Expository Writing, Optional Resources
Crime and “broken windows” theories of policing
Crump, Catherine. “The Small and Surprisingly Dangerous Detail the Police Track about You.” TED Global 2014, October 2014, https://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_crump_the_small_and_surprisingly_dangerous_detail_the_police_track_about_you
A very unsexy-sounding piece of technology could mean that the police know where you go, with whom, and when: the automatic license plate reader. These cameras are innocuously placed all across small-town America to catch known criminals, but as lawyer and TED Fellow Catherine Crump shows, the data they collect in aggregate could have disastrous consequences for everyone the world over
Kelling, George L. and William J. Bratton. “Declining Crime Rates: Insiders’ Views of the New York City Story.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 88, is. 4, Summer 1998, pp. 1217-1232. http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6977&context=jclc
Something dramatic happened in New York City in 1994: a lot of people stopped committing crimes, especially violent ones. The reduction in the number of persons committing murders, for example, while not unprecedented,’ was extraordinary. Since 1994, a debate has raged about why this happened. Putting our position up front, we believe the police played an important, even central, role in getting people to stop committing crime in New York City. Despite arguments to the contrary,’ no evidence exists that the substantial drops in crime in New York City, especially the initial ones when one of the authors of this paper, William Bratton, was commissioner, were the result of economic change, changes in drug use patterns, or demographic changes. Arguably, New York City’s economy, drug use patterns, and demography might be different now in 1998. Unemployment was at 10% the month Bratton took over the New York City Police Department (NYPD) (January 1994) and at 8.7% when he resigned (April 1996)-hardly a booming economy.’ And remember as well, the initial reductions in crime were so steep that by August of 1995-three years ago, but only twenty months after Bratton took office-New York magazine declared in a cover story, “The End of Crime as We Know It.” http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc
Lombardo, Robert and Todd Lough. “Community Policing: Broken Windows, Community Building, and Satisfaction with the Police.” Police Journal, vol. 80, no. 2, 2007, pp. 117-140. http://dx.doi.org/10.1350/pojo.2007.80.2.117
The concept of community policing dominates the law enforcement profession today. One would be hard pressed to find an advertisement for a police chief’s position that does not require a thorough understanding of this method of policing. Like the Kansas City preventive patrol experiment and the Rand report on the criminal investigation process, the call for community policing has led to dramatic changes in the way that police carry out their responsibilities. In spite of its popularity, there have been a number of challenges to community policing from social scientists who are particularly concerned about the ‘broken windows’ model of policing. These challenges have not been received well by the law enforcement community, which argues that sociologists are wedded to the idea that crime is caused by the structural features of capitalist society, including economic injustice, racism, and poverty. The purpose of this article is to bridge the gap between these two positions. Yes, there is a place for community policing, and, yes, social problems do contribute to crime. The article starts by reviewing the development of community policing in the United States. An analysis of the theoretical constructs that support community policing then follows. Finally, we argue that there is sound theoretical evidence to support community policing, particularly those programmes that improve citizen satisfaction with the manner in which police carry out their responsibilities. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
Milgram, Anne. “Why Smart Statistics Are the Key to Fighting Crime.” TED@BCG San Francisco, October 2013, https://www.ted.com/talks/anne_milgram_why_smart_statistics_are_the_key_to_fighting_crime
When she became the attorney general of New Jersey in 2007, Anne Milgram quickly discovered a few startling facts: not only did her team not really know who they were putting in jail, but they had no way of understanding if their decisions were actually making the public safer. And so began her ongoing, inspirational quest to bring data analytics and statistical analysis to the US criminal justice system
Wealth and income distribution
“Economic Inequality and Poverty in the United States.” Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World, 2016, http://open.lib.umn.edu/sociology/chapter/8-4-economic-inequality-and-poverty-in-the-united-states/
In his classic book The Other America, Michael Harrington (1962) brought the reality of poverty home to many Americans. In chapter after chapter, he discussed the troubled lives of the poor in rural Appalachia, in our urban centers, and in other areas of the country, and he indicted the country for not helping the poor. His book helped kindle interest in the White House and Congress in aiding the poor and deeply affected its thousands of readers. Almost five decades later, we know much more about poverty than we used to. Despite initial gains in fighting poverty in the 1960s (Schwartz, 1984), poverty is still with us and has worsened since the early 2000s, especially since the onset of the serious economic recession that began in 2008. What do we know about the extent of poverty, the reasons for it, and its consequences? Released by a publisher who has requested that they and the original author not receive attribution, which was originally released and is used under CC BY-NC-SA. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Kelly, Marjorie and Sarah McKinley. Cities Building Community Wealth. Democracy Collaborative, November 2015, http://community-wealth.org/sites/clone.community-wealth.org/files/downloads/CitiesBuildingCommunityWealth-Web.pdf
