Solving Gun Violence: Andrew Papachristos

Karly Scholz 0:00

Welcome to solving gun violence, a weekly student led podcast from the University of Virginia's gun violence solution project that tackles one of America's most urgent issues preventing gun violence. Each episode will feature experts sharing actionable solutions to improve community safety while upholding individual rights. My name is Carly Schultz. I'm a fourth year at the University of Virginia and a student host of the solving gun violence podcast. This episode features a conversation with Andrew Papachristos, a leading expert on gun violence, social networks and urban crime. Andrew is a professor of sociology and Faculty Fellow at Northwestern Institute for Policy Research, as well as the faculty director of corners, the Center for Neighborhood engaged research and science. His research works to understand how violence spreads and how targeted interventions can disrupt cycles of harm. With deep experience working alongside communities, policy makers and law enforcement, Andrew brings a unique perspective on how data driven strategies and grassroots efforts can work together to reduce gun violence. We discussed the role of social networks in shaping violence the evolution of street gangs and political power and what cities can do to build safer communities. If you're interested in practical, evidence based solutions and the future of gun violence prevention, you're in the right place. Let's dive in. Thank you for joining us.

Andrew Papachristos 1:37

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Karly Scholz 1:39

Great. Please start by telling us a little bit about yourself.

Andrew Papachristos 1:43

That's a pretty broad question. Well, as you mentioned, I'm a faculty member at Northwestern University. Even more important than that, I was born and raised in Chicago, and so I have a bit deep love for that city. I spent most of my life in Chicago, in Chicagoland. Spent a decade sort of on the east coast as a faculty member at different universities there, including the University of Massachusetts and Yale. A lot of what I try to do is combine sort of, you know, deep sociological thinking, looking for patterns among social networks and among relationships and neighborhoods, to understand how they affect what people feel, think and do, and most of my time is spent looking at how people use networks to either create public safety or how networks can kind of lead to violence.

Karly Scholz 2:30

That's great. So you just mentioned your research applies to network science and understanding and intervening in gun violence. In what ways do social networks shape who is at risk of being involved in violence either as a perpetrator as a victim?

Andrew Papachristos 2:43

Yeah, I'm going to talk mostly about victims, because that's what we have the best data on. And often the line between a suspect and a victim is very thin. But one of the things we know about networks and gun violence in America is that, you know, gun violence concentrates in really small networks, so even in communities and neighborhoods that have high levels of gun violence, it's typically a small social network, couple 100 people, a couple 1000 people, depending on the size of the city, that are really where the victimizations happen. And so we've looked at this in Boston, in Newark, in Chicago, in Oakland and Cincinnati, in New Orleans, and city after city after city, what we see is this same pattern, right, that the victims are always tragic, but decidedly non random. And so what social networks help you do are understand how violence can move through a population. And it also helps to understand, you know, when we look at these big structural factors in communities, whether it's lack of access, disinvestment, disenfranchisement, segregation, that create, you know, aggregate level of crime and violence even within those spaces. It means the vast majority of people there, you know, are not at the same levels of risk. The risk is higher than lots of other people, but it's really concentrated in these small networks. And the way I like to think about it, especially post COVID, is like contact tracing. And so really the science is trying to understand, well, where is victimization happening, who's at risk around them, and how does it kind of move? And once you know that, you can start to think about how you might leverage that for interventions.

Karly Scholz 4:13

I think the idea that gun violence is concentrated in small networks is really interesting and a unique part of your work. How does that shift the way we should design prevention programs compared to traditional hot spot policing or broad based interventions?

Andrew Papachristos 4:28

Well, the hot spot policing and these broad based interventions are kind of the two ends of a spectrum. So I think pitting the two against each other is always a really bad idea, because you need both. And I'll give you an example about that in just a second. But I think when you think about networks, what you're trying to do is stop an outbreak of something. You're trying to reduce rates immediately, because something's happening so you can, I often talk about risk as a dimmer switch, rather than an on and off switch. What you're trying to do is lower it. You're trying to keep people alive. If you're trying to keep people alive longer, so then you can do the big stuff, right? So if you can talk someone off a ledge, get them to put down a gun, then you can do all the other things that are involved, right, whether it's about housing or substance abuse or education or employment, like, those are long term, right? That's not like, oh, show up, put down a gun, go get a job. Like, there's so many things that have to happen in between there. And so the network work really kind of focuses on the here and now. How do we stop the shootings today? What it doesn't answer the question is, how those networks got to be there in the first place, which is very much deep and structural, but you mentioned, you know, hot spot policing, when you think about that as a tactic, which which we know, like if you focus and concentrate on small areas, sometimes a couple of blocks or whatever, actually, you can have a better effect in these broad, sweeping policies. So that idea of focusing on the few or focusing on particular behaviors can have a real impact. And by the way, it's not just within gun violence in general. When you think about other types of behavior you're trying to change whether they're stopping smoking, you know, practicing safe sex, like you're actually focusing on a behavior, right, rather than a whole list, laundry list of things you should be doing, stay in school, don't do drugs, be nice to your brother, go to church, whatever, like here it's like, no, we're not going to use a gun. Let's start with that. We're not going to resolve a dispute. We're going to do something else. And then from there, you can build in all these other things. So I don't think it's like this is gonna solve everything, right? The title of the podcast, but I think it helps us lower things so that you can do these bigger work that needs to happen.

