Pre-Modern vs. Modern Discrimination

africasacountry |  By pre-modern I mean the period before the establishment of the centralized structure of power known as the modern nation-state. This period differs from one part of the world to another. In Africa and the Middle East, the nation-state is a recent colonial creation. 

Before the development of centralized power, there were different forms of political powers that coexisted in society. The rulers, whether one calls them kings or emperors or sultans, held one form of political power, which we shall call royal power. In places like Buganda, this royal power could be further subdivided into the power of the kabaka (king), the power of the namasole (queen mother), the power of lubuga (royal sister), and so on. 

But there were also other society-based political powers held by the clans, the shrine, the church, and so on. In the lands of Islam, the mufti produced (i.e. interpreted) the Shari’ah (Islamic law), which coexisted with the laws made by the rulers. The mufti’s legal opinion, though nonbinding, informed many judgments in the courts of law. Thus the mufti was an important political authority even if he held no government office. Elsewhere, the church made its own laws that coexisted with the laws of the kings and emperors. 

This kind of political arrangement in which power was spread rather concentrated in one entity means that there was no single political authority that determined who should be included in or excluded from the political community. An outsider who was rejected by one clan could be admitted by another. A heretic who was persecuted in one village could find peace in a neighboring village. A cultural stranger who was denounced today could be accepted tomorrow. The terms of inclusion and exclusion were contestable, flexible and abstract. There was no permanent or universal outsider. 

The modern state, on the other hand, does two things. First, it centralizes and monopolizes all political power, including the power to determine who is a citizen and who is not. Even if a clan in northern Uganda admits a Somali as its member, the state of Uganda reserves the authority to revoke the citizenship of this new clan member. 

Second, the modern state institutionalizes and reifies the criteria for determining who is included and who is excluded in the political community. In Uganda, a full citizen must be a member of an indigenous community that was living within the borders of Uganda by February 1, 1926, as noted earlier. 

This makes the nation-state an inherently and extremely discriminatory form of political association with no precedent in history. It seeks to dominate society completely with specific emphasis on marginalizing and colonizing certain sections of society. 

To mitigate the marginalization of the minorities, liberals (such as John Locke) introduced the ideas of tolerance within the framework of secularism. The liberal nation-state creates two spheres, namely, the public sphere and the private domain. The private is the domain of religion and other cultural identities while the public is the sphere of reason. 

To ensure peaceful coexistence between the national community and the minorities, liberals prescribe that matters to do with religion, culture, and identity should be personal business confined to the private domain. Public principle, including state law, should be based on reason, not religion or any other cultural prejudice. The assumption is that reason is neutral and objective rather than being socially constructed. How can reason and public principle be neutral and objective in an identity-based state? How can an identity-based state produce a law that is detached from the cultural identity of the state? 

But there is even a bigger problem. If liberal tolerance appears to have worked, it has only worked where the minorities are too weak to threaten the dominance of the national majority. Where the minorities gain some power and influence, they are seen as a threat that must be dealt with. The rising popularity of far right parties in Europe is partly fuelled by the supposition that the minorities, including the Muslims and migrants, are purportedly gaining ground in these countries. 

Indeed, Zionist ethnic cleansing possibly seeks to reduce the Palestinians to small manageable numbers that could eventually be tolerated without threatening the dominance of the Jewish national community. The liberal notion of tolerance only requires the national majority to tolerate the minorities, but it does not ask why there should be a national majority in the first place. Thus liberal tolerance does not offer a meaningful solution to the fundamental problem of the nation-state, which is rooted in the distinction between the national community and the minorities.

All liberal interventions have failed to end ethnic cleansing because liberalism operates within the framework of the nation-state. Liberalism has no critique of the nation-state as nation-state—it only critiques certain manifestations of the nation-state. In other words, liberalism has no critique of the problem itself; it only focuses on certain manifestations of the problem. 

It is this conceptual narrowness of liberalism that prompts political actors to create more nation-states as a solution to the violence of the nation-state. When Jews were persecuted in Europe, the European powers could not think of a better solution than creating a separate nation-state for Jews. The consequence was to reproduce the violence of the nation-state, this time in the form of Zionist ethnic cleansing in Palestine. It is for this reason that the ongoing problem in Palestine cannot be meaningfully addressed by resorting to the so-called two-state solution. 

