The University of Chicago Crime Lab and the Challenge of Youth Violence

1. The University of Chicago Crime Lab and the Challenge of Youth Violence Harold Pollack University of Chicago

2. Plan for today • University of Chicago Crime Lab’s basic mission • Two fundamental challenges in violence prevention • Passing baton to Jens Ludwig who will describe one aspect of our work in greater detail.

3. The University of Chicago Crime Lab “Successful innovation requires learning from experience” • The University of Chicago Crime Lab seeks to provide scientific evidence about what works and what is cost-effective in preventing crime and violence • An established network of over 25 of the nation’s leading crime policy researchers and academics to collaborate on a variety of projects • Provides technical assistance and rigorous evaluations of crime reduction strategies to policing and other governmental agencies nationwide • Dissemination of relevant findings to ensure best practices are implemented to generate the most social good of every dollar spent • Benefit-Cost Analysis of interventions to provide a framework for comparison of the relative effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of various programs and policies • Reducing crime and violence is difficult without learning from experience • Which programs work, for whom, why, and how they can be improved. And with what cost-effectiveness.

4. One face of the problem: Hadiya Pendleton • Hadiya Pendleton shooting right after she performed at President Obama’s second inaugural. • Shooting received national attention, including presidential visit to BAM group at Hyde Park Academy.

5. Plenty of other cases & faces here in Chicago • Chicago had 506 homicides in 2012, the most in the United States, up from 436 in 2011. • 10-year-old Nequiel Fowler shot and killed after being hit by stray bullet. She was kneeling to tie the shoe of her blind little sister. • January 17, 2013, Tyrone Lawson, 17, was shot and killed after a high school basketball game. The game ended with an altercation between the teams while lining up to shake hands. But tensions spilled out into the parking lot and Lawson was shot and killed for no apparent reason. • Maybe more typical: Saturday June 2, 2012, two groups of teens arguing in the street about whether someone stole a bike. As two groups start to separate, someone pulls out a handgun and fires into other group, hits Jamal Lockett, age 16, in the chest, who dies at at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

6. Many reasons to believe violence reduction requires fundamental social reforms • Liberal and conservative arguments for pessimism regarding incremental progress. • Liberal argument. • Violence fundamental outgrowth of economic inequality, blocked opportunities, segregation, and discrimination. • Conservative version. • Violence fundamental outgrowth of adverse cultural trends including family breakdown, adverse media messages, and more. • Both perspectives have some merit. Both also have serious limitations as either guides to policy or as a lens to predict variation over places and over time.

7. U.S. surprisingly average in most crimes(from comparable victimization surveys) *Australia, Belgium, Canada, Catalonia (Spain), Denmark, England & Wales, Finland, France, Japan, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, USA **Additional crimes: theft from car, car vandalism, motorcycle theft, bike theft, attempted burglary, personal theft Source: Van Kesteren et al. 2000

8. Except when it comes to gun homicides (rates per 100,000) Sources: UK: UCR 2009, norc.org (2006) UK: UNODC 2008; Small Arms Survey 2007 Canada: Beattie 2009, Royal Canadian mounted Police 2010 Australia: AU Bureau of Statistics 2009; Small Arms Survey 2007 New Zealand: UNODC 2008; Small Arms survey 2007

9. Guns in Chicago: Motivating Facts • From 2008 to 2012, over 11,000 people were assaulted with a firearm in Chicago • From 2008 to 2012, 2,347 people have been killed in Chicago, 1,941 were killed with a firearm. • If over 85 % of homicides in Chicago are committed with a gun and over 70% of gun-related incidents occur outdoors/in public spaces… • …The illegal carrying of firearms in public places is the proximate cause of the vast majority of homicides

10. Chicago homicides have also declined since the bad days of late 1980s/early 1990s.

11. Unfortunately,our progress is not as great as we hoped when compared with peers.

12. Fundamental equation of many homicides Young men + disagreement + impulsivity + gun = dead body

13. Two issues to be addressed • Helping young people deal more effectively and safely with each other and with adult authority figures. • Addressing that “+gun” term in the homicide equation. • CPD recovers more than six times as many guns per-capita as NYPD, more than twice as many as LAPD.

14. Where do Chicago’s crime guns come from?

15. What’s Promising? Focusing on Illegal Guns – Law Enforcement • Anti-gun policing policies promising (or simply increasing police resources). • Estimates suggest that Pittsburgh’s targeted policing program against illegal gun carrying may have reduced shots fired by 34 percent and gunshot injuries by as much as 71 percent in the targeted (Ludwig and Cohen, 2003). • Estimates suggest the 2 percent increase in police under COPS led to a 2 percent decline in violent crime and a 0.5 percent reduction in property offenses (Evans and Owens, 2007). • Given these estimates, adding $1.4 billion in funding for the COPS program could avert between $6 and $12 billion in victimization costs to the American people (Ludwig and Donohue, 2007). • Key take home point: making illegal gun carrying a liability and reducing gun use even if you dont reduce overall violence or crime would have a huge net benefit to society.

16. Characteristics of Chicago homicides (and not just Chicago) • Young, male, nonwhite: • 90% of victims and perpetrators male • Majority of victims and offenders < age 25. • Only 28/506 non-Hispanic white. • Guns: 83% of homicide victims shot, almost all with handguns. • Public: 77% of homicide victims found outdoors • Impulsive: 73% homicides attributed to “altercation” • Only ~10% to gang disputes over narcotics. Gang affiliation matters, but in different ways such as providing access to a weapon. • Concentrated: 87% offenders, 77% victims prior arrest record • Frequent alcohol involvement: 1/3 of young male victims found with high BAC levels on autopsy.

17. Policy response • Mainly prison: Incarceration rate increased seven-fold 1970-2008; we now have 2.3 million people behind bars • Implicit logic model to policy response: • You are an angry 17 year old boy surrounded by your friends • You are susceptible to sensation seeking & peer influences (brain changes starting in early adolescence), myopic decision-making, “catastrophizing” (make negative events even more negative), low impulse control / self-regulation, & “hostile attribution bias” • “If you pull that 9mm out of your waist band something bad will happen – or at least it might, with considerable delay” • If not enough youth respond to that threat, let’s add 2 more years onto that 8 year prison sentence… • More on this later.

18. Rather than change long-term incentives facing [a] youth who is not in good decision-making frame of mind… • Could instead try to improve decision-making capacity • That is, remediate deficits in “social-cognitive” skills [such as] impulse control, anger suppression, future orientation • These are the strongest predictors of recidivism risk among juvenile offenders (Monahan, Steinberg, Cauffman, Mulvey, 2009 Dev Psych) • More important than measures of consideration of others, sense of personal responsibility, resistance to peer influence • Large & growing body of research shows social-cognitive skills correlated with schooling, earnings, other outcomes (e.g., Moffitt, Heckman) • What we haven’t known is whether it is really possible to modify these skills – particularly among at-risk adolescents • Not a surplus of successful interventions for this population in general

19. From the limited progress we have made… What do we know?

20. Final thoughts • We should recognize the value of broadening the focus of institutions that can and/or already work with at-risk youth • We should be preventing kids from disengaging from school & finding ways to re-engage those kids who already have • Social-cognitive skills are just as important as academic and vocational skills • Guns are not the only factor, but they are the distinctive reason U.S. homicide rates higher than peer democracies’ • Multiple incremental changes vs. one “home run” • There will never be a single Salk vaccine for violence • At the end of the day, there is no silver bullet • Goal: optimal portfolio of interventions • We need to be thinking about the portfolio of strategies we can rely on rather than looking for a one-size fits all approach

21. More on one useful intervention from Jens Ludwig