Officials Announce Funding for the Brownsville Anti-Violence Project

08/28/12 • -1 min

New Thinking, from the Center for Justice Innovation

A multi-faceted partnership to lower violence in one of Brooklyn’s most beleaguered neighborhoods gets a major
boost with the announcement of $599,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice. Among those speaking at a
press conference to announce the grant are Denise E. O’Donnell, director of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance,
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta E.
Lynch, and Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes. September 2012

ROB
WOLF: While crime is down across New York City, residents of some neighborhoods still fear gunfire and gangs. One
of those neighborhoods is Brownsville, Brooklyn, site of several new programs launched by the Center for Court Innovation
to address violence and strengthen community responses. I’m Rob Wolf, director of Communications at the Center
for Court Innovation and in this New Thinking podcast, the focus is on the Brownsville Anti-Violence Project, which
was the subject of a press conference September 26, 2012, in which the director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance
of the U.S. Department of Justice, announced that the project would receive nearly $600,000 in funding out of $11
million in grants distributed to 15 neighborhoods across the U.S. With a siren in the background reminding the audience
what was at stake, the Bureau of Justice Assistance Director, Denise O’Donnell, said that the grant was not
about the federal government dictating priorities but about empowering communities.

DENISE O’DONNELL:
This program is not about the federal government changing neighborhoods. It’s about community members and stakeholders
working together to identify priorities and solutions to persistent crime problems.

ROB WOLF:
O’Donnell was joined at the podium in the Heritage Room of the Stone Avenue Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library
by a number of officials, including New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who said his department was always
willing to test new ideas.

RAY KELLY: You know, when it comes to driving crime down or saving
lives, I can assure you that the New York City Police Department is open to new ideas. Anything that has the potential
to save lives and make this community safer, we’re for it, and we see in the Brownsville Anti-Violence Program
some very strong potential.

ROB WOLF: District Attorney Charles J. Hynes described call-ins, a
key feature of the Brownsville Anti-Violence Program, in which recent parolees are offered services and encouragement
while, at the same time, being reminded of the serious consequences they face if they get into trouble again.

CHARLES HYNES: The past two months we have partnered with the Center for Court Innovation, United States
Attorney Lynch, Commissioner Kelly, and the NYPD in implementing an evidence-based gun violence reduction strategy
with Project Safe Neighborhoods call-in forums. These call-in forums send a clear message to those with violent pasts
who are reentering the Brownsville community after incarceration, to desist from picking up guns, that gang life
is a dead end, and that we stand ready to help anyone who wants to be on the productive trail.

ROB
WOLF: The real life importance of the grant was underscored by Mark Tannis, a community leader.

MARK
TANNIS: With this grant, in conjunction with VJA, we can have a coordinated effort to get guns off the street. Stop
the gun violence. By far, the large majority of our community want safe streets and a sense of peace, where they
all call home. Unfortunately, too many times that tranquility is shattered by senseless gun violence.

ROB
WOLF: The Brownsville Anti-Violence Program works closely with the community, according to James Brodick, director
of the Brownsville Community Justice Center.

JAMES BRODICK: We started to do a community wide
survey and focus groups. And time after time after time we hear common themes. Theme number one is a lack of opportunities
for young people. And we understand that it’s very clear that we need to get our young people better education, job
readiness, and actual jobs. But what we also hear is that there are real issues with gangs and guns, and unfortunately
as much as people say one of the ways of solving this problem is opening up more after school centers, or opening
up you know, opening up a community center, if young people don’t feel comfortable to cross Van Dyke to the
Brownsville Houses, we can’t get past that. And again, you know, one of the things that the Center for Court
Innovation is here to do today, is what we bring to the table is an expertise in research and expertise in trying
to convene people to solve problems, but we’re not the ones who are going to solve the problem by ourselves.<...

ROB
WOLF: The real life importance of the grant was underscored by Mark Tannis, a community leader.

ROB
WOLF: The Brownsville Anti-Violence Program works closely with the community, according to James Brodick, director
of the Brownsville Community Justice Center.

Previous Episode

Improving Youth Programming: The Role of Research

Angela Irvine, director of research in the Criminal Justice Division of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency,
sat down for this podcast interview after participating in a research roundtable on youth courts that was sponsored
by the Center for Court Innovation and the Lowenstein Family Foundation on July 18, 2012. Irvine also discusses
research into lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender justice-involved youth.

ROBERT V.
WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. In this New Thinking
podcast, I’m with Angela Irvine, director of research of the criminal justice division of the National Council
of Crime and Delinquency. And I have the good fortune to have a few minutes with her just as she’s finished
participating in a research roundtable on youth courts that the Center for Court Innovation hosted here today in
Manhattan, at the law firm of Skadden Arps. So thanks, Angela, for taking the time to talk with me.

ANGELA
IRVINE: Thank you for having me.

WOLF: Are there particular challenges that researchers
face when looking at a justice program geared for youth?

IRVINE: I’m not sure if
there are different challenges. I think that people, in a lot of ways, have given up on adult criminals. In a lot
of ways I find research on adults challenging because it’s hard to engage a public, or to find a source of sympathy
for adult criminals. I think that what’s actually exciting about doing research in the juvenile justice arena
is that we have the possibility of engaging sympathy for different populations of youth who are engaged in the system.
I think if you look at girls in the juvenile justice system, researchers have done a really good job of sort of highlighting
the links between past traumatic experiences and how that drives young people into the juvenile justice system, and
how therefore we, as a society, need to take responsibility for creating firewalls so that girls who have experienced
trauma don’t end up in the juvenile justice system. And what I’m really interested in, moving forward, is thinking
about ways to engage the public in becoming more sympathetic to boys of color who are in the juvenile justice system
who’ve also experienced trauma.