If such a solution was to be adopted, what would happen to the non-Jews living in the Jewish state and what would happen to the non-Palestinians living in the Palestinian state? Considering that neither Jews nor the Palestinians are a homogenous category, how would the state deal with internal differences in the form of religious sects and ethnic factions of its national community?

Google "FOP Brad Lemon Tow Lot Scandal" To Understand KCPD Refusing To Do Its Job

kansascity  |  Soon after he became Kansas City’s police chief in 2017, Rick Smith pulled officers away from a strategy credited with reducing homicides.

The effort, called the Kansas City No Violence Alliance, or KC NoVA, garnered national attention after killings dropped to a historic low of 86 in 2014, the fewest in Kansas City in more than four decades.

Under NoVA, law enforcement agencies used “focused deterrence” — targeting violent people and their associates and offering them a choice: change your behavior or go to jail. In exchange, they would get help finding jobs, getting an education and other assistance.

But when homicides increased again by the end of 2015, authorities went back to their separate agencies and “started chasing the bloodstain,” Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said.

By 2019, the strategy was effectively abandoned.

Now, an assessment obtained by The Star offers candid insight into why: Despite the effort’s early success, the Kansas City Police Department had grown weary of the strategy and began to step away, angering other participants who wanted the program to continue.

“Instead of really steering into the problem and retooling ourselves at that moment, we kind of threw in the towel,” Baker, one of the chief architects of KC NoVA, said in December. “We kind of gave up.”

Some key figures who were part of KC NoVA’s launch were reassigned or moved on. Its effectiveness was questioned as killings rose in 2016. Significant elements of the strategy were dismantled over time.

Since then, murders have continued to increase. In 2019, the city nearly hit an all-time record.

Other cities that stuck with and adjusted their focused deterrence strategies over time eventually prevented homicides by targeting a small group of chronic offenders vulnerable to sanctions, supporters of the approach say.

Kansas City police instead announced last summer they were partnering with federal authorities on a program that has been around since 2001 and was retooled in recent years under then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It focuses on targeting the most violent individuals, but not their associates.

That shift, Kansas City police said, was endorsed in an assessment conducted by the National Public Safety Partnership.

“Today, we are focusing the limited resources of the KCPD to the individuals who are ‘trigger pullers,’” the department said, noting it is constantly evaluating what works and what needs to change. “We don’t rule out any potential solution and will consider all options in order to reduce violent crime.”

KCPD Didn't Like It - Stacey Graves Is Now The Chief - Google Brad Lemon..,

KSHB |  The idea is to specifically interact with repeat violent offenders and their friends to give them better life options than violent crime.

The alliance also allows for better inter-agency intelligence sharing on potentially violent suspects.

According to a 2015 University of Missouri-Kansas City study of NoVA's effectiveness, the program had a rocky start. But by 2014, it was operating effectively.

The study concludes NoVA helped dramatically reduce violent crime in 2014 when there were 78 homicides, a 10-year low.

But the study also found the longer NoVA was in place, the less effective it became.

"I think we're a little early to say that NoVA is a success or a long-term failure, we don't know yet," said FOP President Brad Lemon.

The 41 Action News Investigators asked Forte if NoVA was working on March 10.

"Absolutely, crime is down with those people involved in the network by 10 percent since we started NoVA," he said.

While Forte says the specific repeat violent offenders NoVA has targeted aren't committing as many crimes, Kansas City homicides have skyrocketed from a 10-year low of 78 in 2014 to a 10-year high of 128 last year.

And the city is on pace to break last year's record this year.

James, who's on the NoVA Board of Directors, acknowledges the program has its limits.

"Drive-by shootings, domestic violence, those types of things that NoVA is not able to address," he said.

The NoVA study notes in April 2014, Forte permanently transferred 28 officers from the Patrol Bureau to the Violent Crimes Division and another 30 to investigate gun crimes.

Now with violent crime up and the number of officers below 1,300 for the first time in a decade, 41 Action News wanted to know how NoVA fits into the current KCPD picture.

James at the April Kansas City Police Board meeting said even that board doesn't fully understand NoVA's role.

"This is kind of why telling people what NoVA is doing is important because the board doesn't know," he said.

On March 28, the 41 Action News Investigators sent an open records request to KCPD asking how many officers were assigned to NoVA and any numbers showing its impact.

On April 6, Captain Stacey Graves responded by writing, "KCPD does not have any officers specifically assigned to NoVA, all KCPD officers are part of the community collaboration." 

Graves also wrote, "I am waiting on stats for the remainder of your request."

