Using Social Networks To Reduce Gun Violence With Andrew Papachristos

My guest today is Andrew Papachristos, one of the smartest people (though he is a Bears fan) thinking through how to use data to reduce gun violence. Andy has spent his career trying to read networks more systematically. He’s a professor at Northwestern University who studies how social ties and relationships shape who becomes a victim and who doesn’t and how that knowledge can be put to use before the next shooting, not just after.

In this episode, we get into what network science actually is, how cities are using it to reach people at the highest risk, and why the same principles hold whether you're looking at Boston, New Haven, Newark, or Chicago. We also talk about what it actually looks like when violence intervention workers use this research well and what the current historic crime decline might be obscuring.

Andrew Papachristos is the John G. Searle Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, where he directs the Institute for Policy Research and CORNERS—the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research & Science. His (insert adjective :P ) research uses network science and multi-method approaches to understand gun violence, gun markets, street gangs, and policing. He is one of the country's leading experts on how network dynamics shape gun violence and public safety.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Well, I'm Jeff Asher and this is the Jeffalytics Podcast. Most gun violence doesn't spread randomly. It moves through networks, through relationships, disputes, and social ties that, if you know how to read them, tells you a great deal about what's coming next. Andrew Papakristos has spent his career trying to read networks more systemically. He's a professor at Northwestern University who studies how social ties and relationships shape who becomes a victim and who doesn't, and how that knowledge can be put to use before the next shooting, not just after. In this episode, we get into what network science actually is, how cities are using it to reach people at the highest risk, and why the same principles hold, whether you're looking at Boston, New Haven, Newark, or Chicago. We also talk about what it actually looks like when violence intervention workers use this research well and what the current historic crime decline might be obscuring. Let's get into it. My guest today is Andrew Papacristos. Thank you so much for joining the show.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jeff.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

This is exciting. We have we go way back, we've known each other for a while, and I'm very excited to have you on the show and talk about all your research and sort of the potential and actuality of all of this. So, first off, take take my listeners through your background. How did you get to be here?

SPEAKER_00 1:15

How far back do you want me to go?

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Start at the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Yeah, I mean, so uh born and raised in Chicago, north side of the city, a Cubs fan. Um, my dad came here from Greece in 1958. You said the beginning. But of course, uh, what that means if if people know my age, it means I kind of grew up in Chicago in the 80s and 90s. My folks owned a diner. And, you know, the the short radio friendly version or podcast-friendly version is, you know, our family was deeply impacted by gun violence in a lot of ways, directly, various sides of the system, as it were. And kind of as a first gen kid, you you're taught you need to get a job. Uh, had an older sister who's a public school teacher in Chicago, has been for 27 years. Thought I was going to follow in her footsteps or potentially go into law enforcement. I went to visit my sister in her classroom, and it turns out that teaching is really hard, but had always been interested and continued to be involved in gun violence prevention, public safety kind of stuff ever since I was uh, you know, a teenager. And so, you know, in college, and I went to Loyola University and studied criminal justice and kind of found my way to research just through great professors and trying to understand problems and solve problems that were happening in Chicago. And early on, I was involved in some really cool research projects, uh, Herb Spurgel's Little Village Project, working on Project Safe Neighborhoods. And while I was doing my kind of PhD work, I had a super interesting conversation with a street outreach worker and actually a prosecutor. And, you know, we were doing some traditional kind of evaluation work, and they asked me uh who was going to get shot. And what they wanted to know was like who, not uh a bunch of aggregate statistics. They didn't want me to say, hey, it's gonna be an 18 to 36-year-old black or Latino male. They wanted to know, have a sense of who was next and what groups were involved. And so I sat there and went through with legal pad and pen, like drawing network diagrams of victims, offenders, groups, places. Thought I had invented network science. Turns out I didn't. There was a whole field, and kind of spent a lot of my time after that putting these kind of different fields and thoughts and relational thinking together into science, but also into figuring out how it can help us do something about violence and violence prevention. So the the short summary is got exposed to gun violence early. Family kind of stayed involved at a neighborhood level all through my life and kind of was lucky enough to make a path in research that let me stay dialed into that and and spend my career, you know, teaching about it, talking about it, working with organizations and cities and departments about it. And that's the long, the short story long.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

I want to talk about network science and get into all of that in just a second, but you do have a substack that is all about neighborhoods. And you you talked about a little bit why is it so important to you to think about and to research and to write about these concepts at a neighborhood level?