This report invites us to imagine: What would happen if economic developers, city managers, mayors, and other caretakers of local economies thought differently? How might local economies be different, if these city economic development leaders discarded the complex algorithms they use in deal making, if they stopped focusing on abstract inputs and outputs, and instead focused on people and community? Too often in economic development, we look mostly at data: We understand the educational attainment of a city’s workforce; we focus on buildable space; we consider connectivity to transit systems; we measure exports or count square feet of green space. But people and communities are often only referenced as units of measure, or as inputs to make businesses and economies thrive. In many cities, this type of thinking has led to increasing disparities in wealth and prosperity. It has led to certain neighborhoods and populations thriving, as others remain in the shadows, struggling. Yet our frameworks seem to miss this. Economic development operates on an implicit assumption that everyone benefits from a city’s prosperity and economic growth. But that’s a sad fallacy. There are other fallacies in the traditional approaches of economic development. Like the emphasis on strong downtown development and vibrant commercial districts. Or the belief that big business drives employment and economic growth. These are the very approaches that are failing to reach many of the communities most in need of economic opportunity. There are communities leading the way to a new paradigm of economic development. These communities are putting people first and pushing equity, inclusion, and sustainability to the fore. They’re creating land trusts to ensure equitable development without displacement. They’re creating jobs and wealth through ownership models like worker-owned cooperatives, where the notion of maximizing shareholder value has been replaced with a commitment to workers and often the environment. They’re also looking to anchor institutions as sources of local jobs, and as economic engines that can invest in local businesses and direct purchasing to businesses owned by people of color, women, and immigrants. This new approach to economic development puts people and community first, and focuses on creating broadly held wealth. The Democracy Collaborative has coined the term “community wealth building” to describe this approach to systems-level change to create a more inclusive economy. This report showcases successful approaches from cities around the country. At this time of growing inequality, it’s time for people-focused economic development that leads to true community wealth building. Creative Commons Noncommercial Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/deed.en_US
Wealth Inequality in America, YouTube, 20 November 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is. License Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)
Global megacities
“Frameworks for Guiding, Supporting and Evaluating the Work of Community and System Change, Community Tool Box, Work Group for Community Health and Development, University of Kansas, 2016, http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Germ Janmaat, Jan. “Classrooms with Mixed Ethnicity Can Help Boost Tolerance of Immigrants.” The Conversation, 10 February 2015, https://theconversation.com/classrooms-with-mixed-ethnicity-can-help-boost-tolerance-of-immigrants-37397
As Western societies have become more diverse due to immigration and cross-border mobility, the question of how welcoming their native populations are to newcomers has become ever more relevant. Exclusionary and hostile attitudes can compromise the integration of immigrants into society and have potentially negative consequences for overall social cohesion. Nowhere is the urge to combat such hostility early on more pronounced than in schools. Governments are increasingly calling on schools to cultivate tolerance among young people. One way of doing this is to have classes with an ethnically mixed intake. My research has examined the impact of this “mixing” and found that ethnic diversity in the classroom does lead to more tolerance of immigrants among teenagers. But the proportion of first-generation and second-generation immigrants makes a difference to attitudes. Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons licence
Khanna, Parag. “How Megacities Are Changing the Map of the World.” TED 2016, February 2016, https://www.ted.com/talks/parag_khanna_how_megacities_are_changing_the_map_of_the_world
“I want you to reimagine how life is organized on earth,” says global strategist Parag Khanna. As our expanding cities grow ever more connected through transportation, energy and communications networks, we evolve from geography to what he calls “connectography.” This emerging global network civilization holds the promise of reducing pollution and inequality — and even overcoming geopolitical rivalries. In this talk, Khanna asks us to embrace a new maxim for the future: “Connectivity is destiny”
New York Public Library, “NYC Space/Time Directory: Let’s Build the Future of New York City’s Past.” 2016, http://spacetime.nypl.org/
The New York Public Library is creating a digital time-travel service for New York City with historical maps, collections rich in geospatial data, and the public’s help. The NYC Space/Time Directory will make urban history accessible through a set of resources including: a searchable atlas of New York past, an historical location directory and geocoder, a set of APIs and data sets, and a discovery tool linking NYPL collections together in an historical and geographic context. These explorations will provide a way for scholars, students, enthusiasts, and librarians to explore New York City across time periods and to add their own knowledge and expertise. With the NYC Space/Time Directory we’re developing a programming model and freely accessible codebase for other cities, libraries, and individuals to map and explore history. Data sources are listed in our related resources section below and those interested in working with our open source projects can visit GitHub to get started! Ready to travel through time and space? Explore our Space/Time resources below to start discovering and contributing to New York City history. The data produced through this project is covered by a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain dedication