Karly Scholz 6:30

Yeah, absolutely, your work is focused deeply on Chicago. Of course, you are from there. You've lived there for a very long time, but you've worked across the country and in many different places, and Chicago is a city with a long history of structural inequality, segregation and gang dynamics. What are some of the most important lessons that Chicago's experience can offer other cities facing gun violence?

Andrew Papachristos 6:53

So in some ways, I mean, again, Chicago is the best city in the world. I just want that on the podcast as many times as possible. But what makes Chicago unique is, in many ways, it's a bunch of small cities collected together, right? So some of the communities in Chicago are 80,000 people, 90,000 people, 40,000 people. So the size is one of the things that's unique about it, as well as how they all relate together. But one of the things that's not unique is that you know these kind of neighborhood heroes. You can find them in any city or town, really, across the country I've been to, I've never gone to a place and not found somebody like a character I know in Chicago, right? They different, different accent, they have different sports allegiances, whatever. But like, really, they care so much about the town, the school, the city, that they know, right? And so even when we talk about these networks, when I show them in these academic papers, they look like a bunch of dots, but as soon as you put a name to it, it's those neighborhood heroes that know, the people that can say, Oh, this is Andy, and, you know, Carly and Bobby, and here's how they're related, and they went to school together, and here's what's going on, and here's what the fight's about. That's you have that in every city I've been in. And what I love about going to a non Chicago City is I don't know the names of the people they're talking about, and then you start hearing the same patterns and stories. And there is something fundamentally human about that. And so I think I see that in Chicago because I'm there. I've been there a long time, but I think that's the sort of amazingly human thing about the space as well, right? There's this humanistic element which gets lost in many of the much of the reporting on gun violence, let alone the science on it as well.

Karly Scholz 8:31

Yeah, the human aspect, I think, is really important and often overlooked in gun violence, particularly when I think too often the success and failure of a gun violence prevention or gun violence intervention is judged purely on crime statistics or numbers. From your perspective, what are some of the other most important but overlooked measures of success when evaluating effective gun violence prevention efforts?

Andrew Papachristos 8:55

Yeah, that's a really tough question in part, and here I have to divide sort of my brain as, like, scientist versus, you know, regular civilian. I don't know what the opposite of a scientist is. Gun violence is an especially tricky thing to study statistically, in part because even though the levels of gun violence are high in America and in cities like Chicago and others, statistically, they're still rare events, and so we often find ourselves trying to conduct evaluations using models that aren't quite right for this particular problem. So, you know, thinking about things like randomized control trials, which some people are trying. Well, one, you can't randomize gun violence. Can you randomize treatment? You sort of can, but the victimization patterns are not so it's not like a one to one fit with, say, medical models at the same time. To go back to sort of other comment about the humanistic nature, it's not okay to just tell stories as well, right? And by the way, as a Greek and somebody who talks a lot, I love stories. I tell my world and light. We tell our lives by story. Stories, but talking just about lived experience alone is also not science, and so you can have qualitative research or survey work that collects patterns of stories, and that's also really important, you know, but to answer your question, we can't ignore whether violence is going up or down period. We have to continue to do that. But actually what we need are metrics and research questions that are tied to what the programs are actually doing. So one thing that we've been looking at, and we were encouraging, is, are people that are part of these different community programs? Are they carrying guns less? Are they actually putting the physical gun down? Because one of the things that happens, and we talk about it in our work, is like these young men and women will go through this program. They'll do the education component, the health component, the mental health component, the job training component, like they're succeeding on every metric, and then they get shot, and they get shot, and we've done these interviews, this deep work, they also describe as, like, look, we're playing defense, but the rest of the neighborhood's still playing offense, right? So if you have a situation where someone is doing everything, they're going to work, they're going to school, and they still get shot. That's not a failure. Actually. It's a failure because we didn't reach enough people, but it's not a failure for the person who was there doing the work. And I think that's the problem with metrics. So we need to see, are they putting down the gun? Are they getting arrested last are they going to school? Are they completing the thing? Like those need to be framed as wins, in addition to the vanguard of crime rates, which are always going to go up or down.