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Because neighborhood is where humanity is, right? Not just in cities, they're neighborhoods, but in communities and towns. And part of what makes places special are not just like the aggregation of individuals, it's how people are tied or disconnected from each other in space. So that's where you learn. That's where you learn how to navigate people and places, it's where you learn to navigate safety and danger, it's how you learn to navigate the sorts of things you get along. It's how do you learn how to love or to vote or talk about politics or to read? Most of that happens in a very localized context for both for for the for so you know, in our context, promoting safety or potentially inhibiting safety, but it applies across the whole kinds of things, and it actually is the ways that people organize their lives often early on, but especially in cities. Where are you from? Right, defines you. I even started with uh, you know, I'm I'm from Chicago, I'm a Cubs fan, right? That means I'm from the north side. I was, you know, the son of an immigrant. Like those sorts of things define you, but where that happens really matters. And you know, we can in from the larger social science of it all, that exposure to things early on, whether it's lead in your pipes or functioning school systems, or so on and so on, it really has a long-term effect on you. But also, neighborhoods outlive people, and that's one of the beautiful things about humans, right? So a place, you know, again has an identity because of the institutions and people that are in it. And even when people die or move, the place has a character, and the character can change, and most often they do, but by and large, places define things. So if I say, you know, Rogers Park in Chicago, or if I say Brooklyn in New York, or Bushwick, or, you know, the tenderloin, like they kind of bring up images, and I think it's just important for how people do it. It's also where even if you're having online activities, you tend to meet in the real world and it tends to be in a place that's defined by the things around it. So I just think it's how we live our life. It's also what I enjoy about places, right? Understanding characters and and character, the characters of a place and the character of a place. I should write that one down.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

And of course, with Chicago, we're talking about neighborhoods the size of a small city. Yeah. In most places, it's like, oh, it's the three blocks I live around here. And you know, yeah, you're thinking of it of places that host a professional experience team of situation.

SPEAKER_00 6:53

Yeah, I mean, this is one of the things. Even when we'll talk later about violence prevention, we had some folks come in from a mid-sized city and we were working on something in North Lawndale. North Lawndale's 85,000 people, you know, and so even North Lawndale is divided like internally. And I think it's really important to understand that. But again, in in bigger cities, but mid-sized cities, you know, you can still experience like cities within cities, which is true again of any kind of unit, even in small towns. We lived in some small towns when we were in western Massachusetts for a while. You know, they each have their own little character, the own little spots. It's something very human about how people occupy spaces for good and bad.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

The big question then is what is network science? And you talked about how you got into it. How do you define that? I don't know that we have time for an hour lecture because I know this is a big thing, but how would you describe it best to a lay audience?

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Yeah, to a lay audience, it's actually something you recognize, right? Which is it is the scientific study of how the links and relationships and social ties among people and institutions affect what you feel, think, and do, right? Which is to say your friends, your coworkers, your associates, your partners, they have an effect on what you read, what you eat, whether you get a disease, how you vote, what you buy. Right. And so the six degrees phenomenon, this that you know, when we were in college, the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, which was a drinking game at the time, and then morphed into something bigger, it's actually relying on mathematical principles. So humans understand how they meet people through a friend of a friend that's very meaningful, right? It's not random, but it's about what you are in your kind of networks, how you meet your partner when you don't meet them online. You meet them because you were at a party together and you had a mutual friend. You know, how do you decide new fashion tastes besides just what you see? It's a lot of picking up about what's around you. And there's a lot of science dating back to old sociology and anthropology in the 80s and 90s. Physicists and social scientists realized there are mathematical principles to understanding these things. And since then, you know, this has gone on into epidemiology, you know, public health, social sciences, political sciences, computer sciences, even large language models, which everyone are obsessed with, are essentially putting things together that are alike and analyzing patterns and then giving you outcomes. So these ideas about network science are fundamental, uh, including things like neural networks in your brain. And so a lot of what I do, you know, is try to understand how that applies to things relating to public safety.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

And how has your research been used on sort of this public safety issue? And what do you see as sort of your aspiration for the research and how can it be used? What is the what is the maximum potential here?

