America is slogging through another of its counterproductive debates about violent crime, occasioned by President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to patrol the streets of Washington and his threat to send the Guard into Chicago and elsewhere.
Many on the left say Mr. Trump is just stoking a moral panic, and they point to recent decreases in violent crime in Washington and other major cities: In Oakland, Calif., homicides were down 32 percent last year and dropped 21 percent in the first half of this year, with a 29 percent decrease in violent crime overall. Philadelphia is on pace this year to have the fewest homicides it has had since 1966. In 2025, Baltimore has had the fewest homicides it has seen in the first half of a year in 50 years.
Many on the right portray Democratic-led cities (particularly those with substantial Black and Latino communities) as dangerous hellholes mired in what the Heritage Foundation a few years ago described as the “blue city murder problem.”
The good news is that we have proven ways to reduce violent crime, and policymakers around the country are embracing them. The bad news is that this politicized back-and-forth is taking us away from what we know works.
Successful strategies begin with the recognition that violent crime is concentrated among extraordinarily small numbers of people, a phenomenon that the Northwestern University sociologist Andrew Papachristos has called the “small world of murder.” How small? The National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College, my institution, finds that in the United States, close to half of homicides are concentrated in groups making up less than 1 percent of a city’s population. Over the past three decades, a violence prevention ecosystem has emerged that is focused on that small world and its cycles of often retaliatory violence.
Thirty years ago I helped lead a Department of Justice-funded project to address violent crime tied to the crack epidemic that had resisted years of traditional law-enforcement and crime prevention thinking. Our research found that in Boston, homicides and shootings were heavily driven by small crews that sold and distributed crack. These crews, mostly made up of young men, represented well under 1 percent of the city’s population but accounted for more than 60 percent of youth homicides. The violence was more often about vendettas within and between different drug crews than about money.
Because of this, intervening was remarkably straightforward. Beginning in early 1996, a team of law enforcement, social service providers, gang outreach workers and community activists met face-to-face with the drug crews, putting them on notice that they were under the microscope. Crews responsible for violence would be subjected to focused attention for all their criminal activities — not just violent crimes — from the police, prosecutors and probation and parole officials. A homicide could result, for example, in enhanced street drug enforcement and take money out of their pockets.
They were also made aware that there were resources available for those who wanted to break out of the cycle, and that the people in their communities urgently needed the violence to stop. Youth homicide plummeted by almost two-thirds over the next few years, a decrease that became known as the Boston Miracle before the city let the strategy fall apart a few years later.
The fact that today Baltimore, Philadelphia and Oakland are seeing historic reductions in homicides and nonfatal shootings is not an accident: They’re using updated versions of the Boston strategy, one of a family of focused deterrence initiatives that have shown, as a 2018 National Academies of Sciences report says, to consistently help reduce “gang violence, street crime driven by disorderly drug markets and repeat individual offending.”
The violence prevention ecosystem starts by identifying the small percentage of people in a community who are either the most dangerous, most at-risk or both, and engaging with them directly, including through community-based outreach and hospital-based programs. Someone in a hospital recovering from a gunshot wound, for instance, is at extreme risk for being shot again.
In the municipalities where this kind of approach is being used, violence prevention strategies include outreach workers coordinating with their cities’ housing departments to move families that are in the line of fire; mediating conflicts that begin with threats and insults; and working to scrub social media posts, which, these days, often carry the threats and insults. They’re connecting older, wiser men who have enough credibility to reach younger men and get them to end these beefs, and they’re forming mentoring relationships not unlike those of sponsors for people in recovery.
Since violent crime is so concentrated among a few people, when enough individuals change their behavior, whole communities and cities become safer.
This approach is working not only in big cities but also smaller ones like Pine Bluff, Ark.; Davenport, Iowa; and Chester, Pa. Juvenile homicides in Pine Bluff almost doubled, to nine from five, from 2022 to 2023. In July, the city saw its first juvenile homicide in more than 500 days. York, Pa. had 26 homicides in 2022. In 2024, the number was five. Miami and Dallas, both cities with Republican mayors, are also using similar approaches.
These approaches all work to reduce violent crime by focusing on the small world at greatest risk. That they work, and why they work, should change the national debate. The left often misses that one of the root causes of violence is violence itself. The right often misses the ways that abusive and ineffective policing breaks trust, discourages people from calling 911 and cooperating with the authorities, and pushes some toward the cycle of retaliation. If we want lasting safety, we have to address violence directly and rebuild trust at the same time.
Yet the Department of Justice has cut millions of dollars in grants for community violence intervention. Sending in the National Guard may quiet things temporarily, but it’s a show of force that poorly serves our cities in the long run. We know what works, and the cost of ignoring that knowledge is too high.
Detroit, like other major cities, is using these approaches, and last year had the fewest homicides it has seen since 1965. “I don’t remember a time in Detroit when we all worked together like this without pointing fingers and just moving forward to address violence,” Todd Bettison, then the interim police chief, said in December. “As you can see, it’s working.”
David Kennedy is a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College and the faculty chair of the college’s National Network for Safe Communities.
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