How U.S. Cities Can Get Rid of Violent Crime

Pervasive wrongdoing can activate community ‘antibodies,’ local leaders and groups that tackle local problems

By Robert Woodson. Excerpt:

"There is another, more powerful explanation: The crime wave activated community “antibodies,” local leaders and the neighborhood organizations they formed to address these problems. In the paper “Community and the Crime Decline: The Causal Effect of Local Nonprofits on Violent Crime” (2017), Patrick Sharkey, Gerard Torrats-Espinosa and Delaram Takyara write that such local efforts are largely “overlooked in the theoretical and empirical literature on the crime decline.”

“Drawing on a panel of 264 cities spanning more than 20 years,” they wrote, “we estimate that every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.”

Cities began to heal from the inside out when residents took control of their streets. What Mr. Sharkey et al. documented in aggregate, I experienced on the ground. In the Woodson Center’s Washington office in 1997, my colleagues and I negotiated a truce among feuding gangs in the city’s Benning Terrace public-housing development. Gang-related homicides in the project dropped from 53 in the two years before the truce to zero for the 12 years after it.

In Omaha, Neb., in 2006, a businessman named Willie Barney mobilized a handful of people and launched the Empowerment Network. The organization connected and supported local leaders from all over the city. It brought policemen together with church leaders, neighborhood associations, business leaders and nonprofits, all to improve the community. The Empowerment Network helped cut Omaha’s gun violence rate in half between 2009 and 2022. Mr. Barney’s work transformed Omaha and undoubtedly saved lives.

We’ve deployed a similar playbook across the country. The Woodson Center has helped establish “violence-free zones” in more than 30 U.S. schools where mentors work with young people. The mentors are often former gang members, all of whom hail from the same local area as so-called at-risk students. The mentors have the trust of the students and the moral authority that makes their words resonate."