Almost two months later, the 41 Action News Investigators are still waiting for those stats.

A month ago, the 41 Action News Investigators also requested e-mails and other information to find out more details about NoVA's current status.

On Friday morning, the day before Forte's retirement, Graves informed the 41 Action News Investigators that material had been located, but the Investigators don't have it yet.

A KCPD staffing study due to be released before the end of the month may shed more light on NoVA.

Social Network Analysis And Soft Deterrence Worked In Kansas City

UMKC  |  The approach calls for conducting an audit of violent criminals, mapping their connections and using those connections to encourage criminals to police themselves. If a crime is committed, the police can then go after the perpetrator’s entire group – nabbing members for even petty offenses.

“The fact of the matter is, the group members we’re talking about aren’t afraid of police – and they’re not too scared of the prospect of getting arrested. Going to jail is just part of doing business,” Novak said. “But they’re scared to death of people in their social network, like friends, cousins, etc. People in their social network are more effective at regulating their behavior than the criminal justice system.”

In 2013 Fox began helping police conduct social network audits of the area’s criminals. Forty groups or gangs were identified and mapped so the nuances of their leaders and connections to each other could be easily understood.

“Violence spreads much like disease in the network,” Fox said.

As part of focused deterrence, law enforcement reach out to key people in criminal groups through quarterly meetings to get out the message that violence will not be tolerated. If one person in the group missteps, they are told, everyone in the group will be targeted for everything from parole violations to parking tickets to unpaid child support.

“The law enforcement representatives will say, ‘The next group to commit a homicide, we’re going to focus all our law enforcement on all of your group,’ ” Novak said.

The effort also involves offering group members access to social services to help them escape a life of crime.

Novak and Fox are embedded researchers in the project, which is very different from the neutral, observe-only role academics usually take. In this case, they are purposely involved in policy and decision making, such as participating in planning meetings and conducting training with criminal justice officials. This model of “action research” is endorsed and recommended by the US Department of Justice.

The result for the researchers is a first-hand grasp of the process as it unfolds, which they hope provides insight for their research.

“It may be the wave of the future for criminologists,” Novak said.

Focused deterrence has helped reduce crime in Boston, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and High Point, N.C. Novak and Fox say it’s too early to tell whether declining violent crime numbers in Kansas City so far this year can be credited with its implementation here.

But Joseph McHale, a captain in the Kansas City Police Department who manages the NoVA program in that department, said he’s certain a 37 percent reduction in homicides is directly connected to NoVA’s efforts and its work with UMKC.

“We are getting ahead of violence and using intelligence in a way that we never have before,” McHale said.

In the past, a lot of crime fighting has been based on tradition or gut. But through this project, the UMKC professors are helping the area’s top crime fighters – along with the street-level cops – understand the importance of valid and reliable data in making decisions.

Mike Mansur, a spokesman for the Jackson County Prosecutor’s office, said the result will be a long-term change.

“We don’t look at it as a project or a specific effort,” he said. “It’s more a shift in the way law enforcement is approaching the problem of violence.”

Implications Of Everyday Mobility For Structural Connectedness

uchicago  |  A longstanding tradition of research linking neighborhood disadvantage to higher rates of violence is based on the characteristics of where people reside. This Essay argues that we need to look beyond residential neighborhoods to consider flows of movement throughout the wider metropolis. Our basic premise is that a neighborhood’s well-being depends not only on its own socioeconomic conditions but also on the conditions of neighborhoods that its residents visit and are visited by—connections that form through networks of everyday urban mobility. Based on the analysis of large-scale urban-mobility data, we find that while residents of both advantaged and disadvantaged neighborhoods in Chicago travel far and wide, their relative isolation by race and class persists. Among large U.S. cities, Chicago’s level of racially segregated mobility is the second highest. Consistent with our major premise, we further show that mobility-based socioeconomic disadvantage predicts rates of violence in Chicago’s neighborhoods beyond their residence-based disadvantage and other neighborhood characteristics, including during recent years that witnessed surges in violence and other broad social changes. Racial disparities in mobility-based disadvantage are pronounced—more so than residential neighborhood disadvantage. We discuss implications of these findings for theories of neighborhood effects on crime and criminal justice contact, collective efficacy, and racial inequality.