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Yeah, there's a there's a lot of a lot of in that question. I know you know that. So let's start with I think the Catholic use, and I don't mean the religious sense, the broadest use of of this idea. So when you're thinking about public safety, and uh most of my work is in gun violence, which is one type of safety problem. But in the space of gun violence, good preachers, teachers, cops, social workers, violence preventionists, they tend to know a lot about the social networks of the people they're they're working with, right? So if you go to my sister, who's a teacher, she can tell you about not just the kid in their classroom, but their older brother, their siblings, their parents, a little bit about she knows about the kids in their classrooms, right? Police officers, if they're working a beat, should know people on their beat and where they're from and their families and some of their backgrounds, right? Street outreach workers, these sort of what used to be called violence interrupters, they call them CVI workers. It's a very old idea. If you ask them about the crews or clicks in their neighborhoods, they're gonna give you this detailed map of everybody kind of that they know, right? So inside humans' brains that are doing this work lives a lot of information, but there's a huge drop off, right? Well, let's use outreach workers. They can tell you everything about the Papa Cristo's posse, right? Or the Asher assassins, and they'll give you all the dynamics of the relationships of them. But you go three blocks over and they have no information, right? Same thing with a with a comp. If a comp is policing a district, they might know everything about the businesses and the stores and the family in that district, but they go to a different district in a medium or big city, and they have no kind of information. And so at the most fundamental level, this sort of information can create a social GPS to help people navigate very complex social relationships. The problem with something like a GPS system is it can be used to direct your pizza, a delivery truck, a drone missile, or an ambulance. It's the same principles. So it's less about the science and more about how it gets applied, right? So the science is out there, we do the science, and then how people use it is some of the uh raises the concerns or issues or benefits. And I should say we do this in public health all the time, right? And most people got familiar with it with contact tracing, right? Yeah, I was gonna say, oh, someone in your kid's play table had COVID, we wanted to let you know you were exposed. We do this in areas with uh sexually transmitted infections, STIs. Someone in your past sexual history had HIV, we wanted to let you know to get tested. So there are ways to do this that we do this, um, which people may like or don't like, but the idea is to assess risk, if you will, and to figure out the interventions that can work. The thing not to do, let's start with what not to do, is just generate a list and work a list that tends to go very poorly, whether it's enforcement or prevention, because not everybody on that list is at risk the same way. They might have other information that you don't know. They might already have a job, they might be deceased, they might have turned their life around, they might not want services. So, what it requires, again, most broadly, is understanding the dynamics and using it to help guide decision, right? And strategy writ large. Do I need to send a team of outreach workers to activate a space, for example? Do I need to have sort of a call-in of a particularly violent group? And we've seen this used in a bunch of different spaces. I think a lot of this innovation and a lot of what I started first doing on was in what we could now call focused deterrence, right? Which was mapping gang conflicts, reaching out to those gangs, you know, and that turned to be wildly effective in terms of reducing group violence in the late 90s, early 2000s, which I think is a good practical use. Oftentimes it would stagnate and people wouldn't update their information or data. And so it was hard to, it was hard to kind of sustain it in many kinds of ways. Police departments and other sorts of places have used this to create strategic subjects lists and other things, which have tenderly gone sideways. Because again, if you give a cop a list, he's going to work a list as opposed to kind of put in the sort of work that needs to be. Seen this used in sort of homicide and shooting reviews to divert medical health and prevention services. And we've started in a few spaces in Chicago to use this for strategic decisions for street outreach organizations because they have very limited resources and they'll describe it like whack-a-mole. Like if I've got five outreach workers and 30 crews in my neighborhood, where do I start? Right? Who do I start the outreach with? And to go back to that question, somebody asked me who's next, right? All right, I cooled this down. Now where do I go? Kind of thing. So I do think it should be used in conjunction with real basic human intelligence and decision making. But you have to have the tool in the loop. In the computer science world, they talk about, you know, the algorithm in the loop or the human in the loop, right? People use humans to train algorithms and things like that. But actually, it should be the reverse. You should have these tools that are one part of decision making. And usually, again, folks that are doing the work, whatever that work might be, tend to know a lot. So this should be one piece of information that can help look at it. It can also be used to look at the efficacy. Was there a positive effect, a spillover effect, right? You calm down the Asher Assassins. Sorry, we named your crew online today. I didn't know if that was the the name of it. But if the Asher, you know, the Asher Assassins chilled out, what about that Papa Cristo's posse, right? Are they still active or do they also chill out? So you can be you can also use it for sort of evaluation and kind of diffusion purposes.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

So can you go through any examples? And everyone likes calling out cities that did well, but like places that have used this kind of concept correctly, properly, had really good effect. And then you don't have to name the places, but places where it hasn't worked as well. And we can all imagine the city that you're thinking of when you're you you name it. But uh like, you know, how where has it gone sideways? How what does that look like?

