From Response to Prevention

Bobby Doyle 0:00 

Welcome to solving gun violence, a weekly student led podcast from the University of Virginia's gun violence solutions 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 Bobby Doyle, and I'm your host today. This episode features a conversation with Tracey Meares. Tracey is the Walton Hale Hamilton professor and co-founding director of the Justice collaboratory at Yale Law School, and a nationally recognized scholar on policing, legitimacy and law. She has shaped both academic thought and national policy around how justice systems can earn and deserve public trust. We discussed the power of legitimacy in shaping community safety, why public health frameworks matter in addressing gun violence, how dignity and coproduction can transform justice and what it takes to move from reform to structural change. If you're interested in practical, evidence based solutions in the future of gun violence prevention, you're in the right place. Let's dive in. Tracy, thank you so much for being here.

Tracey Meares 1:19 

So glad to be here this morning.

Bobby Doyle 1:22 

When people think about preventing gun violence, law enforcement is a main actor, and the story of public safety comes into play for you who thinks a lot about law enforcement, works with law enforcement, serves on boards of law enforcement. What do you see as the role of the law enforcement actors in preventing gun violence?

Tracey Meares 1:44 

That's an incredibly big question, and so let me break it down. First, you point to the goal of preventing gun violence, and then you ask me, what role should law enforcement play in it? I think it's important to understand that the way law enforcement interacts with gun violence today is that law enforcement typically responds to gun violence. They don't necessarily or if they do prevent, they prevent only in very narrow ways and very short term ways. They're there to respond. They're responding as armed, uniformed emergency responders to a particular moment of gun violence. And of course, once it occurs that gun violence occurs, we want someone in particular, the state, to respond. That's that's a necessary response. But if the goal is prevention, you know we have to first understand that gun violence itself, violence itself is a symptom of safety deprivation. That's the way my colleague at the Justice collaboratory vesla Weaver, who's a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, puts it. And so once we understand that violence is simply a symptom of safety deprivation, then that changes the nature of the Prevention Task helps us to reorient what our particular goals are, and then you can have a better understanding of what law enforcement as it's currently constituted, can do and should do, and it also gives you some visibility, I think, on how we might actually constitute law enforcement to be a preventive agency in that context, I'll just stop there, because I could actually make the answer that question the entire podcast, and I'm sure you will have some questions and follow up.

Bobby Doyle 3:56 

Yeah, I have many follow ups. One that comes to mind, you bring up safety deprivation, and there's a lot of nuances into that idea. And I encourage people to look at the kind of base research here, if they're really curious about that. When you think about how law enforcement right now is meeting that need that you see of addressing safety deprivation, where do you see them succeeding, or where do you see them needing to do more? And if you can relate it to like responses to violence specifically, that'd be helpful.

Tracey Meares 4:29 

Yeah, so I'm probably not going to answer it in the way that you would, like, that's fine. I feel like you're trying to guide me to a place that I don't want to go, and I'm not going to go there. So let's start again, safety, deprivation. If you ask people who live in communities that are experience very high rates of violence, and gun violence in particular, and you ask them what it is, what they require to feel safe, they'll say. A lot of things. Some of the things that they will say have to do with cessation of gun violence, right? But they'll also say things about housing security and food security and and education and jobs, and they'll talk about their built environment, and in certain ways, people are very good at articulating what they require to be safe. They're not necessarily good at articulating what is necessary to meet their safety needs. Or to put it differently, if I can give you a list of things that I need to feel safe. I might not know how to achieve those goals, and I certainly wouldn't know how to tell the state to do that in very particular ways. Why is that important? You'll see where I'm getting to your answer to your question, in many cases, people who are saying, well, we need police to do X in the context of, you know, high violence rates and so on. Will ask those same people who are experiencing high rates of violence in their communities, do you want more police or fewer police? And if the and if those are the choices, then, of course, it's hardly surprising that those people will say more police as they're experiencing those particular problems. But notice asking people if they want more police or fewer police is not the same as saying, What do you require to feel safe, right? And then asking the state, once they get that list of what people require to be safe, okay, how are you going to meet those needs? So the reason I'm resisting your question is, I think too many times, in most cases, we're starting in the wrong place. We're starting in the place of Extremis. We're starting in the place of you know, I can tell you all kinds of very sort of small, tactical things that law enforcement can do in the context of responding to violence that will be helpful and might even respond to violent rates. Violence rates in the short term, as I said, you know, with relatively small reductions. But that's not the same as what the state can do. And I would argue, and have argued, in some of my work must do to provide for the general welfare of its citizens in terms of responding to safety deprivation. So you know, in your third question, we can talk more specifically about law enforcement, but I want to be clear that the state in its police power, which is actually what I'm going to be talking about today, can do, and I would argue, is obligated to do a wide variety of things to address safety, deprivation that goes well beyond armed emergency, uniformed responders.

