Nick DeFiesta Photo
Colombian political journalist Claudia Lopez at Monday’s session.
Andrew Papachristos told an international crime-fighting gathering about a cancer-like disease that targets young black males — and can’t be solved one victim at a time.
The “disease” he dissected: urban crime.
Papachristos, a Yale sociologist, has studied that disease by looking at relationships that form between people at high risk of succumbing to the disease — by getting shot. New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman has studied it firsthand by running a series of urban police departments. Papachristos and Esserman have both been involved with a new urban gang-violence initiative that draws on the relationships between at-risk young men as its foundation; in New Haven the initiative goes by the name Project Longevity.
Papachristos and Esserman joined Enrique Betancourt, former executive director of Mexico’s National Center for Crime Prevention and Citizen Participation, at a forum Monday afternoon at Yale Law School. Sponsored by the Yale World Fellows program, the discussion took a broad look at a problem, urban violence, that knows no national borders.
Papachristos and Esserman drew from their research and experience to offer a classroom of around 30 world fellows a different way to understand city crime.
Papachristos emphasized that one of the most notable facets of crime research is how little experts in the field do know. One of the few things sociologists do know, he said, is that urban violence concentrates among young black men.
The homicide rate for black men between the ages of 18 – 24 is nearly 20 times the national average, he said. This fact, Papachristos told the audience, shaves seven years off the average black man’s life in the U.S., a rate he called comparable to cancer. The violence is concentrated among a small subset of the population, he said — a network of people whose lives are touched by violence.
He said urban crime in general should be treated like a disease. He showed the audience a diagram of connections within a city, with people represented by dots and their relationships shown by a line connecting two dots. Dots representing victims of urban violence were marked in red on the diagram; Papachristos pointed out how red dots tended to clump together, spreading among social connections much in the same way a disease does.
“Here’s the thing: It’s not just any disease; it’s a blood-borne pathogen,” said Papachristos (pictured). “You don’t catch a bullet like you catch a cold — some people do, there are stray bullet killings… but you don’t actually get most shootings just by breathing in the air of a neighborhood.”
Understanding urban violence this way, he continued, affects how a city might choose to fight crime. He asked the audience to envision an HIV epidemic, and consider what would be most effective policy in such a case: Air-dropping condoms across a wide area? Or dealing with sex workers and needle-exchange programs?
Ultimately, Papachristos said, understanding how urban violence spreads depends on the ties between city residents, particularly criminals. That’s because crime associations — such as if “Chief Esserman and I rob a bank together,” Papachristos said — are like “sharing a needle” in the disease analogy, and are predictive of urban violence.
When Esserman spoke, he said he did so mainly to give anecdotal evidence to Papachristos’ academic findings. Cities are at war with themselves, Esserman said.
“If you could travel across America the story is almost always the same … Young man is dead. Young man is arrested or suspected. The weapon is a handgun,” said Esserman (pictured schmoozing with conference participants). “I can tell you what the professor says is true: almost always the distance between them is not much. … New Haven kills New Haven.”
Follow the presentations, Yale world fellows joined in. Henrique Salas-Römer, the former governor of the third-largest state in Venezuela, advocated a series of different approaches to solving urban violence. In Venezuela he tracked court decisions to identify corrupt judges; he also had cops meet the parents of schoolchildren.
Colombian political journalist Claudia Lopez (pictured at the top of the story), meanwhile, called into question some researchers’ emphasis on economic development as a means to solving urban crime. Drawing on evidence that most violence is the result of group dynamics, she argued that modern governments have failed to provide the public goods of self-esteem and empowerment that could prevent such violence from occurring in the first place.