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Yeah, I will say, you know, it's it's always funny, I think, when people try to hide the large Midwestern city that rhymes with Chicago. But I'll talk about a few places that I've worked at where I've seen this go quite well. Um, and you know, again, I was not involved in sort of the early Boston work, but by looking, I spent a lot of time looking at it, working with people there. So the early iterations at the group level in Boston, the so you know, the Boston Miracle, where they actually started some of these mapping exercises. Um, I saw it work well there. I actually saw it work very well in Connecticut, in New Haven. And I spent some time in New Haven, and New Haven is a small city relative to Chicago, but the dynamics were identical. And the thing about a city of the size of New Haven was you didn't have 900 crews like you had in Chicago, you had 25. And you had very good support from local community that during the period that I was there, I really saw them, you know, map these sorts of conflicts, use outreach to engage, have the support of some of the local law enforcement and social services in the hospital in a way that was quite unique and rare. Um, and our evaluation suggested that it was is quite positive. Now, in in the greatest city in the world, Chicago, I've seen it done well and I've seen it done poorly, right? I think the early iterations of using it to identify groups and group conflicts, true to what we've seen in other spaces, worked very, very well. And I think part of the reason it worked well is the data was accurate and it was the whole package. It wasn't just enforcement, it wasn't just outreach and services. It was actually a focused effort to really look at and do something about it. I think it deteriorated over time because, as a lot of programs do, they expand, they don't have data, they don't have resources. It became primarily a law enforcement tool, and sort of the effect kind of dropped. I actually think right now in Chicago, it's being used innovatively by a couple of our research, the people we're partnering with in some of these research projects. And they're using it to figure out how to plan safety for their teams, they're using it to identify, put potential folks that are at risk to reach, and they're using it to respond to incidents. And let me give you an incident example because it's quite interesting. If you remember, I was talking about like, oh, this outreach workers, it's all about, you know, their what they know in their head, and then all of a sudden it drops off. I mean, this is happens all the time when they do their sort of shooting reviews. And we've seen that, you know, one case I like to talk about was there was a shooting. You put these network diagrams up, they looked at the victim and it was connected to another victim, which turned out it was this person's brother who was shot six months earlier. An outreach worker said, I know the third brother who's still alive and in school, they were able to reach that kid who was at risk and to essentially get them out of a situation and get them help. And that kid's still around today. Or another instance in where someone identified their nephew and were able to pull their nephew out of harm's way, or another one, which happens more often than not, to rule people out. So there was another case, you know, they they had a name for it in the outreach world called, I forgot what it was, in Swappies or something like that, where everybody was kind of had a theory about why this group kept getting victimized. And when you started mapping it, it turned out that it was coming from a whole different neighborhood, not what anybody thought it was. And they were able to determine just by a couple pieces of data that in fact it wasn't this long-standing rivalry between two crews, but it started from some romantic relationship, right? Because that romantic relationship just was getting translated because there was a lack of information. But all of a sudden you draw a different line, and everyone could be like, we got to come about this differently. We're not negotiating between crews here. We're we're now negotiating, you know, a romantic dispute. And so those are kind of ways I think are super promising. You know, we're trying to look at and research and evaluate some of these things, and it it seems like it can get to people faster. It seems like it can expand the reach, which is you can you can do a lot with more. And there's all sorts of potentials, but it's just sort of, you know, some of these things are sort of getting there. Law enforcement already has the tools, they have the analysts, they have the data, right? So the question is, how can that be activated for other systems? Because in most of those cases in law enforcement, they don't need a law enforcement response. Some do, most probably don't. Most probably need referrals or systems or housing. And I think that's that sort of coordination, I think, as you know from your years, working in cities is often harder than you know, just looking at data and finding a few threads to pull.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

How do you so like the base of much of your data is coming from law enforcement? Yeah. Who got shot? You know, John Smith got shot, John Thompson got arrested for the shooting. Like that's that's policing data. Yeah. But you don't want your response to be solely or even largely a policing response. So, how do you sort of square that circle of community and civic organizations need police and need the police data, but they don't want that to be sort of the lead response?