Bobby Doyle 8:18 

I'm glad you brought up police power of the state. This was where I was going to go next. Kind of zooming out a little bit more. No, this is something you've written about, talked about, could you just speak a little bit more for people who might not be familiar with this idea of, like the police power, more generally, tying it, untying it from law enforcement specifically, and where that can have effects on this sort of issue, right?

Tracey Meares 8:40 

So the as I said, the police power is the state's power to legislate and just operate. And by state, I literally am talking about a state, the state so more local units, as opposed to the federal government, to provide for the general welfare of its citizens. So what is encompassed in the state's police power every state has, as in its constitution, a provision for education of its citizens. Most states, actually, you might call it some lot of times people call it a right to education. But the better way of understanding what that is is that it's a state obligation to provide for education of citizens. The police power makes that access to education by all citizens compulsory, right? So the fact that the state can make you go to school is a function of the police power. The police power has its origin in provision of, you know, health regulation, or the requirement that we get vaccines against measles, is a function of the police power. The. Police power actually provides for things as quotidian as regulation of weights and measures. Why the regulation of weights and measures helps to prevent fraud? I mean the list of what the state can do and its police power is so unbelievably broad that it is almost invisible to people, and it's many people consider it more discretionary things that the state can do, rather than things that the state should do or must do. And I guess tying it to our topic, I would argue that the state is obligated to provide safety for citizens in a way that is non harmful and the big problem, or a big problem, with the policing service as distinct from The police power, right? Policing service is just a thing that the state can do through its police power is that too often it's harmful to citizens more than it is actually either helpful or certainly consistent with what I would call safety provision. Now I know that was probably very abstract. So hopefully we can, we can bring it down, but it is a kind of difficult, abstract topic for those people who aren't used to thinking about what it is.

Bobby Doyle 11:34 

Well, it's the water that we're in right like where the fish in the ocean, and we don't talk about this water, but it's everywhere. It's everywhere. It's everywhere. We breathe it. We experience it. And it's really hard to understand it, if you don't just start to look at it really, really hard and name it. And name it exactly. When you think about the police powers more generally, and think about how it's maybe even evolved our understanding of it, right? I know the way that the state has been able to enforce different ideas or help structure ways people think about safety change throughout time, and our understanding of what it means for people to be safe has changed throughout time. There's a wonderful scholar at the University of Virginia named Gerald Higginbotham, who has been looking into how people's different identities help them understand about where whether they feel safe or not, whether they're black or white, or any other identity that could influence what actually means safety means to them. So when you think about the goal of police power of public safety. This, like general good, this common good, it's sometimes hard for us to reach that common good and also meet where the citizenry are at, where they have all have very different ideas what public safety is. This is a unique problem for policymakers and for other folks who are really interested in trying to achieve this goal. What is your thinking on how people should approach this challenge of differing ideas of public safety from the people whoempower our government?