Karly Scholz 11:25

Yeah, and how do you ensure that those smaller wins, or less shiny wins, I guess, ensure that your research informs both policy and intervention programs in a way that prioritizes those broader indicators of community well being?

Andrew Papachristos 11:40

Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, a lot of that burden needs to be put on places like reporting in the media. There's plenty for US researchers to do, which is, we need a louder voice in this space. We need to be educating policy makers on this space, and we need to be more honest about sort of some of the things we're talking about. So even as I mentioned these randomized control trials, which are great tools and we should do them, we also need to remind policymakers that some of our biggest public safety innovations were never conducted with this clinical model. Air travel, removing lead from pipes, you know, sanitary water systems, smoking cessation, like all those were not built off of these sort of clinical views of science. And so scientists need to do that too. And we need reporters and journalists to also understand that these aren't like soft, that these are real, that there's a science behind these things as well, and really kind of make sure that that gets as much attention. And I think you're seeing places like The Trace, the Marshall Project, The Guardian has a very good gun reporting sort of team, or they did like I think you're seeing improved reporting in this space, but we need to push it so that policy makers have those too, and that's usually depends on who's in office.

Karly Scholz 12:51

Of course, often the media covers a large gun violence event. Something happens, and the media covers it, and that cycle eventually goes down and returns when another gun violence event happens, how do you see the media's role in keeping the conversation about gun violence active and in people's minds, even or not after an event?

Andrew Papachristos 13:11

You know, that's a good question. I think one is the media does this well around suicide, and they've also done this well recently around shootings in New York, where they stopped naming somebody who was getting a lot of attention. So I think there are ways that the media can do it. The other way is they can also realize their own bias in reporting. And so we have a study with our team in coroners that's looking at, you know, the race and place of victims and how they get mentioned, and when is a case or reporting becoming more clinical versus more legal. When do you use word like gang member, right versus victim? You know, a lot of that influences the way people operate. And so there are some things that I think reporters and journalists can do. The other thing is, and it's really hard to say this, the body count tickers on newspapers and websites is important, but it gets misconstrued a lot, right? And so I'm all for having more data in the public, but the number of times I get a call from a reporter that says Like Andy today is the third violent most Tuesday in a leap year since Al Capone's daughter's cotillion. What do you think? Right? What do I say to that? I was like, it's, is it true? Yeah, but what do I think of it? Like, nothing. I think nothing of it. But you clearly want me to say something about how horrible you threw Al Capone out there and violence. And now I have to comment on Al Capone and violence. Like, that's just dumb. Like, stop doing that, just like we often look at year to date statistics, which are really important to know, like, how we're doing, but it's not like gang disputes stopped on December 31 and rebooted on January 1. Like, that's not actually how time works, but we do need a metric that says, Hey, are we doing better or later than last year? So I think there are other ways we can do better reporting. One example. Bull that I'll give, which I've been pushing, and the city of Chicago has integrated this into their violence reduction dashboards, what I call the safety gap. So it's no longer just whether or not neighborhood A's level was high and neighborhood B's was low. It was like, well, what's the gap between the two? It's an it's an index of inequality, essentially, right? Because the neighborhoods that have had high levels of gun violence, they've had them for 70 years. It's not like all of a sudden, like, oh my god, it's high. It's like, no, it's been high. But is that neighborhood getting better while the other one is staying as safe as it has been? And so looking at the inequality is an important way to look at it, rather than just, you know, body counts or bullet holes.

Karly Scholz 15:35

As you mentioned, specific neighborhoods, I think a lot of the programs that you study depend on building trust between communities, outreach workers, institutions like law enforcement. What does your research say about what it takes to actually build trust in those communities that have been over policed and underserved for generations?