SPEAKER_00 21:21

Well, so it depends on the response. So this let me be you know super clear on this. It depends on the response, right? If the police are using it to solve shootings or to actually address sort of the things that they should be doing in a constitutional, transparent manner, no one's gonna no one should argue with that. And I'll give you a great example, of course. You know, DA Gonzalez in New York, right? He didn't necessarily use these tools, but he had a series of sort of summer takedowns of some crews that were causing a lot of violence in some housing projects. He coordinated this, you know, he got the shooters, he had diversion for the other. ones and he had the support by and large of the the community and there was an outreach response. So I think it can be used in ways that are effective and constitutional, you know, full stop. But I think when you look at what the data actually are, in fact, the data are a proxy. And this is one of the things I'll kind of tell a story without naming names. My whole academic career, what you get are people being like, this data is horrible. It's just police data. You know, it's got all these biases in it. You know, we can't trust it. I've got it from every academic reviewer who we often call reviewer two. So I've spent my lifetime defending using offending records, incident records, and shooting records, right? To academic audiences. And, you know, I'll tell the story and then kind of give you my thoughts. But so I want this was last summer at a sort of an academic meeting. Some people were touring Chicago. We had some of our outreach partners out. We were talking about this and someone poised this question to me. And I wasn't the one that made the response. It was in fact an outreach worker who just kind of chuckled and said, yeah, those are those are totally right. Those are our celllies. Those are the guys on your rap sheets. Like in fact you're missing more than you're not because the truth is and you know this better than anybody in the country right shooting data it in fatal and non-fatal shooting data is a is as good as you're going to get in being pretty accurate. Right? A bullet entered your butt yes some are not reported but by and large we can count those very very well arrests are tricky but we know that only a fraction of crime gets reported and a smaller fraction ever makes it to an arrest page. So if Jeff and Andy rob somebody it might not be right but to get there it's already a super conservative measure. And if Jeff and Andy did arrest somebody we probably knew each other excuse me if we did rob somebody we probably knew each other before we robbed somebody right so we're actually using a piece of data that is a police observation in point in time of something that's probably much bigger. Right. And so yes academics are right to be question this but when we've never had this problem when we're working with either you know community members or the people that are doing the work on the ground because they know the relationship between Jeff and Andy. So we're using it as a proxy, an imperfect proxy because there's no other data set that does this. And when you care about gun violence you capture 80 plus percent of the victims. So whatever it is that we're we're capturing we're capturing the phenomenon I'm interested in and you know to to put this in an even finer point when you want to study the transmission of a sexually transmitted infection right you want to study sexual networks. You want to study contact networks you want to study the thing that is the vector for the disease spread. In this case most interpersonal violence happens in these networks happens with disputes happens with arguments and these data are just a proxy for it. But it's also to go back to something I've said part of the reason you don't just want to go into it blind and believe it's perfect. You want it to pass through human decision making of people that have on the ground knowledge whoever that might be right and again preachers, teachers, cops, outreach workers, social workers like they really do know the folks that are kind of in these networks and they need to be part of this process that's that's making decisions.

SPEAKER_01 25:37

From the strictly the sort of outside looking in the public perspective how is this research and analysis and policy being driven by it how is it so most often misconstrued? Are there responses that sort of just drive you batty when you hear them constantly I know what sound bite you're fishing for. No, I'm not fishing for anything. I'm genuinely curious.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Yeah no no I mean I think the thing that drives me crazy is something I've already alluded to which is people hear the word prediction. By the way I rarely talk about actual prediction mapping is often way better than prediction but people hear things like that someone in the news will use the phrase the minority report and then it sort of it's all downhill from there. One most people have never seen the movie or read the book or short story, right? But also you know what it conjures up rightfully so has been the misuse of technology in particular by the criminal justice system. Right. But not just the criminal justice system, the school system, all sorts of healthcare systems, all sorts of systems. So as soon as people teeter into this world and use the word prediction it often gets me going a little bit because I'm not even talking about prediction. I'm talking about mapping right people love maps and and inevitably when they see some of these things they can see some of their value. But I think the misconception is that that you're generating a score and you're following the score blindly and it happens. And it's happened poorly even in my own favorite city of Chicago with you know some of the things they tried to do conversely I've seen it done well right you know the sort of ready program in Chicago basically took my algorithm you know my my models made a few changes and made you know I reviewed their work and they used it to drive enrollment in the ready program. Same principles same general ideas and it was used for something very different than just creating a list and having cops knock on doors. And so I think it's it goes back to the thing I nudged before like what does the math do? The math can be used to drive a school bus, you know, or a tank. And I I also think that that is more important and and this this is so important right now even in the world of AI what are the policies in place that can keep these things from being used improperly we don't have any we have some well what are the policies in place right so what are the policies in place but I mean like you know AI facial recognition is an extreme license plate readers companies like Palantir and others there are how many of these sorts of things are out there in the world but I mean there's no policy in place for how these things are used. And without policy they'll be misused I mean they're going to be misused anyway but at least with the some kind of policy around using them I think they're there that's where you kind of often get into it. And it's not just these sorts of tools it's all these all these sorts of tools and of course there's a whole for-profit sector you know within the law enforcement I mean that's part of why the development is there. Not only do they have the data they have the resources to do it. If you go to a community organization and you give them $100,000 are they going to hire an analyst and buy some data space or are they going to get another outreach worker victim advocate? It's just not the same. So there's a digital divide between how things are being used you know healthcare law enforcement schools have different sorts of relationships with technology and data and sort of civilian public safety infrastructures or even city level infrastructures and you know this well too rarely have the resources to put towards real data systems.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