Tracey Meares 13:08 

That's a hard question. How do I want? How do I want to enter that? Well, I do think that one way to enter that question is to I to have a process that you know, a process for approaching that problem that actually foregrounds the people who are experiencing the most, what I would consider the most acute problems of safety deprivation that are easily identified gun violence, right? We just talked about a long list of things that constitute safety deprivation, and I don't think anyone would deny that experiencing high rates of gun violence would not constitute an acute problem of safety deprivation, where as maybe you would find someone who might say, well, you know, housing insecurity isn't that big of a deal. That person is not me, but maybe there is a person out there, no one, I don't think would say that experiencing high rates of gun violence in your community is not a significant safety deprivation problem, so people who are experiencing that problem, but also the people who and hopefully in the and as we're identifying these people, it's the same group experience the costs of the state's response to that problem of safety deprivation, right? Because very often we'll have a situation in which, you know, those who are complaining about how the state has responded to particular problems of safety deprivation are not themselves. The people who are experienced. Facing either the high rates of violence or how the state is going to respond. So I think, you know, those particular stakeholders views, in my view, must be foregrounded, and that can be a challenging and difficult position to be in, because people who are on the outside might say those people are not sufficiently sensitive to incursions on rights and so on, and that is that is a reality that I acknowledge, and I'm not saying that those people should be in charge of the decision. I'm simply saying that their views must be foregrounded. Number one. Number two, I think that whatever process is undertaken ought to follow general principles of social psychological research on procedural justice. You know, which you averted to earlier. We know that how people come to conclusions about the fairness of decisions by legal authorities and others, including, literally, the fairness of policies, depends on the extent to which the approaches to constituting those policies are consistent with ideas of procedural justice. So people want to be listened to and taken seriously. They want to have voice in the process. So that goes back to my first point about which group of people's voices were foregrounding. They want to be treated with dignity and respect and with concern for their rights. They want to be treated fairly and transparently and without bias, they want to be able to expect that the decision makers that they're dealing with will treat them benevolently and in the future. Basically, as you're coming up with policy, you want to make sure that the particular stakeholders in the process believe that those who are making policy believe that they count, and you can only make that decision, that determination as an observer, as an evaluator, by assessing how you're treated, because we can't read minds. So that part of it is is really important. I think having approaches that are grounded in research is critical, too often in this space, policies are adopted through a vision of unarticulated theory. What do I mean by that the whole get tough on crime approach proceeded under an assumption that the reason why people obey the laws, because they fear the consequences of failing to do so. You know, a deterrence regime, and research doesn't really bear that out. I don't mean that deterrence doesn't work. What I mean is that research shows that deterrence isn't as effective as people think it is. It's short or lasting. You don't get the benefits that you think you do, and policies that comply with legitimacy based approaches actually are longer lasting, more enduring encourage voluntary compliance and so on. So going back to my point about evidence, evidence is important, but also appropriate conceptual frameworks. And then what's the last thing I would say? I feel like I've kind of gotten far afield from your question, and I'm trying to talk in generalities. We can talk about specific policies if you want, but I really do think that having a different approach to how we come up with these solutions is critical, because almost everything that we do is responding in the short term, in the context of institutions that we already have in place And to really prevent gun violence, we are going to have to metaphorically blow things up.

Bobby Doyle 19:07 

Well, the question of how we approach solving this problem is really interesting and thank thank you first for that answer. It's a tough question, so I welcome the kind of expansive answer. I know that many people kind of see gun violence through the lens of media, and what often gets a lot of attention is large, high casualty shootings in media like school shootings or mass shootings, and that can drive a lot of response to what gun violence prevention looks like from public officials and just people within communities themselves. I'm interested in how that connects with this idea. You think about of legitimacy, and you write about this, a lot of people seeing that legal actors are fair and just and responsive to what they want. Some people experience gun violence through this media lens in many ways, right of like I see. These shootings, and it's scary and terrifying because it feels like that could happen to me, and there's nothing substantially preventing that from happening to me. And others live in communities where there may be much higher levels of gun violence, and that is how they may primarily experience shootings, and it seems those communities have very different views of what legitimate approaches or legitimacy could be for, like a gun violence prevention policy or just tactic that the police powers could take. And I'm curious to have thoughts about, like, how we can do a good job of actually approaching this problem. And once again, we can go to an easier question, if you want, but it's this is tough kind of reality that different people are living in.

Tracey Meares 20:47 

Yes, well, I guess the first thing I would say to that is that reality, the duality that you mentioned, is the reason why I began with identifying a particular group of stakeholders. Yeah, in my view, the people who are watching things on TV and have opinions, they can have opinions, and of course, they're going to vote. But one hopes that the policy makers in charge understand, you know, the weakness of responding to responding primarily to those people, as opposed to the people who are experiencing the simultaneous problem of gun violence as well as the potential costs of the state's response. I don't want to say that those people should be ignored. It's impossible politically to do so, but I feel like it's incumbent upon policy makers to constantly explain why they are taking the tax that they are that respond more to that former group rather than that last group. I mean, here's data. We know from one of your prior guests, that the people who are watching things on TV who don't actually experience the violence and somehow think that they could be subject to the violence, are simply wrong. The data shows that Andrew, Andrew, Papa Christos is work on gun violence is quite clear. Gun violence is not an airborne disease. That's a metaphor. It's a blood borne disease. And so if you're not actually in contact with people who are in the context that the people are afraid of that they see on TV, then there's nothing to worry about. That. Said, One huge aspect of gun violence that we haven't talked about that those people who are watching it on TV may well be exposed to a suicide. We don't talk about suicide very much at all. It's an important aspect of gun violence, and gun violence suicide is is is not transmitted. We'll put it that way in the way that Andrew talks about violence being transmitted in neighborhoods. You know, homicide, it's a totally different structure, so I've now lost my train of thought in terms of your question.