Andrew Papachristos 15:54

Well, when we talk about trust in the state, especially with police, actually my own work, Monica Bell's work talks about legal cynicism or legal estrangement in general. When people feel estranged from the police or the state or they feel cynical, that is where you tend to have higher levels of gun violence. And in part, and I was talking with somebody just earlier about this, it's in a very American idea that you solve your own problems yourself and with a gun, right? If the state's not going to do it, I'm going to do it. And by the way, that applies to rural and urban and white and black and Latino. It's a very common thread line. But communities that have experienced police levels of police violence, for example, are the same neighborhoods that have experienced segregation, have experienced disenfranchisement, they tend to have higher levels of cynicism. And then even when these other factors, like poverty are less, they still remain high. And so it's really hard to change. That is the short answer. It's a long turn when we think about outreach workers that are working with young people that are involved in violence. These are individuals that don't trust anybody. It's not just they don't trust the police, they don't trust hospitals. They got kicked out of school, so they don't trust schools. They don't trust people that are they'd be like, Yeah, we want to help you, because everybody's been trying to help them for years. And so it's a slow grind. It's shoe leather. A bunch of the outreach workers talk about, say, the sweat work makes the network, which is, like, I didn't make that up, but it's pretty good. But basically, like, it's time and time and time and Andy, let's go. We're gonna go here. Where are you at? Andy, Andy, blah, blah, blah. So it's a lot of that, text messages, phone calls. It's a lot of that. And it's all out of going with individuals to medical appointments, to school appointments to, like, really trying to show almost a situational trust, like, we know you got burned by the school before, but like, your kid needs to get into school. So let me, let me show you this process. So, or you, you're sick, you need to go the hospital. We know you don't like hospitals, but let's go do this. So there's, it's very, very, very slow, but it's vital to getting the sort of services that you need to kind of catch up as it were.

Karly Scholz 18:07

You're working on a project that explores the evolution of street gangs and politics in Chicago from the 1950s to the early 2000s How has the relationship between those organizations and political structures changed? What have you found, and what impact has it had on violence and community safety today?

Andrew Papachristos 18:24

What a good question. Chicago is a city, and in many ways, it's thought of like a great American city. It's a kind of a rough and tumble. Built it there was a big fire. We rebuilt it again. So gangs in Chicago have played a really key role in shaping the city from even before the 1950s but what you saw were early white ethnic gangs used these groups, these crews, as a way up and out of poverty, and actually not just up and out of poverty, but into city government, into the police department, and to organize crime. And that's a pattern that other groups have tried to follow, black gangs, Latino gangs, other immigrant gangs. And so by the 1950s or 1960s as other groups were trying to do this, non white groups are trying to do this, they got crushed. But the groups themselves these networks, because that's what gangs are. They're networks, or they're kind of families neighborhoods. What that did was it buried them in the city, like, like electric lines under the ground, right? So they're still there, and people still use them. They're also the same levels that violence flows through, right? So they're kind of this invisible structure under the city that help explain some of the patterns that we continue to see. However, a lot of these violence interruption programs that we're talking about are trying to use those same systems to now combat violence. And so, you know, think about lead pipes in cities, horrible by the way. And Chicago has more than any other city in the country. I think it has 400,000 lead pipes in other cities. To tear up those lead pipes, you'd have to tear up almost the entire city. How can you think about ways that you can intervene in the short term, while you take those long term projects? And I think that's kind of what this project is about, understanding how the city got built this way, and maybe what we can do to, you know, counteract it as it were.

Karly Scholz 20:15

Yeah, your point about the opposition in this or the challenge you're up against, is these structures, these social structures that have been in place for many decades. How do you find that we can better involve impacted communities in creating and implementing solutions?

Andrew Papachristos 20:30

Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing that we keep coming back to when we think about things like community violence intervention, or even when we think about public safety in general, most public safety is not handled by the police. Most fights never turn into a death or an injury. Most of them get resolved with neighbors and friends and family members just it's actually a basic human element in communities that have been left behind or locked up or locked out. You know, they often develop informal ways of doing things, whether you're sitting in a church basement coming up with a program in program, informal child care, informal labor, whatever you're trying to solve problems. One of the things we've seen over the last five years the community violence intervention work, and that's, again, it's an old idea that has a new name, is formalizing that more giving it more voice, giving it more space. And I think that that is a that is a great thing, and what you find when you do that is most times, it's not at odds with other elements. It's not at odds with like what teachers would say or or other officials would say, probation officers, whatever. They might have different vantage points, but ultimately, they're working with the same population. They know the families, they know, the kids they know. And so there's a convergence, and then you just have to get people to agree on, like, what to do. That's the hard part. I also think when you're talking with folks that have been impacted, or, you know, have lived experience with gun violence or survivors or victims or victims families, there's also a need to just have a voice, right? And it might not necessarily be the right person to do something at that moment, but to have a voice in a space. And so when you look at things, I know you have every town that's kind of been here as well, like that started from that, and then it has evolved into something very different, right? It was a space for families to to kind of process, to figure things out, and then the sort of the way that that moved. And I think that's true in most communities, like you're gonna have people that are hurting, and then you have people that want to help when you need to make sure in any situation is that the help is actually helping, and if it's not, you have to figure out some other kind of, you know, way it can align with what's happening in the community.

