probability the crime will be cleared. According to a study in Phoenix, Arizona, there’s a greater chance of successfully clearing a crime with more investigators and patrol officers, as well as more witness interviews.
Homicide clearance rates were down during the pandemic with fewer officers, said Harvey. Across FBI data showed that clearance rates were consistently lower for homicide cases with Black victims, and only got lower during the pandemic.
Recently published burglary clearance rate data by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office also shows that some crimes committed in Portland have a very low clearance rate (which Harvey indicated can be due to staffing, management, or other organizational challenges). The election of “reform” or progressive district attorneys has no effect on crime rates, said Harvey, based on findings that show no significant crime rate changes in jurisdictions before and after the election of 35 district attorneys.
Place-Based Solutions
Hanna Love, the Brookings Institution Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking research associate, described some of the work being done to develop hyperlocal and community-centered solutions to violence.
The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C., with a mission to conduct in-depth research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the local, national and global level.
“We’ve known for a very long time that violence concentrated spatially within cities, within select sets of neighbors and select sets of streets, can sometimes cause people to come to conclusions about how to address concentrated violence in ways that might perhaps blame residents of those communities themselves,” said Love.
“I think it’s really important that when we’re talking about spatial concentration of violence within neighborhoods to also talk about what the research says.”
Research has shown that places that continue to have high rates of gun violence often have:
- a history of redlining (even when adjusting for current socio-demographic factors)
- contemporary racial segregation
- concentrated poverty
- overcrowded housing
- a high density of alcohol outlets
- high rates of mortgage foreclosures and vacancies.
“It’s not as simple as one answer, but there is a wealth of research that makes a connection between disinvestment, racial segregation and gun violence,” said Love.
Love’s work at the Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking shifts the paradigm to focus on solutions that recognize the way that places shape people’s access to safety. It’s an approach related to the public health field’s recognition that the social determinants of health — including one’s neighborhood and built environment, economic stability, and access to and quality of education — can have just as much of an impact on people’s lives as some biological qualities.
Accordingly, investments in a built environment can lead to reductions in gun violence, shared Love.
“There’s plenty of research showing that just by cleaning up vacant lots can have significant reductions on gun violence,” she said
Structural repairs to homes, as well as urban greening and tree canopy programs, can also lead to improved safety outcomes. Chicago, Illinois, for example, has been trying to address place-based disparities by prioritizing and providing grants to 15 neighborhoods on the south and west sides to clean up lots, restore buildings, and preserve safe and affordable housing.
However, Love stressed that even this $10 million investment is not enough to make up for centuries of structural racism and disinvestment.
“When we talk about place-based solutions, people don’t feel that it’s responsive enough to the urgency of the violence and fear they feel in their community, and I think that’s very valid,” said Love.
“It’s really important to note that there is no single answer here. There has to be a continuum of coordinated investments within communities and they do have to be staggered. There are long-term and short-term solutions.”
Those short-term actions can include increasing lighting in high-violence areas, vacant lot clean-ups, grants to homeowners and “tactical urbanism,” or place-making strategies. Long term strategies can include increasing community-driven processes to guide neighborhood improvements, revising investment structures for development, replacing lead pipes and redeveloping local parks.
Strengthening economic opportunities and access to jobs is also an effective safety strategy, said Love. Summer job programs are one of the most effective, with evidence consistently showing that they can reduce youth violence by up to 45%, said Love.
There’s also decent evidence showing that cash transfers and Universal Basic Income pilots have been found to reduce neighborhood violence, among numerous other community benefits.
And there’s incredibly large evidence around community and violence intervention and conflict mediation, said Love. “It’s a program that’s seen a lot of uptake and buy-in.”
Finally, Love noted that there is a large body of research showing that community violence can be reduced by the presence of nonprofits, as well as “third places” like libraries, cafes or community centers where people can hang out and make connections with one another.”
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