(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
Ever since violent crime rates tumbled in American cities from the 1990s to the 2010s, researchers have been trying to figure out why. They have proposed many different causes— including shifting demographics, lead exposure, policing, and criminal justice policy—that tend to involve independent or external forces acting on urban areas. But until now, few have considered the actions of communities themselves in organizing to drive out crime.
In a new paper, a team of sociology researchers from New York University—Patrick Sharkey, Gerard Torrats- Espinosa, and Delaram Takyar—look at community groups launched in response to neighborhood violence. The study finds a causal link between the prevalence of these organizations, “local nonprofits formed to confront violent crime and build stronger communities,” and the decline in violence. The more neighborhood nonprofits a city had, the more the crime rate fell, they found.
“Drawing on a panel of 264 cities spanning more than 20 years, 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,” they write.
The data on local nonprofits included groups with a wide variety of missions, everything from “business improvement districts, to after-school programs, to substance abuse and addiction treatment, to programs that run services for people returning from prison, to boys and girls clubs,” Sharkey says. The researchers found that organizations focused on substance abuse and workforce development have the largest impact.
Rather than argue for or against any of the existing theories for why the level of violence fell, the study draws attention to the additional factor of successful efforts by local communities to defend their neighborhoods against crime by organizing themselves, Sharkey says.
There are several potential explanations for the nonprofits’ effect on crime, says Harvard University sociologist Mario Luis Small. The local organizations could have an impact on how police enforcement is conducted in their communities. They could wield political influence. Or they could build connections among families in ways that deter violence, he says.
“When you build community locally, give young people things to do, target substance abuse in a serious way, and treat it as a condition rather than an excuse to lock people up, it leads to lower violence for everyone,” says Small.
The main limitation of the study, Sharkey says, is that he and his colleagues pooled the organizations together at the national level. The analysis is complicated because of the different types of nonprofits studied. That makes it impossible to identify which kind of group is best at fighting or deterring violence in a neighborhood, he says.
“There’s not a single program that you can point to as being the key to reducing violence,” says Sharkey.
As a next step, Sharkey says, researchers should look at which type of community organization offers the best method of confronting violence. Other studies have found evidence that summer jobs programs, schoolbased programs using cognitive behavioral therapy to help students change their behavior, and local initiatives that convert vacant lots into useful facilities are all helpful, he says.
This study is among the first to prove that local community organizations can reduce crime, Small notes. “Many of us doing field work on local organizations would not be surprised to see this, but it’s something that for a number of reasons has been hard to demonstrate on a large scale, and this is one of the first to demonstrate it in a reasonably convincing way,” he says.
The breakthrough, Small says, is that the researchers amalgamated data that wasn’t previously available with sufficient granularity to find nonprofits’ effect on violence. “What they’ve done is combine the data sources that have been accumulating for the last few years,” he says.
The study’s results could be relevant to today’s policy debates about urban crime and quality of life, Sharkey says. “We’re at a point right now where the long-standing model for confronting violence, which typically relies on the police and the prison system, has broken down, and some of the costs have become more clear over the past several years.” As cities look for new ways to control violence, local organizations can play a larger role in ensuring residents’ safety. Government and philanthropists can also help nurture these groups.
“We should go city to city, block to block, figure out where there’s not that foundation of institutions in a community, and those are the communities that are most vulnerable to a rise in violence,” says Sharkey.
Patrick Sharkey, Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, and Delaram Takyar, “Community and the Crime Decline: The Causal Effect of Local Nonprofits on Violent Crime,” American Sociological Review, 82, No. 6, 2017, pp. 1214-1240.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.