So when cities do that, it's great but that's not often their top priority you talked about the sort of violence interrupters I want to get into that because we we've kind of talked about it a little bit but not really gone into details. So you've got a lot of experience with this how do the violence interrupters work how does your role sort of fit into their role and how does it work in Chicago to you know just sort of give us the the overarching sense because I don't know that there's anywhere else doing it as well as it's being done in Chicago.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Yeah. So quick quick history lesson it's this old idea. Right? This goes idea goes back to the 1940s Chicago area project the Roxbury project in Boston they did something in LA the idea that there are groups and networks of individuals that are disproportionately engaged in delinquency uh and PS they're not connected to an institution they're literally on the street and that the response of them should include folks that know the streets it's old it's an old idea we used to call them curbstone counselors detached workers so in the 40s 50s and 60s these programs existed in the 60s they were very well funded by the federal government and philanthropy and then kind of came to a screeching halt with the sort of war on crime they resurfaced prior to cure violence with uh Herb Spurgel's comprehensive gang model it had a long we just called it the Little Village project in Chicago but the idea was the same some of the people that need to be at the table are formerly gang involved street involved people that can get out there and mediate disputes but it's not just about mediating disputes it's also mentoring gat gr catching folks and helping right get into services and actually to help build trust with other institutions. The cure violence model kind of shifted and at the time was crucial to kind of taking this outside of a criminal justice lens and adding a public health lens. And since you know 2016 in Chicago postLaquan McDonald's murder right there was a new mayor there was a shift people wanted a more comprehensive community-based response and that's when they started coming back to this model of credible messengers right the idea of people with lived experience being on the front line mediating disputes but they wanted to do something more so between 2016 and 2018 there was a lot of innovation both in how you do street outreach but more than that what the field would look like so a couple things happened at once you saw the development of the Ready Chicago program and Chicago Cred, which were programs right that had outreach and then phased sorts of job readiness training health and mental health the idea being they would go through 18 20 months of training paid training and end with a job and it simultaneously organizations that used to fight with each other came together to build a collaboration right they built something a partnership that standardized pay that shared resources that built a training academy Metropolitan Peace Academy which is amazing you got to check it out. And they actually started doing something that had never been done in Chicago which is coordinate responses, share information. They still meet on weekly calls to talk about what happened last week what's going to happen this weekend we can, you know, we're doing this on June 30th they're going to meet to talk about the July 4th weekend right so there's there's actual coordination this is this they're calling it an ecosystem I like to think about it as an invisible kind of infrastructure right that's woven now throughout many of these communities and they've started to slowly scale it over to over time right and so in addition to the traditional violence interruption there's all other sorts of things that are going on in these spaces our role at corners there's a there's a couple great stories here we don't have time for but long you know the the sort of short version is I was coming back to Chicago and they I'd worked in this space previously in Chicago with both Cure Violence and the Little Village project and they started calling me to say like would I be interested in doing some research on the Sinai it sounded great. I was really excited um it was early on uh and a couple of the things they wanted was of course an evaluator someone to see whether it worked but they wanted something different which I was very excited about was they wanted a thought partner. They wanted somebody who could help bring the latest research that could ask kind of different sorts of questions that would be willing to kind of be engaged in a way that not all academics are, which is being at the table a lot, pushing and also being pushed back on. And so our team is actually kind of doing this with every project we've done. So we've done a survey of the entire outreach teams in Chicago almost a census did this in partnership not just with uh my David Herot, a longtime co-author at SUNY but we built the survey with outreach workers to answer the questions they needed in addition to understanding some of the things. When we were doing our you know analyses we report back regularly so that they see things so that they're not surprised if we're like, hey, this doesn't look so great. They're not catching kind of something and taking aback but in fact what we find is they want to learn. These are learning organizations, right? They actually want to improve. And so it became it was a lot of shoe leather to get there to be clear. It took months for people to trust us enough to really answer questions. But our role is both, you know, as a as an evaluator and a partner in some of these research questions and also a little bit like a think tank with the community in Chicago right so they'll often ask like hey we heard about this thing in Denver or Boston or Oakland what do we know about it how does it and I'll do the research and I'll come back and we'll give our thoughts or they'll run things past us and I'll try to bring what I know you know from doing this for 20 years, but also from being able to look at data. You know I think one of the things you know again I really appreciate our conversations over the year. One of the things that's changing in Chicago are multi-victim shootings. And like we're analyzing it right now along with something I've been calling the safety gap for a decade. So a couple things are happening at once. This is my hypothesis my working hypothesis but we've got some working papers on right now. So the last time we looked at the safety gap in Chicago it looked like it was narrowing right that as violence went down this gap between the most violent and least violence was closing. So now we're at 40 year lows in Chicago on homicides but inequality is getting worse which means the safer neighborhoods basically are about as safe as they're going to get and all of the action is happening in a small, small number of neighborhoods, which means what happens in a very small number of neighborhoods will drive everything in the city. And if I'm right about multi-victim shootings, and we're again we're looking at this now it means you can have one or two multi-victim shootings that can almost move the entire city rate. So you know we had a 12 person shooting incident, you know, week and a half ago there was a four person one and there was a three person one the week before. So the number of incidents is changing but it's the number of victims per incident I believe right I know this will air before I'm done so this is a hypothesis for everybody who's keeping score I believe that's gonna be one of the big things that's happening in Chicago that's going to change it. And of course that changes how you feel right a mass shooting at a Juneteenth party that's gonna which is what that 12 person shooting was like that that changes the people's psyche in a community going back to your first question in a way that an intimate partner shooting does not. And if that's what Chicago is facing it means we potentially have a new ceiling and then every time we go above it's going to be driven by even a smaller number of communities.

