A packed house listens to ways to curb community gun violence.

DURHAM – The city of Durham hosted the first of a series of crime reduction strategy sessions last week.

Bringing forward longtime violence reduction researcher, Thomas Abt of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland, Durham kicked off a six-month process of crafting a plan to save lives in the Bull City.

Mayor Leo Williams emphasized the community should work together to form the strategy. “The challenge of violence in our community is very real. This is not something that any government or any agency can do alone,” he said. “I cannot take another child dying. I cannot take another trigger being pulled.”

Abt began his career as a teacher in Washington, D.C. After one of his favorite students was murdered, he became a prosecutor in New York City. Abt served as chief of staff to Office of Justice Programs under the Obama administration.

The national trend Abt presented to a standing-room only audience of engaged community members is that gun violence is the leading cause of youth deaths in the United States (ages 1 to 20 years old). Suicide by gun tops the category, but VRC focuses on “community gun violence,” which accounts for approximately 70% of gun homicides.

“It’s happening outside amongst unrelated individuals,” Abt said (quoting from the CDC), “mostly between two men who don’t have a lot of opportunities or hope.” This public violence can have significant impacts on multiple levels – not just the psychological impact on community members but the quantified costs, Abt explained.

Thirty-three homicides have occurred in Durham this year. Abt said that’s about $10 to $19 million per death lost in “social costs,” including medical care, criminal justice systems and other costs. Accounting for Durham, that’s an estimated $330 to $627 million lost this year for the city. “We don’t feel all this cost evenly,” he said.

The most disadvantaged are youth. The lasting trauma has real costs that make it harder to focus in school and harder to find gainful employment later on in life.  But Abt was also clear. This is simply the lasting impacts of racism’s legacy, including neighborhood disinvestment, which has led to concentrated poverty.

“We didn’t get here by accident,” he said. “It would happen to any community” that has experienced the systematic disadvantages that communities of color have. Crime and violence are also operating in a cyclical nature, regenerating that concentrated poverty by depressing property values.

Abt also presented that “crime thrives on injustice.” When folks don’t trust the criminal legal system, they don’t use it, even if it is a nonviolent resolution of disputes. “When someone beats up your cousin, you don’t call the police, you call your boys,” he said. “And then a beating becomes a stabbing, and a stabbing becomes a shooting.”

To address the violence, Abt said there needs to be a balanced approach. He’s worked in conservative cities and progressive cities and hasn’t seen one strategy proven more fruitful over the other. 

“I don’t know a city that has arrested their way out of violence or just programmed their way out of it,” he said. “I don’t believe it’s either blue live matter or Black lives matter; that is a false choice. You need teamwork. You need cops and communities working together.”

Abt’s research led to the crafting of a scientific approach, which highlighted three core principles. First, the approach must be focused in the highly-concentrated communities where violence is most prevalent. Second, there must be a balance between “hard” and “soft” approaches to the violence, and third, there must be “fairness” in every aspect of the approach. “This is not up for debate,” Abt said. “This is based on thousands of interviews from people with lived experiences.”

He said cities must apply these principles to five steps. First, use people-based approaches to reducing crime. Identify those who are most likely to be involved in gun violence and engage them. Second, stabilize them by providing them with safety and security. Third, treat their unaddressed trauma. Fourth, offer them educational and employment opportunities that are realistic. Lastly, punish those who persist in violence with strict sanctions.

Giving a quick look at recent data, Abt said Durham’s violent crime has not kept on par with national trends, which dropped off after 2021. Instead, violent crime has increased in the Bull City.

Community members expressed concern about Durham’s contracts with Peregrine Technologies to create a Real Time Crime Center, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze various data points from the Durham Police Department in what residents argue to be “predictive policing.”

Abt said he doesn’t believe AI in surveillance to be a “vehicle for racial oppression,” or “some scary boogeyman,” but they are “often not the all-in-one solution that for-profit companies say they are.”

While there weren’t many youth in the audience, those directly affected spoke out during the question-and-answer session. “We’re not in the violence elimination business; it’s a violent world,” Abt said. “But we are in a reduction business, so that when it happens, it’s as shocking as it would be if it happened in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Durham.”

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