COMMUNITY
INVOLVEMENT AND
FOCUSED DETERRENCE
Brian P. Schaefer, M.S.
Tad Hughes, J.D., Ph.D.
Southern Police Institute
University of Louisville
Focused Deterrence
• Started with Boston’s Operation Ceasefire in mid-1990s
• Applied in multiple jurisdictions
• Boston, MA; Cincinnati, OH; Lowell, MA; High Point, NC; Kansas
City, MO; Louisville, KY
• Strategy has led to a 22 to 60 percent reduction in
homicides across jurisdictions.
Focused Deterrence
• Key elements:
• Identify crime problem
• Problem-oriented Policing
• Create interagency working group
• Generate consistent enforcement
• Identify violent offenders and groups
• Specific and general deterrence
• Develop enforcement strategies to reduce crime
• Increase in certainty and severity
• Enlist community and social services
• Informal sanctions
• Communicate new rules
• Cost cannot be considered unless it is known
The role of the Community in Pulling
Levers
• Improving the health of communities
• Informal social control
• Collective Efficacy
• Improving community and criminal justice collaboration
• Police Legitimacy
Collective Efficacy
• Collective efficacy is the process of activating or
converting social ties to achieve desired outcomes.
• Collective efficacy is a dynamic factor.
• Communities with weak collective efficacy lack the
closeness and trust—sometimes called social capital—to
mobilize as a group and rid their street of troublemakers
and disorder.
• Benefits (Eck and Rosenbaum, 1994):
• Improve police-community relations
• Increase legitimacy of police operations
• Reduce fear
• Decrease crime and Disorder
Legitimacy
• Procedural justice suggests that perceptions of fairness
matter more than the outcomes (Tyler, 1988, 2000).
• This notion holds whether the situation is negotiations,
punishments, or reward distribution (Lind & Tyler, 1988).
Three primary process-based evaluations:
• Quality of decision making
• Quality of treatment
• Trustworthiness.
• Transparency is key for legitimacy (Tyler & Wakslak,
2004)
Hurdles to Engaging the Community
• What is the community?
• Disengagement
• Racial History
What is the community?
• Kennedy (2011) talks about 3 communities:
• Law enforcement
• The community in poorest neighborhoods
• The community of offenders
• Racial animosity in poor communities
• History of racial oppression
• Racial Profiling
Disengagement
• Disengagement
• Communication between community participants and police is nonexistent, adversarial, and/or one-way
• Informed and committed local and police leadership may not exist.
• There is a lack of community organizations through which
neighborhood residents can participate
• Sometimes there are organizations, but the leadership is not well
informed.
• Sometimes the only community-based organizations that exist are
concerned with serving clients not in solving community problems.
• Community residents may feel that their neighborhood is lost and
they are powerless.
Building Effective Community Groups
• Know your problem
• Identify what you intend to accomplish
• Identify Stakeholders
• What parties need to be involved?
• Secure Commitments from participating parties
• Community Teambuilding
• Clearly identify the extent of the collaboration and its benefits
• Identify resources you will need
• Develop tasks and a corresponding timeline
• Be clear about the roles and responsibilities of group members
• Evaluate
• Quick Wins (Tilley, 1999)
Potential Strategies for The community in
Pulling Levers Strategy
• Call-Ins
• Moral Voices
• Street workers
• Community Accountability Boards
Call-Ins: Several Approaches
• Formal Call-Ins
• Focuses on reaching out to gangs and community groups and
attempting to change their behavior.
• Community Call-Ins
• Informal discussions
• Focused on community aspects rather than law enforcement
consequences
• Homes Visits
• Associated with drug-market interventions.
• Using “Influentials”
Community as Moral Voice
• Common themes in call-ins (Kennedy, 2010):
• All of us would like to change
• All parties respect you
• There is no justification for the violence
• The community needs the violence to stop
• Ideas of the street code are wrong
• Law enforcement, social services, and the community have been
part of the problem
• You are valuable to the community
Street workers
• Serve as a community representative for project.
• Focused on outreach activities related to violence
interruption, mediation, and spreading non-violence
messages to the community.
• Potential Issues:
• High turnover
• Inadequate training
• Criminal activity
Community Accountability Boards (CAB)
• Serves as an alternative to the traditional criminal justice
responses and focuses on providing victims (individuals
and community members) a voice in repairing the harm
caused by crime.
• The CAB is made of community members.
• Goal is for offenders to understand the harm they cause.
• Primarily used for misdemeanor offenders.
Pulling Levers and CAB
• Community Accountability Boards provide the Moral Voice
• Centralized community and government collaboration
that can provide long-term assistance independent on
law enforcement strategies.
• Building legitimacy through collective response to crime.
• Leveraging the legitimacy for future participation
CAB and Pulling Levers Overview