Murders Will Drop When the Community Says: ‘Enough!‘

Type_webhead_here Nationwide, homicide has dropped significantly from its peak in the 1990s. There is considerable debate about why, but there is general agreement that the following have had at least some effect:

• Trauma care has gotten much better. Thus, many people who would previously have become homicide victims instead recover and go home.

• Sentencing has increasingly been targeted at violent offenders and offenders who possessed firearms during the commission of a crime. Locking those criminals up for extended periods means they will become neither perpetrators nor victims.

• Parole has been eliminated. In Virginia, people who are convicted for crimes committed after Jan. 1, 1995, are not eligible for parole. The longer convicts stay in prison, the less likely they will become victims or offenders. Be all that as it may, the most important factor in suppressing homicide has been that in many communities, the residents got tired of it. Because the residents increasingly became willing to do something about it, homicide declined markedly. In some respects each community did its own thing, but most did something to suppress homicide -- and other crime as well.

Homicide does not happen randomly. It is tied tightly to drugs, gangs, the decline of family structure (single parenting and illegitimate children, among others) -- and to what communities will tolerate. In communities where drugs and gangs are uncommon, where family structures tend to be firm, and where people don't tolerate crime, homicide is a rarity. These four factors -- drugs, gangs, the family, and tolerance of crime -- are tightly tied to one another. And to a fifth factor -- race.

Unfortunately, many primarily black communities have not been effective in coming together to do what is necessary to suppress homicide. It is in those primarily black communities that homicide continues at a high rate.

Blacks commit homicide at about seven times the rate of whites and Hispanics. (See http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm). That racial disparity is increasing, even as overall homicides nationwide are holding steady or declining. "From 2002 to 2007, the number of homicides involving black male juveniles as victims rose by 31 percent and as perpetrators by 43 percent," according to a study released in December by James Alan Fox and Marc. L Swatt, professors at Northeastern University in Boston.

The leading cause of death of black males between ages 20 and 34 is homicide. No other cause of death is even close. The rest of us are far more likely to die in motor vehicle crashes.

Stop young black males from killing one another and the overall homicide problem will drop off the front page.

Black homicides are disproportionately drug-related.

Drug-related criminality often is organized. Approximately 40 percent of all homicides are gang-related. Gangs -- white, black, and Hispanic -- have to get money somewhere. Whether Hell's Angels, the Crips and Bloods, or MS-13, their primary income is derived from the manufacturing, distribution, and/or sales of illegal drugs.

Gang problems, like homicide problems, are symptoms. Richmond has shown considerable improvement in managing its gang problems, but that's still pushing back the ocean. Gang suppression efforts, even when successful, typically do not last.

Gangs do not thrive just because there is a market for their product (drugs). Gangs thrive also because they function as surrogate families. Most of the gang members I have talked with over the years, in prison and in various communities, have readily stated that they joined the gang because it provided a family-like support structure when their own families did not. People are inclined to join gangs because of the decline of the family unit. The decline of the family unit has pervaded our black communities.

Those of us in the crime prevention business often talk about the importance of building community. What we are really talking about is building a commitment to our neighbors -- a sense of duty -- including the duty to protect one another from threats. And including the duty to raise our children so that they do not kill other people's children.

Don't expect the police to fix the homicide problem. Homicide is not something that government can fix. Police don't prevent homicide -- they clean up the mess afterward. It is important to catch killers and to prosecute them, but that happens way too late for the victims.

Homicide is never the problem. It is always a symptom of underlying problems. Official suppression of homicide is inevitably ephemeral; it's not a long-term solution. Why? Because as soon as the official diligence and social pressure are (inevitably) relaxed, homicide will increase. It will increase especially in communities where neighbors do not develop tight and enduring ties of duty and commitment to one another.

Al-Tarik Onque -- who started Stop Shootin', a nonprofit group in New Jersey that works on grassroots ways to fight violent crime -- had it right when he explained Newark's success to The New York Times: "These stats are about people from Newark stepping up and saying, 'Enough.'"

Onque was right. Will we listen to him?

Let us not get distracted by the fruitless pursuit of nominal "root causes" such as poverty, unemployment, and inadequate education. Those social problems -- as undesirable as they are -- do not cause homicide. Fixing them, even were it possible, would leave homicide unaffected.

What is core to homicide reduction is our expectations of one another. It is up to us, as individuals, to take responsibility for our own families, and our own communities. When we stop tolerating single parenting and illegitimate children and drugs and gangs, and when we control our own children and those of our neighbors, then homicide will drop markedly.

It is up to us. Not up to government. It is up to us.

Bud Levin is professor of psychology at Blue Ridge Community College and director of research and development for the Society of Police Futurists International. His work has been published in a variety of criminal justice, psychology, and education journals. Contact him at .