As a Community Development Sociologist who has spearheaded community
kitchens and gardens in two major centres in Ontario, I thought this article
was worth a read by this list. I know Dennis R will really like it.

Scientist at Work: On Crime as Science (a Neighbor at a Time)
January 6, 2004                    By DAN HURLEY
BOSTON - Dr. Felton Earls was on the street, looking for something at ground
level that would help explain his
theories about the roots of crime. He found it across from a South Side
housing project, in a community garden of
frost-wilted kale and tomatoes.

"That couldn't be more perfect," said Dr. Earls, a 61-year-old professor of
human behavior and development at
the Harvard School of Public Health. Gazing at a homemade sign for the
garden at the corner of East Brookline Street
and Harrison Avenue, he pointed out four little words: "Please respect our
efforts."

"We've been besieged to better explain our findings," he said. For over 10
years, Dr. Earls has run one of the
largest, longest and most expensive studies in the history of criminology.
"We always say, It's all about taking
action, making an effort."

Dr. Earls and his colleagues argue that the most important influence on a
neighborhood's crime rate is neighbors'
willingness to act, when needed, for one another's benefit, and particularly
for the benefit of one another's children.
And they present compelling evidence to back up their argument.

Will a group of local teenagers hanging out on the corner be allowed to
intimidate passers-by, or will they be
dispersed and their parents called? Will a vacant lot become a breeding
ground for rats and drug dealers, or will
it be transformed into a community garden?

Such decisions, Dr. Earls has shown, exert a power over a neighborhood's
crime rate strong enough to overcome the far
better known influences of race, income, family and individual temperament.

"It is far and away the most important research insight in the last decade,"
said Jeremy Travis, director of the
National Institute of Justice from 1994 to 2000. "I think it will shape
policy for the next generation."

Francis T. Cullen, immediate past president of the American Society of
Criminology, said of Dr. Earls's research, "It
is perhaps the most important research undertaking ever embarked upon in the
study of the development of criminal
behavior."

The National Institute of Justice has so far spent over $18 million on Dr.
Earls's study - more than it has ever
financed for any other project. The MacArthur Foundation has spent another
$23.6 million on the study, likewise the
most it has spent, and money from other government agencies has brought the
cost of the project to over $51 million so
far.

Dr. Earls came to his current work by a circuitous route that included one
great leap. Born to working-class parents
in New Orleans, he graduated from Howard University's College of Medicine
and pursued a postdoctoral fellowship
in neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin. It was there that he met
Dr. Mary Carlson, a neurophysiologist. They have been married for 31 years
and are now collaborating on a project in Tanzania to promote the well-being
of children who have lost their parents to AIDS.

When they met, they were both aiming for a white-jacket career in the
laboratory. In fact, back in April 1968, Dr.
Earls spent 36 hours straight, alone for much of the time, in a soundproof
room, mapping the responses of a cat's
brain to various high- or low-frequency sounds.

When he emerged from his laboratory on the evening of April 5, the Wisconsin
campus was in an uproar. Only then did he
learn that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed the day before. Having
participated in rallies led by Dr. King, Dr. Earls says he reacted
instantly.

"I realized that I couldn't have a career in neurophysiology. I couldn't
remain in a laboratory," he said. "King's death made me see that I had to
work for society. My laboratory had to be the community, and I had to work
with children because they represent our best hope."

Six months later, he left Wisconsin and went to East Harlem to train as a
pediatrician, then to Massachusetts General
Hospital to train as a child psychiatrist, and finally to the London School
of Hygiene for a degree in public health.


His research is, in essence, about the health of communities, not just about
crime. "I am concerned about crime," he said, "but my background is in
public health. We look at kids growing up in neighborhoods across a much
wider range than just crime: drug use, school performance, birth weights,
asthma, sexual behavior."

His study, based in Chicago, has challenged an immensely popular competing
theory about the roots of crime. "Broken
windows," as it is known, holds that physical and social disorder in a
neighborhood lead to increased crime, that if
one broken window or aggressive squeegee man is allowed to remain in a
neighborhood, bigger acts of disorderly
behavior will follow.

This theory has been one of the most important in criminology. It was first
proposed in an article published
20 years ago in The Atlantic Monthly, written by Dr. James Q. Wilson and
George L. Kelling. The theory provided the
intellectual foundation for a crackdown on "quality of life" crimes in New
York City under Mayor Rudolph W.
Giuliani.

