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WHAT MOVES IT
QQ: Can a dangerous place be made safer, or is it stuck?
AA: It moves, and we know a fair amount about what moves it. Everything that works changes the situation rather than the person — the hour, the tools, the space. The one thing that would rebuild the missing authority is also the most dangerous thing on the list, and nobody has solved it.
01| Almost every conversation about violence is about people: bad families, bad values, bad young men. The evidence points somewhere less satisfying and far more useful.
02| The hour. Diadema, in Brazil, had one of the country's worst homicide rates, and most killings happened in or near bars late at night. In 2002 the city ordered every bar shut at eleven. Researchers writing in the American Journal of Public Health in 2007 found homicides fell by about 44 percent. Nobody's character improved. The bars closed earlier.
03| The tools. In 2012 Bogotá and Medellín banned the carrying of guns across the whole city, permanently. Researchers compared them with seven other Colombian cities of over half a million that had no such rule, across seven years. Gun deaths fell by 22 percent in the two cities. The drop was larger in public places than in homes and larger for men — but deaths of women inside homes fell too, which reaches rung three of the ladder from an unexpected direction.
04| And the authors are honest about the thing that matters most for us:
"we were not able to obtain data on enforcement levels over time, which limits our ability to discriminate between the role of the restriction itself and its enforcement. Our results are likely to reflect their joint effect."— Vecino-Ortiz & Guzman-Tordecilla, Gun-carrying restrictions and gun-related mortality, Colombia, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 2019
A rule and the effort of enforcing it cannot be separated. That applies to every lever in this chapter, and to anything anyone builds later. A rule nobody enforces is not a rule; a rule enforced hard is partly a policing operation. Nobody has yet measured which half does the work.
05| The light and the ground. In New York, eighty public housing developments were randomly picked to get lighting towers or not; night-time outdoor crime fell by at least 36 percent where the lights went up, and arrests fell too, meaning the crime did not happen rather than being caught. In Philadelphia, abandoned lots were randomly assigned to be cleared and planted, or mown and cleaned, or left; shootings fell where the ground was restored. Nobody moved house. The empty ground stopped being empty.
06| The connection. In 2004 Medellín built a cable car linking isolated hillside barrios to the city and spent money around the stations. Researchers compared 25 of those barrios with 23 similar ones that got nothing. Homicide fell in both — the whole city was improving — but it fell far further in the connected barrios. A second result matters as much: residents' belief that they could act on crime, and that neighbours looked out for one another, rose where the cable car went and stayed flat where it did not.
07| The second before. In Liberia, criminally active young men were randomly given eight weeks of therapy, or two hundred dollars, or both. Therapy alone and cash alone worked and faded. Therapy followed by cash cut crime sharply for at least a year, with traces still visible ten years later. The same approach works with young men in Chicago. Liberia and Illinois have nothing in common except the mechanism — not remaking a man's values, but changing what he does in the ten seconds after being disrespected.
08| Two things push the other way. The United Nations finds that danger rises with the number of competing armed groups rather than their existence, which is why smashing one large organisation has sometimes produced more killing. And the same report warns that heavy-handed crackdowns can strengthen what they attack.
09| Look at the list. Closing time, whether a gun can be carried, whether a space is lit, whether abandoned ground is cleared, whether a hillside is connected to the city. Not one asks anybody to become a different person, to earn more, or to believe something new. They change the situation and the people in it behave differently — because the people were never the problem in the way the speeches say.
10| But every one of them leaves the slot from chapter one empty. None of them puts seven adults back on the street. The only lever that does is the organisations result, and it produced the largest effect of anything here — which points straight at the obvious idea: give the barrio back the power to judge its own small cases. A local court, before the formal system, sentencing to work and service rather than jail.
11| It exists. Peru has recognised peasant patrols with judicial powers. Bolivia wrote community justice into its constitution. South Africa has run local peace committees that settle disputes before the police are involved. Brooklyn has a community court that sentences to services instead of prison, and it has been evaluated.
12| And it goes wrong in two documented ways. It gets captured — by a local strongman, by an armed group, or simply by the majority against whoever the majority dislikes, which lands on rung one of the ladder and on women at rung three, where customary courts have their worst record. And it escalates. Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala all have recorded cases of community justice ending in a killing. This is not a modern failing. Wiessner lists the risks the Ju/'hoansi ran when they punished their own, and the third one is:
"Escalation of disputes into violence. This was a very real risk."— Wiessner, p. 121
13| Boehm gives the same warning from the other end, and it is the most honest sentence in this whole chapter set:
"The striking anomaly for this hypothesis is murder. Hunter-gatherer homicide is quite frequent, and it usually takes place because of problems with male competition."— Boehm, p. 85
They controlled bullying, cheating and theft well. They failed at one thing: young men competing violently for status. Which is precisely what the Chicago accounts found in a drug gang forty thousand years later — promotion through willingness to hurt people, and a quarter of the members dead in four years.
14| So the ancient system is not a solution waiting to be copied. It handled the bottom of the ladder well and the top of it badly, and the barrio's problem is both ends at once. Anyone who says a village court fixes this has not read the record. Anyone who says it cannot be tried is comparing it to a police service that does not answer for rungs one to four at all.
15| What can be said is narrower and harder. The direction travels even though the sizes do not: every time the hour, the tools or the space was changed, in whichever country, violence moved the same way. And fifty-six years of the same streets in Chicago is not proof that those streets cannot change. It is proof that nobody changed them.
THE END
