One of the accomplishments Mayor Street often talks about was the Safe Streets program. Safe Streets put policeman at corners where drug dealing was known to take place. It was an immediately effective program in that it forced a lot of drug dealing off the streets, and, by making them safer, brought people back on to the streets, which made them even more safe.
I wonder, however, if Safe Streets did not backfire and lead to the rise in gun violence over the last five years.
Early critics of the program pointed out that simply moving drug dealers from one corner to another and from the street to drug houses, did not really reduce the drug trade or remove people dangerous people, and their guns, from the street. It just occurred to me, however, that Safe Streets might have ultimately had a negative effect and lead to an increase in gun violence and murder.
We know that gun violence is often connected to the drug trade and, in particular, to battles between groups of drug dealers over who sells drugs in a particular area. By forcing drug dealers to move from their usual places of operation, did Safe Streets disrupt the informal arrangements that existed between drug dealers over turf? And, as a result, did conflicts arise between groups of drug dealers who then resorted to violence to establish new turf?
I am not sure this is true and I will investigate further. But I have run it by some people in a position to evaluate this theory and all have found in plausible. While we are trying to figure out why murder is spiking and what to do about it, we might want to consider this possibility.
Our horrendous murder rate is obviously a critical issue in Philadelphia today. I have not written about it here in large part because I thought I needed to learn much more about the issue, and especially about how New York, Boston and other cities have managed to reduce their murder rates while we have not. There is a large body of useful academic research on crime, which I knew very well twenty years ago when I taught courses in criminal justice. Over the last few months I have been brushing up on the literature and talking to people I know, including police officers, who know much more about crime in Philadelphia than I do. This is the first of a number of posts I am going to making about crime over the next few weeks that report on what I have learned.