... we must stop seeing urban violence as an argument to be won and instead look at it as a problem to be solved. On the right, racist blame-shifting and fearmongering must be rejected. On the left, race-based mistrust of law enforcement must be addressed. A diverse new political constituency must be created to demand practical solutions to the pressing challenge of urban violence.Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence--and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets

Anti-violence efforts are not a substitute for broader and deeper efforts to remedy economic and social injustice--they are, rather, an essential aspect of them.Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence--and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets

We have been looking at gangs all wrong, and we have been doing so for decades. We fetishize gangs, obsessing over the details of their rituals, rites, and ceremonies. We exaggerate their numbers and their crimes. We stereotype them, grouping all gangs and gang members into a monolithic whole. And, despite all this attention, we have yet to find any specifically gang-oriented policy that consistently works to reduce crime or, more importantly, violence.Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence--and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets

... while a glance at the evidence seems to show that gangs cause violence, a deeper look also reveals the opposite: violence causes gangs.Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence--and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets

Police create gang units, prosecutors build gang cases, and politicians pass laws prohibiting all manner of gang activities. Nothing has worked. Some activists coo over gangs, mistaking them for nascent community groups. That has not worked either. We have been so wrong about gangs, for so long, that an entirely new approach is needed. We have to start over and refocus our efforts not on gangs but on gang violence. If a gang or gang member is violent, they deserve our anti-violence attention. If they are not, our time and energy are better spent elsewhere. With gangs, the issue is not the group's identity; it is the group's behavior. Gangs are not the problem; gangbanging is.Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence--and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets

Evidence-informed strategies do not oversimplify the complex challenge of urban violence. Because such approaches do not dumb violence down, they can be difficult to digest quickly. They may also challenge us to think and feel differently. For these reasons, they are often overlooked: we usually want solutions that can be evaluated using our own intuition and common sense. The media caters to this, telling us what we want to hear rather than what we need to know.Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence--and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets

The good news is that we have a large body of scientific research on urban violence. The bad news is that most of it is hidden behind publisher paywalls, written in academic-ese, divided across disciplines and sectors, and of varying quality. Too much research is produced in a bubble. Too many scholars have limited contact with those with actual exposure to crime, leading to studies that pursue abstract academic queries with little relevance to real life. Advances have been made. Systematic reviews address some of these shortcomings by bringing together the best evidence on certain important questions. Think tanks and policy shops frame academic ideas in engaging ways while producing research of their own. Some in the media are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their reporting on urban violence, and some leaders have championed evidence-informed crime policy. Still, too much knowledge remains trapped in academia's ivory tower.Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence--and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets