10/06/11
Crews Control Benjamin Wallace-Wells
FOR THE LAST few years, from roughly the
spot on the Venn diagram of intellectual culture where Malcolm Gladwell and
David Simon overlap, some intriguing flares have been set off by a crime
theorist named David M. Kennedy. Kennedy is most famous for the work he did in
the 1990s as the engineer of the Boston Gun Project, which worked to leverage
the social dynamics of drug crews (the small, insular circles of adolescent
males, goading one another to violence) as a way of severing the ties between
the drug trade and gun violence. For quite a long period of time, Kennedy’s
efforts seemed to be the major progressive alternative to the carpet-bombing of
Giuliani-style law enforcement. Kennedy’s work has spooled out since then, both
in focus and in geography, but it has retained the quality that made it
attractive to liberal intellectuals. It has retained its hopefulness.In even the bleakest, most terrorized neighborhoods in the most devastated cities, Kennedy suggests, violent crime and open drug markets are the work of an astonishingly small number of individuals. What’s more, these criminals are deeply rational, and it has likely already dawned on many of them that there must be more lucrative and safer ways to live. Perhaps, Kennedy suggests, the mass incarceration of black American men is not a necessary condition for keeping cities safe, but simply the collateral consequence of a poor understanding of how crime really works. Perhaps reclaiming the ghetto from the drug trade does not require far-off solutions to the education system and the post-industrial economy. Perhaps you merely need to identify—as police in High Point, North Carolina did in 2004—the sixteen young men responsible for the drug market, assemble them in a room at city hall, show them incriminating evidence, and convince them that unless things stop altogether (the open-air markets, the shootings) that they will spend decades in jail, beginning tomorrow. And perhaps, as it did in High Point’s once-desiccated West End, where there has not been a single homicide, shooting, or rape reported since, it will actually work. Perspectives on the ghetto are caught between warring political visions, each of them in their own way equally bleak: Giuliani’s dim, autocrat’s view of human nature from the right, and David Simon’s dim view of capitalist and bureaucratic institutions from the left. Kennedy’s work suggested that optimism was possible.
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