SPEAKER_01 37:20

So stay tuned but those are my hypotheses I I'm loving talking to you because each time you say something I then get like a thousand other questions on my list that I then want to ask and I'm like wait we're only already 38 minutes into this and so I I did very briefly want to ask because you talked about July 4th and it's such a it it becomes a national story. You know 70 people shot in Chicago over July 4th weekend it it's like a you know Cubs scored six runs and then the the Chicago shooting statistics over holiday weekends becomes the statistics that's reported everywhere. Why is that such a big thing? Is it just the weather's nice and people are out so why is why do we care about July 4th or why do we care about that well that's just the holiday weekend where you see just enormous eruptions of gun violence it feels like in Chicago that become big national stories.

SPEAKER_00 38:13

Well there well one is just the mythos of Chicago right and the other is your fault which is the availability of data is a blessing and a curse right so the number of times I get a report that says this is the bloodiest Tuesday on a leap year since Al Capone's daughter's cotillion and I'm like wow you know like how did you get that and they're like oh I got it off Jeff Asher's blog you know but the availability of data but the inability to know how to read data often kind of comes it comes in there right so you know we the people are out it's the middle of the year is the other part right so the 4th of July is just past the kind of halfway mark for Chicago you're halfway through the summer people are out it's hot it's a hundred degrees in Chicago today it's gonna be a hundred degrees plus over the next couple of days there's a lot of gatherings which is the other thing right like when you have a lot of public gatherings it's a good time to find people you've been looking for um it's so it's sort of all of the above but I do think we look to that and Chicago in particular just because of the you know so many things have happened since Al Capone and we can't shake that right even though we've seen the lowest levels of homicide since before I was born a decade plus before I was born to be clear like you know we're still we're still kind of facing that sort of cultural identity um and I think it's hard it's hard to change that narrative and people will kind of continue to look and also because Chicago has the highest number it drives a lot of the national action and story. Right? We take up a lot of ink and you know but we have a lot of things that have happened since Al Capal. But I think but I do think to answer your question directly you know it's hot it's the middle of the year kind of where we are in July you know the trajectory is probably going to be pretty close to where things will look in another quarter. So how applicable is all of this work in Chicago to the rest of the country given how unique Chicago is I think a couple of things you know I stand firmly I've done this in 12 or so cities that the concentration of gun violence in small networks is a human phenomenon. I don't think it's Chicago specific. Chicago from a researcher's perspective gives you such a big network that you can study lots of different varieties of it right but when you go to we did work in Newark Newark was very different but it had the same principles right Boston's smaller city same principles so I think the idea that that concentration exists and by the way I want to be clear because we didn't do this, it drives sort of today's violence right but it doesn't drive tomorrow's violence per se. So if the average age of a homicide victim in Chicago is 27, right? If you're not working with 27 year olds or 27 year olds are not putting down their guns or not using them, today's homicide rate's not going to change right which tells us also something about the latest great crime decline. Something happened among that specific population in cities right that population had to change arrests went down incarceration went down so what happened among that population for it to to change right or something in that population changed enough where the shootings they usually occur went down I think that's applicable to most cities. I actually think it's easier to see in smaller cities than in bigger cities. I think it's probably easier to see in cities that have less entrenched entrenched gang problems by the which is a point to your previous question too Chicago's gangs were so unique between the 60s and the early or mid 2010s that like you know it created a very different dynamic. It's not like that today. I think today groups in Chicago are more like groups in other cities there's small side street crews right there's some allegiance to some history but by and large they're not these corporate structures but I think that that's what applies I also think that the local knowledge is key and gonna be key in any city. And the other lesson I think that's really key from Chicago and other cities but you know I know Chicago is this coordination right this coordination that recognizes that even in mid to small sized cities you have to respond between parts of the system whether it's the courts and corrections and police and the schools and the housing and public safety real large there has to be coordination Chicago still struggles with that. It's a big city a lot of stuff a lot of history but I think that that's going to be true because even when we look among outreach participants or this population that we've been talking about these networks according to some of our survey estimates that we're doing a third are housing insecure right so just to look at that it's not like outreach or policing are going to provide housing but somebody should and somebody needs to right or the the unmet health needs again policing can't do that. Street outreach organizations can try to refer them if they don't have in-house services which most don't but there has to be this sort of coordination that's where you start to I think at the long run stuff right where do you help families how do you help whole communities have access to some of these things and I do think that that's beyond any kind of part of the system. So a lot of what we're talking about is really the stuff that we're doing is focusing on like today and maybe this month's sorts of sites of violence but you kind of have to just keep doing that while all this other stuff has to happen in the background. Just like in public health if I go to the doctor, if I go to the ER because I have a heart attack, you know, they don't check if I have a felony conviction before they save my life they save my life right and then maybe my primary Physicians are going to say, Andy, lay off those Twinkies and cigarettes, right? But that's a different, that's a different part of the system than just the ER. Save my life, right? Save the life today. Bring me back. Use all you have. And then somebody else is going to talk to me. And if there's other underlying concerns, hopefully those get met. And in the healthcare system, if I have insurance, maybe I have options. Right. If I have established care, maybe I have options. Right. As you know, I just came back from an unexpected appointment. I don't want to see the bill, but I was able to use my insurance to walk into urgent care, deal with something that I hope will resolve itself. But I had access to those things. I had an immediate response, some quick relief on an ailment, but now I got to follow these course of actions that are beyond that. And we need that in public safety, right? Writ large. And it does involve tapping into other systems. And that's going to be the long game in any city.

