In The Dispossessed, John Washington explores how wealthy nations have gutted asylum protections for the world’s most vulnerable against historical, literary, and current political contexts. He observes that poverty is endemic to corruption, and the co-existence of both poverty and corruption leads to violence. When violence becomes so pervasive that it is inescapable, people flee, first within their home countries and then outside of them.

Recently, CBS News reported that 2021 is on pace to be the deadliest year in terms of gun violence in twenty years. Homicide rates have increased twenty-four percent in the first quarter of 2021compared to 2021. The Gun Violence Archive reports there have been 296 mass shooting in the US in 2021. 2020 followed a similar pattern. Patrick Sharkey, Princeton sociologist, author of Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, and the founder of American Violence Dog, a project to track and visualize violence in the US, reports that 4000 more people were murdered in 2020 than in 2019. Moreover, in 2020 relatively safe cities such as Portland experienced huge spikes in violence, rendering their rate of shootings comparable to much larger cities. Historically violent cities such as New York, Detroit, St. Louis, and Chicago saw gun violence sky rocket while overall crime dropped last year (Sharkey). Some have argued that the increase in gun violence in the US is a consequence of the desperation created by Covid lockdown measure. However, Democracy Now! reports that other wealthy nations implementing Covid lockdown procedures, some much more stringent than those implemented in the US, have not experienced an increase in gun violence or the crime rate in general, and as restrictions are lifted in the US, gun violence has not abated. Prior to 2020, the US had been experiencing one of its safest periods in decades.

In Uneasy Peace, Sharkey argues that how crimes rates are lowered is integral to sustaining a stable decrease in violence. If crime rates are lowered through a misuse of order maintenance policy, decreases in violence are unsustainable. Order maintenance policy is the policing of minor offenses as a means of addressing community problems and promoting the fair use of public space in order to prevent the decline of a neighborhood. However, David E. Thatcher, writing in The Oxford Handbook of Police and Policing argues that the rise of zero tolerance policies in policing has made order maintenance more aggressive and less focused on solving community problems. Because there is ambiguity and confusion surrounding order maintenance, police may abuse its authority to target and detain people. For example, in high poverty communities across the United States, residents are scared of the police because the residents, often Black and Latino men, are the targets of order maintenance policing (Sharkey). For example, Eric Garner was killed by a New York city police officer who alleges Garner was resisting arrest for selling loose tobacco cigarettes. Order maintenance policing did not address the underlying causes of poverty, which led Garner to sell loose cigarettes. Instead, it targeted a Black man, and the police involved ended up killing him, which made the members of Eric Garner’s community mistrustful of or have outright contempt for the police.

New York, Detroit, St. Louis, and Chicago are cities with extreme urban inequality. They are also cities where an over policing of the public space, mass incarceration and aggressive prosecution of crimes are the primary tools to deal with violence. Monica C. Bell, Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School, argues that the over policing of public space, mass incarceration and aggressive prosecution of crimes lead to legal estrangement, the feeling that segments of the community are not protected or served by the law, nor are these segments part of the citizenry. A system of legal estrangement cannot support a stable decrease in community violence, which may be one of the reasons that cities like Portland, historically non-violent, have experienced a spike in violence in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by police office Derick Chauvin.

Sharkey argues that in order to understand why violence increased in the US over 2020 and continues to exacerbate in 2021, it is essential to understand how the social order in communities has changed. Core institutions which structure people’s lives, such as churches, community centers, schools, after school programs, and violence prevention programs shut down in the wake of Covid-19 or shut down as public funding dried up. At the same time, maintaining social order became more dependent on police dominating the public space, which has led to unarmed Black and brown people being killed by the police in non-violent situations. For example, Daunte Wright and Philando Castille were killed by police during nonviolent traffic stops, Rayshard Brooks fell asleep in his car, blocking the drive through lane of a fast-food restaurant and was killed by police, Tanisha Fonville and Daniel Prude were killed by police who were responding to mental health calls. Stephon Clark was holding a phone in the backyard of his grandmother’s house, Botham Jean was eating ice cream on his sofa, Breonna Taylor was asleep in her bed, and Atatiana Jefferson was at home with her front door open when all four of them were killed by police. Alton Sterling was killed when police confronted him outside a shop where he was selling CDs and DVDs. George Floyd was killed for allegedly passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. Neither Alton Sterling’s nor George Floyd’s behavior was violent, yet they were policed with disproportionate force. These acts of police violence furthered the feelings of legal estrangement in the communities where these unlawful killings occurred, especially when there was no accountability by the police.