Karly Scholz 22:37

I think, as you mentioned, a lot of the people who do want to help are the ones listening to this podcast and really interested to hear the different and important work that you're doing across a lot of different aspects of gun violence in Chicago. So what is the solution to gun violence in the United States look like to you?

Andrew Papachristos 22:57

I don't think there's one solution, and it's not meant as a cop out. It's a complex issue, right? And I think any complex issue, social issue, health issue, economic issue, is never going to have one solution. You know, the sheer prevalence of guns in this country makes it more difficult than than others. For not just violence, assaultive violence, Guy study, but for suicides, which, which I didn't talk about, let alone injuries, which are also pervasive, you know. So I think there are sort of near term, midterm, long term, sort of interventions. And in this way, I think the typical public health model is very nice. What are primary causes, secondary causes, responses? And so I do think we need to have a triage or response system that is more broad than it is right. So, you know, law enforcement is part of the issue of looking for and solving cases, but this broader civilian architecture right around community violence intervention, hospital responses, trauma responses, school responses, they actually need to be coordinated. So I think one thing we could do about short term responses, how do we respond to a shooting the victims, how do we stop the next shooting, is figuring out the way we think of this response as a system, and not just one agency or another agency, and how to coordinate. Because, you know, the tension between, say, community violence intervention and policing is like, well, whose job? It's actually all their jobs, right? If a police officer can't make an arrest for homicide, it makes the work of the community violence interventionist harder, and if the community violence interventionist isn't working for peace among, say, warring crews, it makes the law enforcement job harder, and the community suffers. I'm just using those, but then you add in schools and you add in hospital responses. It's the same, same principle. So in the short term, I think the biggest thing we can do as a solution to gun violence is figure out the way systems can coordinate. Mid and long term, I think, and I'll give one example, we have to think about what I'll call. Generation interventions. So in many cities right now, the average age of a gunshot victim is late 20s, not teenage years, which is often Chicago, it's almost 28 so that means, like intervening with early childhood in schools, it's not gonna help the 28 year old. But you know what that 28 year old has kids? And so if you're thinking about what a 28 year old might need, and what if they have kids, for example, they might need, they have a parent who might have been incarcerated or shot like there are certain interventions at that level, which I think we haven't even begun to think about. And then, of course, there's all the big stuff. Like, how do you make sure you know, solving gun violence is not just counting shootings? What is, what does thriving look like? What does safety look like? And you know, what does a community that is safe look like? It means that people aren't afraid. And by the way, you know, people are afraid of gun violence, whether it's going up or down. And I think that's very telling. So how do you make people feel safer, right? Because if you feel safer, guess what, you're not going to carry a gun, right? And if you feel safer, you might be more inclined to give somebody a pass when they are mean to you in the parking lot right or on the expressway. And so I think part of what we need to think about is, how do we make schools and communities and cities feel safer? And I think there's lots of small things improving lighting parks. You know what I mean? Like, we have a lot of evidence of stuff that works. People will feel safer if an area has well is well lit, and they can use the resources, and they're not worried about their kid walking to school, and that plays, that plays a lot into all the other short term stuff, right? Why did you have that gun that day? Because I felt unsafe. I didn't think I could make it. I was telling you, one of the people in the programs was shot. You know, on their way to work, the program worked. They had a job, right? And yet they weren't carrying a gun because we told them not to. And they got shot because the neighborhood was actually unsafe at that moment. But, yeah, I think the solution to gun violence, kind of, in a perfect world, especially in the US, is thinking about how multiple systems are responding to and trying to prevent gun violence. And when I mean multiple systems, I mean exactly that. We need to understand that any singular shooting, any singular victim, there's going to be some key variation on what they need, and we shouldn't assume that all you need is the same thing. Some people don't need a community violence intervention. Some people don't need that money, something different. They already have a degree. They need is a job, or maybe they need housing. Like we need to understand and coordinate those things. I think that would take us far to reduce harm, and I think to reduce longer term violence, we got to keep at it. Stuff changes too, by the way, we got to keep innovating.

Karly Scholz 27:32

Well thank you so much for joining us today. Where can audience find more about you?

Andrew Papachristos 27:37

Check out. Oh my gosh. I don't know what our website handles. I think it's cornersresearch.org. I'm at Northwestern University. You can just kind of Google us there and find and find what you're looking for.

Karly Scholz 27:50

Thank you so much for similar information. You can find more on the gun violence solution Project website, and we'll see you next week. You

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