Safe Streets Evaluation

Yup, this is Moral Dimensions and I'm going to drown you in statistics.

I'm a bit disappointed in Safe Streets assessment I linked earlier.  The conclusions sound pretty rosy, but there are two things that - while they mention - they don't really emphasize in declaring Safe Streets a success.

First, that the overall statistically significant reduction in violence represents a serious reduction at the Cherry Hill site and less/no change or even an increase at some of the East Baltimore sites.  I don't want to make it sound like they don't discuss this, because they do... but in the end the hypothesis is that the site that saw the increase was maybe where a war was brewing anyway.  Which might be true.  But deflects any deeper inquiry into what characteristics might distinguish neighborhoods or implementers for whom Safe Streets/Ceasefire works from those for whom it doesn't.  I need to dig up the Chicago assessment (but I'm too busy getting ready to record y'all's Environment lecture.  Did I mention I know jack about environmental policy?).

Second, and this gets an even briefer mention, the impact of the BPD's Violent Crime Impact Section on Homicide+NFS is larger than any other statistically significant impact on the combined measure.  This strikes me as something specially interesting because of the wall that the Safe Streets model erects between outreach and police.  Again, it's not like I'm saying they should work with police.  But given the apparently positive impact, it seems like ways in which police and outreach responses might interact bears more investigation.

Kathleen, tell David Simon to drop Treme.  I demand a season six of The Wire that's all Prez and Freamon hunched over STATA for 13 episodes.

Rape Statistics

Following a depressing discussion with one of your colleagues, I thought I'd do a quick check of the numbers.  Needless to say, trigger warning if that's an issue for you.

More on Gangs/Crime in Baltimore

For any of you who may be interested in the issue (and there are lots of ethical concerns lurking here!):

Article on Baltimore's Safe Streets outreach program

Hopkins School of Public Health assessment of Safe Streets

Article on Baltimore's "Black Guerilla Family" (including lots of links to previous coverage of the gang/movement - interesting especially from the perspective of issues about the legitimacy of criminal groups)

How Much of Baltimore's Violence is Political?

As some of you know, my main "beat" is civil violence, but since my return from Ghana, I've been thinking more about violence here stateside, particularly urban violence (actually, the interest ultimately comes from a conversation I had with one of our Ph.D. students before heading to Liberia about "resilient communities," but that's another story).

As even more of you may know, my home turf of Baltimore is a pretty violent place (28XX Greenmount Ave?  Basically right around the corner from my house).  If you're not aware of this, jeepers, go watch The Wire already.  It's only Februrary, and so far we've had 16 homicides (see the sidebar).  In 2011, Baltimore had a total of 196 murders, and that was a significant drop from the 300+ murders per year the city had been seeing in the 1990s.  For comparison, the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset counts you as having an armed conflict if there are 25 battlefield deaths per year.  And the Correlates of War datasets count you as having an intra-state war if there are at least 1,000 deaths per year (the same overall number is used for their newer non-state war dataset) - but in a whole country.

Of course, the difference between Baltimore and, say, Darfur, is supposed to be that the violence in Baltimore isn't political.