by Chris Fisher, Seattle Police Department Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives
The events of 2020 have made us all too familiar with different approaches to preventing the spread of a contagion. The lessons learned about differences costs and impacts of prevention and intervention strategies for COVID-19, can help to also highlight what can be done about this year’s significant increase in another threat to personal safety – the unprecedented increase in gun violence occurring in many major cities.
As we have seen with COVID-19, wearing a mask is associated with minimal costs and can significantly decrease the risk of contagion. When prevention fails, direct interventions, in the form of individual and community-wide quarantines, are necessary to stop the spread and save lives, at both much more substantial direct and in-direct costs. The same is true when gun violence is considered.
Others in this project comprehensively review what is known about effective prevention strategies for gun violence – and there are many. These approaches come without the often steep costs of criminal justice enforcement – be they financial or social.
It is understandable that residents and advocates call for non-policing interventions. The reality is that while the violence is occurring, strategies centered on investments and services will have limited effect.
During a dramatic uptick in gun violence, however, it is essential to consider proven intervention strategies. For the past four decades, the justice system has been answering the call to approach gun violence from a public health perspective. In 1980, an article in the Journal of Public Health Policy was one of the first to suggest approaching the problem differently. This year may be the clearest demonstration yet of why to do so. Just as a mask is not appropriate for someone confirmed to be COVID-19 positive, jurisdictions experiencing a surge of violence must be prepared to quarantine those inflicting direct harm and spreading the contagion of gun violence.
Amidst the current call for developing the community’s capacity to create public safety, cities experiencing upticks in violence do not need to wait for new programs to be designed, implemented, and evaluated. Neither do they have to resort to the heavy-handed enforcement tactics of past decades to stem the tide of violence. The justice system – and it will involve the entire system – knows how to avert the personal and economic costs of immediate and future continued violence from lessons learned around the country.
There are a plethora of peer-reviewed research studies, many utilizing gold-standard randomized controlled trial designs, that have shown police do prevent crime. One strategy specific to gun violence – and it is not so much a strategy as it is making strategic use of the tools currently available – is ensuring jurisdictions are aligned to arrest, book, prosecute, and fully hold accountable those who engage in gun violence or use guns illegally.
Cities need to send a loud and clear message from the steps of city hall to the sidewalks of every neighborhood, that illegal guns are not tolerated and using them will result in unquestionable accountability. This message is even more successful if it can be paired with community efforts to echo the call that using a gun is not acceptable. These efforts can be further enhanced when evidence-based practices are implemented to change how people think about settling disputes, to teach them to slow down their thinking and reactions, and to increase beliefs in the viability of other options.
Not only do we have program-specific research that shows these approaches work – we have systemic data about the differences in outcomes when cities follow this model and when they do not.
While New York City achieved a dramatic and sustained decrease in its shots fired and homicide incidents from the early 1990s through 2019, Chicago experienced more pronounced waves of violence, with 2016 seeing the same number of homicides as reported in the early 1990s. Yes, they are entirely different cities in their structure, history, and geographic/political context, but these two major American cities have different crime trends even while following many of the same policing strategies, even sharing leaders at times.
Over the years, as gun-related homicides and other gun violence persisted more in Chicago than New York, one identifiable difference between the two jurisdiction was Chicago’s one-year minimum for having an illegal firearm in the commission of a crime compared to NYC’s three-and-a-half year minimum. This fact was not lost on stakeholders in Chicago and Illinois, as the state did move to copy the New York approach, but it ultimately was rejected by the legislature in 2013. Even when Chicago did enact more accountability for repeat gun offenders, at least initially, the system was hesitant to use it. Stakeholders in both cities have pointed to a lower level of accountability for illegal gun offenders in Chicago as a potential explanation for the difference.
Various retrospective analyses of what lead to the dramatic decreases in violence across most American cities during the past decades, including those cities like Chicago that have seen more frequent spikes than others, point to a variety of possibilities, which together, still only explain about up to a third of the decline. Even if the difference in gun offense sanctions is not the sole answer – which it clearly is not – or even a major factor, recent trends point to the potential effects of allowing those who engage in gun violence, or increase the odds illegal guns are more present during criminal interactions, might have on the overall rate of gun violence.
Data presently available from the Cook County District Attorney’s Office, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, and reported by the New York City Police Department, all point to a year where gun arrests are up but the proportion of illegal gun charges that result in any real measure of accountability has significantly decreased.
American society, including the criminal justice system, has reoriented itself to the understanding that incarceration is not the answer to a vast majority of behaviors defined as criminal. We know far too well the costs and social ramifications of mass incarceration and enforcing order through prolonged jail or prison stays. But we also know that someone who carries an illegal gun, especially someone who has demonstrated a willingness to use it, increases the threat to everyone around them. Just as we demand that someone who has tested positive, or even been exposed, to COVID-19 self-quarantine at home, the justice system must remove illegal gun offenders from their social networks.
Given the evidence that extended periods of incarceration – much like Project Exile – are not found to be responsible for significant reductions in violence, this current call for “gun violence quarantines” is not an urging to return to threats to send individuals to federal prison, or even state prison, for merely illegally carrying a gun – using one is another matter. Rather, tied together with the provision of service and community calls for ending the acceptance of carrying an illegal gun, an equally used response to gun violence must include holding individuals accountable and directly averting additional immediate violence by removing them from risk for at least some time beyond a few days or hours.
More research is needed to precisely determine how long the positive effects of removal persist. If alternatives to incarceration can be shown to have the same success at ensuring an individual does not continue to engage in gun violence (100% for the period they are incarcerated), they should be similarly considered. Violence interrupter models and focused deterrence models – oddly both called Ceasefire at times – have research showing they prevent future shootings by those involved in violence, when implemented with fidelity.
While shootings are escalating, society must intercede to stop the violence, right now. Research by various sociologists and economists suggests that violence is a major cause of the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and that gun violence in America cost the nation over $200 billion a year – and that doesn’t include the more indirect costs from shots-fired incidents where no one is injured or killed.
In the face of the costs of over three decades of intensive policing in many neighborhoods across the country, it is understandable that residents and advocates call for non-policing interventions. The reality is that while the violence is occurring, strategies centered on investments and services will have limited effect.
We must first stop the violence to create the opportunity for communities to thrive. This does not have to mean tearing communities apart through incarceration, but it cannot mean sending the message currently being delivered that the possession and use of illegal guns is acceptable, or at the very least will have no real consequences. If direct intervention can lead to the avoidance of the costs of gun violence, we must ensure the affected communities are able to capture the savings in the form of investments in housing, schools, employment, and other social needs.
If a plethora of approaches to ceasing the current violence is successful, and we are able to establish systems that capture the cost-avoidance savings to invest in community solutions, we can build toward a model where investments prevent violence and decrease the need for enforcement. This can help to further limit the negative effects of even stringently targeted justice system enforcement.
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Chris Fisher is the Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Seattle Police Department. He previously has served as Senior Policy Advisor at the Council of State Governments Justice Center and worked throughout the New York City justice system. As Director of Analysis and Integrated Solutions in NYC’s Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, he coordinated interagency efforts to solve criminal justice challenges. Chris served in similar capacities for other NYC criminal justice agencies, including the NYPD, the Department of Probation, the Administration for Children’s Services, and the former Department of Juvenile Justice. Chris holds a doctorate in criminal justice from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
The views and opinions expressed here are the author’s own and do not reflect those of the Seattle Police Department or the City of Seattle.
