National Network for Safe Communities Beat Intro Voiceover 00.08 This is the Beat – a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. Interview Jeremy Writt 00.15 Hello. I’m Jeremy Writt. On behalf of the COPS Office, I’d like to introduce to you David Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy is the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Today we’re here to talk about the National Network for Safe Communities. Many colleagues in our field have heard of the Boston Ceasefire and the High Point DMI – and I know this may be difficult, but do you mind giving us a one-minute description that highlights the key components of a focused deterrence intervention? David 00.41 Sure. It’s actually pretty simple and all the rest is in the details. But when we’re talking both about serious violence, serious public violence – homicide, gun shootings and that kind of thing – and about what we call overt drug markets – drug markets that are operating frequently in public; it turns out that both the violence and the drug markets are driven by very small numbers of identifiable offenders – gangs and drug crews and such in the case of the violence and street drug dealers in the case of the drug markets. And in each case it turns out to be possible to identify those offenders, to put together a partnership to engage with those offenders. A partnership includes law enforcement, community figures and social service providers – and create an engagement with those offenders through sit-down meetings or home visits or other sorts of communications devices, in which the partnership says to these core offenders “You have to stop what you’re doing. Your community needs you to stop what you’re doing. There is help available for you and there will be a special law enforcement consequence if you continue – which we’re going to explain to you ahead of time.” And when you follow up on that community engagement – the offer of help and the legal consequences – it generally turns out that you have a rapid and large impact on the violence or the drug market. Jeremy 02.26 Wow. Now you’re also the co-chair of the National Network for Safe Communities. If you could, describe to me what that is and what are the jurisdictions involved and what’s the purpose of the Network? David 02.39 Sure. The Network is a community of practice for carrying out, sustaining and improving this approach. So the violence and the drug market strategies at this point are off the shelf – by which we mean they’ve been implemented a lot of different places, they’ve worked in a lot of different situations. They are strategies that we and others can teach a city how they implement, so we know that they travel. There are other things that have a lot of these same flavors that are very promising, but these we know work and can be moved around. And the National Network is an umbrella that has tried to reach out to the cities that are doing this kind of work, help them learn from each other, support them in what they’re doing, pick out particular areas that need research and development and do that research and development and get the lessons out, promote robust evaluation and other research agenda and generally – and this is the simple bottom line – try to move this work along and make it more normal across the country. Jeremy 04.01 Now your work has evolved and expanded quite a great deal since the original project in Boston in the ‘90s. What do you see as the trajectory of your efforts as you move forward with the National Network? David 04.11 I think there are a couple of ways in which things have moved and changed since Boston. So one is what you say – which is that the work is being taken up and carried forward in more and more places. There’s something like 70 cities that have joined up in the National Network and even that doesn’t include all the cities that are doing this work in one fashion or another, so the simple population of cities working in this way has expanded enormously. The work has also changed. So Boston was, very frankly though not exclusively, very frankly, law enforcement centric and deterrence focused. That element is absolutely still there in what we do. It has been joined by the elevation of elements that were also in the Boston work, but nearly as prominently. Those being what we call the moral voice of the community so that is the deliberate work by communities to set their own standards about right and wrong and what they want and what they don’t want, which turns out to be fantastically powerful. It has expanded its focus from pure crime control to an equal commitment to addressing criminal justice intrusion into these communities and especially mass incarceration. It has finally recognized and taken on and developed ways to address the heavily racialized conflict – the bad feeling that generally exists in some fashion or another between law enforcement in these communities. And it is increasingly focused on concretely addressing the issue of the legitimacy of law enforcement in these communities. So working back, all those pieces were there. We weren’t – unquestionably I wasn’t bright enough to see what was in play and we’ve learned a lot. Jeremy 06.35 Can you give us an example of how you’ve seen someone’s life or neighborhood transformed by the work that’s being done by the Network? David 06.41 Yeah. There are a lot of those, so the bad thing about this work is that it’s a lot of work and it’s tricky and complicated. The good thing is that when it catches, it is really transformative. And let me talk about the original drug market intervention which really captures a lot of what we’ve been talking about. So that was, as kind of everybody knows at this point in High Point, NC in the neighborhood called the West End – which was a hugely dangerous, deeply frustrated and alienated, largely black neighborhood. And the relatively new police chief in High Point was and is a Texan, named Jim Fealy. And the community was alienated. Jim was, at least on the surface, kind of a career SWAT narcotics, cuff and stuff, take no prisoners, hard core cop. And a year later, all of that was different. So Jim was the first figure at his level in American policing to really face this issue of racial conflict and unintended consequences in these neighborhoods. He went to this neighborhood and opened a conversation with the community by saying “I am sorry for what we have done to you. We have failed you. We have stopped your kids for no reason. And everything we have done while trying to protect you hasn’t worked. And I apologize for that and I want to try something different.” The community in its turn, said “We can’t expect the drug dealers to get off the corner if we don’t tell them really clearly that we don’t want them there and we haven’t been doing that.” There turned out to be about a dozen drug dealers operating in that area, when the cops thought that essentially all the kids were doing it. We had one of these call-ins. The day after the call-in, the drug market was gone and the hookers were gone and pretty soon the stories were about kids playing in the park. Jeremy: Wow. And it’s still like that. That has been a sustained win. And it’s not just the crime control. It’s the new community attitudes. It’s the new racial understandings. It’s the understanding on the part of the police that the community they’d written off is really much like them and wants the same things that they want. It’s the realization that the street guys that everybody had written off as sociopaths mostly aren’t. It is just across the board – important. Jeremy 09.34 Anything else people interested in following this model should know? Where can they contact you? Where can they get more information about the program? David 09.41 The National Network tries to serve as a clearing house for what’s going on out there. And so the first place to go is our website. So the Natioanal Network for Safe Communities has w-w-w-dot-n-n-s-communities – that’s nancy-nancy-sam- communities-dot-o-r-g. We try to keep up with what’s going on in the field, there are implementation guides, the evaluation research is collected there. There is other work going on out of other kind of nodes all across the country – DOJ, BJA, various universities – but we try to be at the center of that web. So start there and then call us. Jeremy 10.35 Well unfortunately that’s all the time we have today. On behalf of the COPS office, I want to thank you, David, for joining us and I want to thank YOU for listening. Beat Exit Voiceover: The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships and solving problems. ####END OF TRANSCRIPT####