WOLF: One thing I hear you saying is that there’s
a greater, perhaps, societal interest in research of justice programs that focus on youth, and that is because it’s
easier to have empathy for youth?

IRVINE: I think so, yes, compared to adults.

WOLF: And is it also because there’s this general sense that there’s a greater possibility
of rehabilitation?

IRVINE: I think that there is so much fear of boys of color, in particular—in
public schools, in public spaces, and so I’m not sure how much the general public thinks about wanting to rehabilitate
that population. In theory I think that the juvenile court system was developed to rehabilitate young people in a
different way than the adult criminal justice system has been, but I think that we’re caught in a little bit of a
quagmire right now. If you look from the ’80s on, I think that that’s when super-predators in urban Chicago,
urban New York, started to take over media. You know –

WOLF: Like “wilding,” that kind
of thing?

IRVINE: Yeah, exactly. And I think that it’s really important for us
to sort of stop the fear of those young people, and to try to move back in time, to a time when we really do think
of the juvenile justice system as different than the adult criminal justice system, and a system that does seriously
invest in the rehabilitation of those young people, because they’re all our kids.

WOLF:
And do you think researchers have a role to play in helping to change that orientation?

IRVINE:
Researcher always have a role in identifying which program should be invested in. So if researchers identify programs
that effectively reduce recidivism or improve graduation rates, I think that the government, the federal government,
state governments always justify their investment in programs based on research. I think that it’s really important
to think about who the researchers should be doing this work. I think it’s really important that we try to recruit
researchers of color who come from the neighborhoods where we are arresting most of the people, so that we can have
a richer discussion about what the findings are, but also have a richer discussion about what the possible solutions
are because in my experience, researchers who are more familiar with low-income communities of color come up with
more realistic solutions in terms of effectively changing behavior, essentially.

WOLF:
You’ve done a lot of research with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth, and they face a number of
problems that make...

Next Episode

Beyond Fighting Crime, Police in a Minnesota Town Seek to Foster a Sense of Community

Under Chief Michael A. Davis, the police officers of Brooklyn Park, a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul, pursue
community building.

ROB WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, Director
of Communication at the Center for Court Innovation. This New Thinking podcast is focused on policing and the ideas
of community building and police legitimacy. On the phone with me today is Michael Davis, the chief of police of
Brooklyn Park, which, with about 80,000 people is the second largest suburb of Minneapolis – Saint Paul. Chief Davis
was recognized earlier this year by the Police Executive Research Forum as an up and coming innovator. Thanks for
taking the time to talk with me, Chief Davis.

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Thank you.

ROB
WOLF: Let’s start with community building. You’ve said, at a National Institute of Justice conference in
2011, community building is the next generation of community policing. And I think many listeners might be somewhat
familiar with the idea of community policing, but what is community building?

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS:
Well in the context that I speak of it, community building is more reliant on the assets of the community more so
than trying to fix the problems. Now for those who know community policing, they know that at the core of it is this
problem-oriented policing model by which if your rectify low-level problems, in theory, that you prevent other levels
of crime and disorder. Well the problem with that is that there’s limitations to problem-fixing. There really
is no limitations to building upon assets. And so if you want to change this place, want to make this place better
than what it is currently, it really is about leveraging all the assets that exist within a community, not simply
fixing the problems. And so this gets away from the transactional model, and more towards a model that is built on
the understanding of three things. One is, is that we’re a community that has abundant assets. The second thing
is that we know to make those—activate those assets, we must have strong relational ties. And thirdly, these relational
ties aren’t serendipitous. We have to go out and intentionally connect with one another, which is why, I think,
it’s a shift in focus. Not necessarily a new iteration of community policing, but more a new way of looking
at our role in community.

ROB WOLF: So you’re saying that instead, perhaps, of saying, Oh,
there’s a problem in this neighborhood around drug sales—are you saying think larger than that? Let’s look
at the whole community and how can we strengthen connections within the community so that anything, any challenges
that may arise, it would be in a better position to deal with?

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Absolutely.
You look at what a community is meant to accomplish. A competent community is one that supports the family in accomplishing
its mission. So the larger structure supports the smaller structure, the family, in accomplishing its mission. When
that breaks down and we rely exclusively on services, like the police, to do what the community is supposed to do,
then the impact of what the police can do alone is obviously severely limited. And so we have to re-engage the community
and get them to see what their role actually is, which is to take ownership, to be accountable to one another. In
that process we are creating a competent community. I mean it’s not an abdication of our role to pluck out the
deviants of our society, but this is thinking bigger than that.

ROB WOLF: The philosophy of community
policing—hasn’t it in some ways tried to promote that?

CHIEF MICHAEL DAVIS: Yeah, well I
mean obviously community policing purists will say that, you know, this is what the essence of community policing
is. I disagree, and I disagree because it’s not what’s happening. This is not what’s happening in
our communities. You’re talking about communities that have been trying different iterations of community policing
for 30 years, yet the conditions of their communities remain unchanged. People point to this dip in crime, so to
speak, that we’ve been experiencing throughout the country. In some cities it’s reversing itself and no
one can explain it. And so my focus really is on really understanding what makes a community really successful. And
it’s not the most robust police department. What we do know is that the conditions in the most challenged neighborhoods
that need to be reversed. There’s a condition of isolation, there’s a condition of fear, there’s a
condition of dependency. We know that when we study any successful community. People reminisce all the time about
the small town. Well in small town America, typically there’s a dearth of what we call municipal services that
can do things the community can’t, and so they’re forced to rely on one anot...