Today, "broken windows" policing is endorsed by police chiefs across the
country, its proponents sought out for
lectures and consulting around the world. But from the beginning, Dr. Wilson
concedes, the theory lacked
substantive scientific evidence that it worked.

"I still to this day do not know if improving order will or will not reduce
crime," Dr. Wilson, now a professor
emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently said in a
telephone interview. "People have not
understood that this was a speculation." Testing "broken windows" was not
the point of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, the
study planned and conducted by Dr. Earls and colleagues to unravel the
social, familial, educational and personal threads that weave together into
lives of crime and violence.

Nonetheless the data gathered for it, with a precision rarely seen in social
science, directly contradicted Dr. Wilson's notions. From June to October
1995, trained observers drove a sport utility vehicle at 5 miles per hour
down every street in 196 carefully selected Chicago neighborhoods.

As they drove, a pair of video recorders, one on each side of the S.U.V.,
recorded social activities and physical
features: litter, graffiti, drug deals, public drinking, everything within
the camera's view. When the researchers were done, 11,408 blocks had been
observed and videotaped. Then the police records on homicide, robbery and
burglary were pulled for each of these 196 neighborhoods, along with
in-person surveys of 8,782 residents.

In a landmark 1997 paper that he wrote with colleagues in the journal
Science, and in a subsequent study in The
American Journal of Sociology, Dr. Earls reported that most major crimes
were linked not to "broken windows" but to two
other neighborhood variables: concentrated poverty and what he calls, with
an unfortunate instinct for the dry and
off-putting language of social science, collective efficacy.

"If you got a crew to clean up the mess," Dr. Earls said, "it would last for
two weeks and go back to where it was.
The point of intervention is not to clean up the neighborhood, but to work
on its collective efficacy. If you organized a community meeting in a local
church or school, it's a chance for people to meet and solve problems.

"If one of the ideas that comes out of the meeting is for them to clean up
the graffiti in the neighborhood, the benefit will be much longer lasting,
and will probably impact the development of kids in that area. But it would
be based on this community action - not on a work crew coming in from the
outside."

Boston's experience in the 1990's, he believes, demonstrates his point.
"Right now there are about 35 homicides per year in Boston, down from 151 in
1991," he said. "It plummeted between 1996 and 1998. Many people attributed
it to the Ten-Point Coalition, a group of black ministers who took to the
streets to engage kids and work with other adults to develop after-school
programs.

"At the same time, they were also asking the kids to help them target the
ringleaders who were going down to Maryland
to buy weapons. And they were coordinating their activities with policemen.
So through these ministers, there was an
activation of large groups of adults and kids."

Driving back from the community garden in the South End of Boston, Dr. Earls
emphasized that the analysis of the
findings of the Chicago study had only begun. The entire neighborhood study
was repeated between 2000 and 2002, and
a second study tracking the behavioral and medical development of some 7,000
children in those same neighborhoods from birth to age 25, was finished in
December 2001.

Dr. Robert J. Sampson of Harvard, Dr. Steven Raudenbush of the University of
Michigan, Dr. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of
Columbia and Dr. Earls are now working together on papers that they expect
to see published this year.

"If we are to show that where you grow up is more important than your
temperament or your I.Q. or your family, or even
equally important, that is a major contribution to science," Dr. Earls said.
"We're saying that community is important at a moment in science when many
of the most dramatic findings are in genetics. If genetics plays a role,
it's got to be a minor role, because the community effects are very robust."

As important as the study's findings, Dr. Earls said, are the measurement
tools developed to uncover them. "Newton's
discovery of gravity was important because he was able to measure it and
quantify it," he says. "What we are
discovering around collective efficacy was not terribly obvious before we
started to measure it with some precision."

As for policy implications, Dr. Earls said that rather than focusing on
arresting squeegee men and graffiti scrawlers,
local governments should support the development of cooperative efforts in
low-income neighborhoods by encouraging neighbors to meet and work together.
Indeed, cities that sow community gardens, he said, may reap a harvest of
not only kale and tomatoes, but safer neighborhoods and healthier children.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/science/06PROF.html?ex=1074420631&ei=1&en=e511bf122866c94f

Susanna Suchak

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