Sharkey’s research reveals that communities which are resistant to violence, even if they are poor communities, share some key characteristics. First, the residents know each other or are connected to one another. Second, a core set of institutions such as religious institutions, after school programs, community health centers, homeless shelters, and addiction treatment centers are supported and sustained financially. Core institutions need funding comparable to what is given to policing and mass incarceration because, as the foundation for a community, they make sure no one falls through the cracks. They see people who cause harm as people in need of help. They build after school centers for teens and cooperative gardens instead of using mass incarceration to combat violence (Sharkey). Mariame Kaba, founder of Project NIA, which works to abolish the incarceration of children and young adults, agrees and champions “…investing in the things we know do keep safe — housing, healthcare, schooling…living wages.”

These core institutions also participate in violence disruption. For example, they send community representatives to see shooting victims in hospital to dissuade them from planning reprisal shootings. They make sure a community recreation center is open and well-maintained so children have a safe place to play instead of shooting hoops on a playground under the scrutinizing eye of an order-maintaining police officer.

Erica Ford, co-creator of New York City’s Crisis Management System and CEO/founder of LIFE Camp concurs with Sharkey’s findings. She believes the rise in gun violence is caused by a lack of resources in a community. When there is no safe place for children to play, no educational opportunities, and no job opportunities, violence increases. Community based anti-violence work involves people closest to the problem finding a holistic and comprehensive approach to solving the problem, such as the sixty organizations within Crisis Management System which co-produce public safety. They help both victims and shooters heal from the trauma of violence instead of relying on over policing or mass incarceration to secure the public space by focusing on response, recovery, mitigation, and prevention.

Dr. Philip Atiba Goff, Co-Founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, a research center which aims to ensure accountable and racially unbiased policing in the USA, sees the role of community organizations and non-profits as essential to mitigating violence. Communities are safest when they have the resources (homeless shelters, community health organizations, after school programs, violence prevention centers) to prevent the crises which result in 911 calls. Many 911 calls do not require law enforcement but rather public health or other community resources. Providing these resources is foundational to keeping communities safe. For example, sending law enforcement only to a respond to a 911 call that is only about housing does not make a community safer, but this is what happens, especially in areas of extreme urban inequality.

Goff observes how societies in the face of extreme urban inequality become more punitive. As a result, police dominate the public space instead of focusing on well-being and problem solving. Goff champions a new method for dealing with the challenges for which communities usually rely on the police. Consulting for Mayor Svante Myrick of Ithaca, the Center for Policing Equity has helped Ithaca create a Department of Public Safety to provide solutions for the city’s unique health and safety problems where the police are secondary responders. In this way, investment is made in community organizations which problem solve for the citizenry and are focused on the well-being of the community members instead of on dominating the public space with order maintenance policing.

Denver has been operating a similar program, Support Team Assisted Response (STAR), for almost one year. After answering over fourteen hundred 911 calls, STAR responders have never called for police backup, and no one has been arrested from these calls. In STAR, licensed mental health clinicians are paired with paramedics to respond to low risk, low acuity calls (in its pilot stage, police officers were paired with the clinicians). The clinicians respond from a nonjudgmental, trauma-informed standpoint, listen to an individual’s problem, and solve it in the moment. The solution may be as simple as driving a person to a shelter or urgent care clinic. The clinician connects the person in need to the appropriate resources, local treatment providers, or case managers for follow ups. The community member who placed the call gets a trauma-informed response. Eugene, Oregon operates a similar program, Cahoots, which pairs EMT basic responders with mental health workers to respond to its community’s needs.

Disruptions and breakdowns in a community’s social order create the conditions for violence to emerge because communities feel vulnerable. When a person grows up learning not to trust the police because the police mistreat him or people who look like him or the people around him, he thinks no one is going to protect him. He gets a gun. This is the effect of legal estrangement at play. Then, a set of causes ignite and lead to shootings. This spike in shootings builds upon itself with reprisal shootings. More people feel unsafe and purchase guns, which increases the number of guns on the streets. More people feel vulnerable as violence spikes, and they buy guns.

To eliminate the preconditions of violence, policy makers need to address the underlying causes that create extreme urban inequality, which leads to the breakdown of institutions and communities. To reduce violence, policy makers need to invest resources into community groups and non-profits which focus on a community’s well-being and solve its members’ problems instead of aggressively policing the public space.