Bobby Doyle 23:13 

We have this duality of experience, and people sometimes feel differently about policy responses because of their different experiences and like feel different responses is more or less legitimate, because it's speaking to the kind of fear and danger I have, and how, as like a person who is, you know, kind of constituents that are trying to, like, speak to both those experiences. How do you actually get at that?

Tracey Meares 23:34 

The first thing I said was, you know, elevate the people of primary concern, and the second thing I would do, which is actually consistent with Andrew's work, is to explain the ways in which a constant focus on uniformed, armed emergency response is never going to be enough that it's necessary and it's limited. But you know, if we’ll call them the TV watchers. If the TV watchers are the people who are promoting more armed emergency response to a problem that demands a much more complex solution, then it's incumbent on policy makers to explain why that is wrong. It won't work, and it's actually so harmful to the group of people who are literally experiencing not watching it on TV, literally experiencing gun violence every day. So I did want to say those two things, that's great.

Bobby Doyle 24:30 

Thank you. Let's talk about suicide very quickly. I'm glad you brought it up, because it is a huge driver. Locally, we see suicide here. You mean locally, within Charlottesville, now moral area, more rural community, we see suicide as the largest driver of deaths, and nationally, it is the largest driver, even to take in urban violence. We talked about police powers and all the different ways that you can intervene in these big problems. What do you see as particularly effective interventions, or interventions you see as like promising or. Interesting when it comes to how a state can actually help prevent suicide.

Tracey Meares 25:04 

So, this is not my area of expertise. I'm familiar with some of the research in this context, but, you know, I think, to the best of my knowledge, the some of the best ways to respond to suicide are simply supply side interventions. I mean, it's pretty clear, whatever else you would say about neighborhood group based violence, which, yes, could occur without guns. You know it happens in other countries where knives are the prevalent weapon, rather than guns, not it's just a less knives are a less lethal technology. You know, fewer people are getting killed, although the levels of assault are probably not incomparable to ours. But with suicide, having a less lethal technology is the difference between suicide or no suicide, right? And most people who attempt suicide don't try multiple times, but if you try once with a gun instead of something else, you're likely to be more successful. So strategies that make it difficult to have a gun are going to address suicide. So whether that's requiring people to have certain kinds of registrations, having requiring gun safes, requiring gun locks. I mean, we can go down the list, having waiting periods. All of those things are ways that can substantially impact the rates of suicide.

Bobby Doyle 26:47 

Great. Okay, last question, this is another really broad one, and you can answer it however you want. What does the solution to the gun violence epidemic in the United States look like to you?

Tracey Meares 27:00 

Well, I think answering that question, you know, depends on whether I am talking about my fantasy or whether I'm talking in as a pragmatic Chicagoan, right? So my fantasy solution would be, you know, somehow we have, overnight, one quarter of the guns in this country, handguns in particular, that we have now and that there is much less access, so a supply side solution combined with serious attention to the building blocks of safety, deprivation, right? The interesting irony of both of those things together is that it is in some ways the fulfillment of reconstruction, if you will. You know, many of the places where gun violence is rampant are places that are places that suffer from historical residential segregation, and, you know, lack of investment and education and people who don't and haven't had real access to living wages places that lack in Disha of what we call it, the justice, collaboratory, community vitality, to which I think every citizen has access to. That would be my dream. And interestingly, not only does that address gun violence, it addresses a whole lot of things, yeah, all at once, which I think again, is just an indication that gun violence is a symptom and not the thing that we should be trying to achieve. But if I'm being if I'm being the pragmatic Chicagoan, I probably would focus more squarely on addressing the here and now set of solutions which have to do with making our armed emergency response less harmful, pushing a set of gun violence responses that have been demonstrated to make a difference, like some of which I was just talking about in the suicide context. But, you know, erpos and other things are also have uses thinking about, you know, the ways in which we can address the dynamics of group based violence. You know, those are things that can work to address homicide in the near term, and maybe levels of shootings. But that that shouldn't be our goal, in my view.

Bobby Doyle 30:09

Well thank you so much for joining us today. Is there anywhere people can find you?

Tracey Meares 30:13

Yes. So to learn more about some of the things I have talked about I encourage you to visit the Justice Collaboratory's website, www.justicehappenshere.yale.edu. There is a long list of not only my own work but of work of the amazing scholars of the collaboratory which include some of the visitors to this class.

Bobby Doyle 30:48

Amazing. We will make sure that is included in the show notes and for other information you can go to the Gun Violence Solutions Project website. We'll see you next week.