For Miami TIE fans, I’ll be doing epidemiology and public health grand rounds at the University of Miami on Wednesday. I’ll be talking about violence prevention and measures to improve social-cognitive skills among low-income urban youth. More details here.
For those interested in such issues, the first half of my Bloggingheads with Glenn Loury touches on these (and many other) issues.
Incidentally, I am co-director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Yesterday, the Crime Lab and the University of Chicago Urban Education Lab hosted an event where Frank Zimring discussed his new book, The City that Became Safe, on New York’s remarkable crime drop since the mid-1990s. In 2009, the city’s homicide rate was roughly 18% of what it was in 1990. Similar declines were observed for robbery and burglary, even as incarceration declined. No one can say exactly how this was accomplished.
Putting more “cops on the dots” in low-income communities where the most violent crimes most frequently occur was a big part of the story. As Zimring observes, there is a wonderfully democratic quality to the Compstat paradigm of police management, which counters the obvious forces of urban political economy which tend to concentrate police resources in affluent and upper-middle-class communities.
It’s a remarkable story. More here.
(HAP)
