America has a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives violence, and that’s gotten in the way of doing more to prevent shootings.
That’s the premise of the new book “Unforgiving Places” by University of Chicago Crime Lab director Jens Ludwig.
Ludwig, an economist, talked about that in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times that has been edited for length and clarity.
Sun-Times: We are at a location you return to several times in the book. Tell us about it.
Ludwig: “We are at 71st and Dorchester on the South Side. This is the boundary between Greater Grand Crossing on the west side of the street and South Shore on the east side of the street.
“There are twice as many shootings on our side of Dorchester, in Greater Grand Crossing, than there are across the street in South Shore.
“And conventional wisdom basically gives us no understanding of why. The two neighborhoods are economically similar, demographically similar. They’ve got the same gun laws, and they’re served by the same criminal justice system.”
So what is the difference?
“I think it’s really useful first to recognize … that gun violence in America is not what we all think from reading the news and watching entertainment and watching ‘The Wire.’
“We all tend to think of gun violence as being basically gang wars over drug-selling turf — deliberate, premeditated, it’s got an objective, has some sort of economic motivation.
“That’s not what most shootings in America are. Most shootings … are actually garden-variety arguments that escalate and spin out of control and end in tragedy because someone’s got a gun. And it turns out that there are features of these two neighborhoods that lead arguments to be more likely to happen in Greater Grand Crossing and more likely to escalate and end in tragedy.
“In South Shore, there are a bunch of eyes on the street because it’s right along the lake. Historically, there were a lot of commercial [buildings] interspersed with residential. So there are always people walking around. You can see in Greater Grand Crossing, there’s just a lot less commercial [development], there’s a lot less eyes on the street. … There’s more disorder, graffiti, trash lying around. There’s more premature mortality.
“So it’s not that the people are fundamentally different. It’s not that the economic conditions are different. It’s that you’re more under stress in Greater Grand Grossing, so you’re more likely to go on tilt, and there are fewer adults around to step in and deescalate that when it happens.”
Does that give us more hope or less?
“Definitely a cause for hope. … The book is fundamentally optimistic in that it suggests … feasible things that we can do as cities that the data show can make a really, really big difference on gun violence. And they don’t require tons of money, and they don’t require us to have these huge political fights or solve every other social problem before we can solve gun violence.”
What are those relatively easy solutions?
“This sort of new behavioral economics perspective on gun violence suggests a very different sort of social program that people have not been talking about. It’s basically the sort of social program that helps people be less likely to go on tilt, to use the poker term.
“We’ve seen in study after study [about these programs]. They’re not very expensive. They don’t take tons of time. You can deliver them inside schools, inside detention facilities at very low cost. [They] can have really big impacts in reducing people’s risk of going on tilt and getting involved in violence.
“And I think the other thing that we can do is eyes on the street. That is a very solvable problem, right?”
What could you do?
“Make even better use of data. There is some predictable structure for when and where shootings are most likely to happen. And you can use data to make sure that we’ve got police officers in the right places in the right times, to be eyes on the street.
“And we can think of doing things that you wouldn’t even think of as gun violence — zoning commercial so that you have more foot traffic in a neighborhood. We can see in studies that can reduce violence rates by 20% or 30% in the area around where you’ve zoned a store.
“Cleaning up vacant lots and turning them into pocket parks — seems on its face like a huge distraction from the gun violence problem, but we have really good evidence out of Philadelphia that shows that can reduce the number of shootings around that area by like 20% or 30% by bringing more people out into public.
“So this is very, very feasible, practical stuff that you can do that accumulates to really, really big potential changes in what had seemed like a totally intractable social problem.”