The Pandemic Has Hindered Many of the Best Ideas for Reducing Violence

Reported crime of nearly every kind has declined this year amid the pandemic. The exception to that has been stark and puzzling: Shootings and homicides are up in cities around the country, perplexing experts who normally expect these patterns to trend together.

The president and others have blamed protests and unrest, the changing tactics of police, and even the partisan politics of mayors. But at least part of the puzzle may lie in sources that are harder to see (and politicize): The pandemic has frayed all kinds of institutions and infrastructure that hold communities together, that watch over streets, that mediate conflicts, that simply give young people something to do.

Schools, libraries, recreation centers and public pools have closed. Nonprofits, churches and sports leagues have scaled back. Mentors, social workers and counselors have been hampered by social distancing.

And programs devised to reduce gun violence — and that have proved effective in studies — have been upended by the pandemic. Summer jobs programs were cut this year. Violence intervention workers were barred from hospitals. Group behavioral therapy programs meant to be intimate and in-person have moved, often haltingly, online.

“This work is a pat on the shoulder, a touch on the hand, a handshake,” said Del McFadden, the director of the office of neighborhood safety and engagement for the District of Columbia. “All of those things are different now.”

Mr. McFadden’s office was created after a rise in homicides in Washington in 2015. One yearlong program it runs, called Pathways, provides residents deemed likely to engage in violence with job training, social services and cognitive behavioral therapy that teaches skills for de-escalating conflict. Groups entering the program used to take a white-water rafting trip on the Potomac. But there’s no social distancing in a boat. Mentors would typically take participants shopping for job-interview suits. But that’s hard when stores are closed.

Now violence prevention work is masked, in smaller groups, in public parks, or online.

“We’re all struggling to figure out where are the evidence-based solutions in this work,” said Chasda Martin, the director of programs for an initiative run by the Heartland Alliance called READI Chicago, which combines transitional jobs with behavioral coaching and services for men at risk of involvement in gun violence in Chicago. In early analysis, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and Cornell studying the program has found that it may be reducing the risk that participants become a victim of a shooting or homicide.

Then came the pandemic. The program’s partnering employers couldn’t quickly shift to online work. So READI Chicago created its own version of unemployment insurance, paying men who kept up with their coaching online. In that virtual world, the program required participants to blur their backgrounds in group sessions, concealing any hint of location or gang affiliation. In some form, Mr. Martin said, the program had to continue.

“We knew that if we had a bunch of guys sitting around, our hypothesis was that those participants were going to lose their safety net, and they’d engage in criminal activity,” he said. “This is the highest-risk population. That propensity is still there.”

Some version of that fear — students with no school to attend, long summer days with no summer jobs, young people with nowhere to go — may be part of what is happening this year on a wider scale.

Without jobs, activities or support, many people have also been stuck at home in neighborhoods with histories of violence and continuing conflicts.

“You couldn’t create a situation that theory would predict to be more volatile,” said John Roman, a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago.

It’s impossible to say how much this dynamic has contributed to violence this year. Crime is hard to explain even in normal times. Some of the trends this year are relatively straightforward: Residential robberies declined with people spending more time at home. Shoplifting declined when businesses closed. Stolen cars increased in some cities as novice delivery drivers started leaving their running cars in the road.

But violence is harder to grapple with. And that is especially true this year because it diverges so drastically from other crime.

“Any theory that’s really going to be convincing has to explain this unusual pattern,” said David Abrams, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania law school who has been tracking crime trends this year.

The behavior of the police has certainly changed. Early in the spring, officers pulled back on their interactions amid social distancing. Later in the spring and summer they faced mass protests — and may have reacted to those protests with slowdowns. But Mr. Abrams said the effect of any policing changes wouldn’t be limited to homicides and shootings.

The rise in violence in cities around the country coincided in late May and early June with mass protests after the death of George Floyd in police custody. But that’s not necessarily because of a police pullback, or because the protests themselves led to violence (although looting did create an abrupt spike in nonresidential burglaries), said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

He has looked at a similar rise in violence around the protests against police brutality in 2015. And he suspects that police legitimacy deteriorates in these moments, even in neighborhoods where trust in law enforcement is already low.

“When confidence in the police wanes and drops sufficiently, then one gets a rise in so-called street justice, in people taking matters into their own hands to settle disputes,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “That contributes to a rise in violence.”

Viewed that way, the police themselves are another institution that’s fraying, at a time when alternative mediators and authority figures are especially absent.

“The police are the most visible and maybe salient thing that society does to try and achieve public safety,” said Jens Ludwig, who directs the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, which has been analyzing some of the violence reduction programs in Chicago. “But it’s definitely not the only thing that society does.”

One of the paid jobs in the READI Chicago program involves cleaning up and maintaining vacant lots in city neighborhoods. That work halted over the summer, leaving participants without a job. But there’s also research suggesting a secondary lost benefit: When vacant properties are cared for, gun violence in surrounding areas declines.

Separately, there’s evidence that the presence of nonprofits in a community has helped lower violent crime. There’s evidence that hospitals can play a role in reducing violence, when gunshot victims are identified in trauma centers for follow-up interventions. There are randomized control trials showing that summer youth employment programs reduce violent crime among participants, even well after the programs have ended.

“They’re clearly keeping kids safe,” said Sara Heller, a professor at the University of Michigan who has studied summer jobs programs. “It’s not always consistent, but violence is going down, criminal justice involvement is going down. Where we can measure it in New York, mortality is going down, and it seems to be from homicides.”

Professor Heller and others argue that it’s worth considering the role of these programs right now, even when definitive answers about violence are elusive, because summer jobs, parks departments and mentoring initiatives may seem like line items a city can afford to trim with budget cuts looming. To save money, for example, Detroit has already planned to reduce how often it maintains vacant lots.

“Libraries, parks, rec centers, pools, free internet — those are all crime prevention activities and resources,” said Caterina Roman, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University (who is married to Mr. Roman, the NORC researcher). She suspects that cities that will successfully weather this year’s rise in violence are the ones that invested in these resources for years before the pandemic. And cities that further cut them will increasingly rely on policing strategies alone to reduce violence.

In Chicago, another program aimed at at-risk teens, Choose to Change, has had success reducing violent crime arrests and contact with the criminal justice system. That model relies on mentorship with community advocates and group behavioral therapy designed to address trauma. The program used to hold some of its meetings inside schools, and now that’s not possible either.

“The first thing to go last March when the stay-at-home order was issued here in Chicago for these young people was the stability of school,” said Julia Noobler, the director of metropolitan behavioral health services for Children’s Home & Aid, which runs the program alongside another nonprofit, Youth Advocate Programs, Inc. Though school attendance for the program’s participants wasn’t great even before the pandemic, Ms. Noobler said, “School was there when they needed it.”

Now in virtual meetings, there is a new challenge: finding quiet, private space to get online in homes that may have several generations of family in quarantine.