SPEAKER_01 44:54

Well, this has been wonderful. You know, the like incredible conversation. You're doing amazing work. And it's just incredible to hear all of this information, hopefully in a way that people can digest and and understand and maybe even bring to their city council or mayor or police department. Um, what what sort of is the future of your work? What's next for you?

SPEAKER_00 45:15

Right now, there's a couple of things. Right now, we're wrapping up a lot of big projects from the last eight to 10 years of work, looking at the spatial impact of some of these things in Chicago in the long term. I've got a new thing coming out, hopefully soon, and the safety gap I had mentioned. And really diving into not just the question of does it work, but what is the work? I should say when we're talking about CVI sorts of things, we have very little basic science on this. People have jumped straight to evaluations and often at a detriment to sort of real base level understanding of the science itself. So we're going to kind of keep pushing in that direction. I also just finished the draft of uh a manuscript, a book-length manuscript that is 12 years overdue. And so we're going through the editing process now. So hopefully that'll be out in uh later next year. That's exciting. Do you have a name? Right now it's called Gangways Violence, Politics, and Power in the Great American City. It's a uh very brief hundred-year story of gangs in Chicago and how they relate to patterns of violence and politics and power.

SPEAKER_01 46:22

Well, that's awesome. Congratulations.

SPEAKER_00 46:26

People don't know. It's a very Chicago term, they should Google it. But it refers to these spaces between houses. There's a little double play on the title, unless the publisher changes it.

SPEAKER_01 46:36

All right. And any five final, final question is any predictions for your Bears this season?

SPEAKER_00 46:43

Well, I'm gonna pull for 500 and stay there. So, you know, the current still the Chicago Bears at the moment. Better talk to some Raiders fans and see how they've dealt with people in Aben Fitties.

SPEAKER_01 46:54

Aren't we fans? They're just generally people from my island. What if there's a support group of some kind? I'm sure. All right. Well, Andy, thank you so much for coming on. Fantastic conversation. Really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 47:06

Yeah, I appreciate it. Take care, buddy.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

Thanks for listening to the Jeffalytics Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and to learn more, head on over to ahdatalytics.com for more information and previous episodes. If you like what you heard, please leave a glowing review, which will help others to discover the show. Until next time, I'm Jeff Asher.