Real Revolutionary Thinking Focuses On Social Infrastructure And The Neighborhood Effect

chronicle |  Jacqueline lived in one of the most toxic environments in urban America. If you’ve seen The Wire, HBO’s series about crime and punishment in Baltimore, you can picture daily life in her neighborhood on that city’s West Side. Drug dealers. Junkies. Shootings. Her high-rise housing project felt like a concrete cell. Jacqueline, a single mother with a sick child, was desperate to escape.

Then she got a ticket out. In the mid-1990s, Jacqueline volunteered to participate in a far-reaching social experiment that would shed new light on urban poverty. The federal government gave her and many others housing vouchers to move out of ghettos—with a condition. Jacqueline (a pseudonym used by researchers to protect her privacy) had to use the voucher in an area where at least 90 percent of the residents lived above the federal poverty line.

It’s unlikely that Jacqueline had heard of William Julius Wilson, but the experiment that would change her life traces its intellectual roots in part to the Harvard sociologist’s 1987 book, The Truly Disadvantaged. Wilson upended urban research with his ideas about how cities had transformed in the post-civil-rights period. Writing to explain the rise of concentrated poverty in black inner-city neighborhoods after 1970, he focused on the loss of manufacturing jobs and the flight of black working- and middle-class families, which left ghettos with a greater proportion of poor people. And he examined the effects of extreme poverty and “social isolation” on their lives. The program that transplanted Jacqueline, Moving to Opportunity, was framed as a test of his arguments about “whether neighborhoods matter” in poor people’s lives.

Twenty-five years after its publication, The Truly Disadvantaged is back in the spotlight, thanks to a flurry of high-profile publications and events that address its ideas.

Researchers who have followed families like Jacqueline’s over 15 years are now reporting the long-term results of the mobility experiment. The mixed picture emerging from the project—"one of the nation’s largest attempts to eradicate concentrated poverty,” in the words of the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson—is feeding a broader discussion about how to help the urban underclass.

Families that moved to safer and better-off areas “improved their health in ways that were quite profound,” including reductions in obesity and diabetes, says Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who is principal investigator of the project’s long-run study. They showed less depression, Katz says, and “very large increases in happiness.” Yet the program failed to improve other key measures, like the earnings and employment rate of adults and the educational achievement of children.

At the same time, two sociologists influenced by Wilson are publishing important new books that mine extensive data to demonstrate the lasting impact of place on people’s lives. The first, published in February by the University of Chicago Press, is Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Among his many findings, Sampson shows that exposure to severely disadvantaged areas hampers children’s verbal skills, an effect that persists even if they move to better-off places. That handicap is “roughly equivalent to missing a year of schooling,” according to research he conducted with Stephen Raudenbush and Patrick Sharkey.

The second book, Sharkey’s Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality, forthcoming in January from Chicago, explores how neighborhood inequality spans generations. Sharkey, an associate professor of sociology at New York University, writes that “over 70 percent of African-Americans who live in today’s poorest, most racially segregated neighborhoods are from the same families that lived in the ghettos of the 1970s.” In other words, “the American ghetto appears to be inherited"—a finding with implications for policy.

But as scholars break new ground, is anybody listening? Not since the early 1960s has poverty received so little attention, says Christopher Jencks, a Harvard professor of public policy. Among sociologists, he says, optimism that they will make a political impact has waned.

Social Anatomy of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Violence

nih  | We analyzed key individual, family, and neighborhood factors to assess competing hypotheses regarding racial/ethnic gaps in perpetrating violence. From 1995 to 2002, we collected 3 waves of data on 2974 participants aged 18 to 25 years living in 180 Chicago neighborhoods, augmented by a separate community survey of 8782 Chicago residents.

The odds of perpetrating violence were 85% higher for Blacks compared with Whites, whereas Latino-perpetrated violence was 10% lower. Yet the majority of the Black–White gap (over 60%) and the entire Latino–White gap were explained primarily by the marital status of parents, immigrant generation, and dimensions of neighborhood social context. The results imply that generic interventions to improve neighborhood conditions and support families may reduce racial gaps in violence.

The public health of the United States has long been compromised by inequality in the burden of personal violence. Blacks are 6 times more likely than Whites to die by homicide,1 a crime that is overwhelmingly intraracial in nature.2 Homicide is the leading cause of death among young Blacks,3 and both police records and self-reported surveys show disproportionate involvement in serious violence among Blacks.4,5 Surprisingly, however, Latinos experience lower rates of violence overall than Blacks despite being generally poorer; Latino rates have been converging with those of Whites in recent years.6

These disparities remain a puzzle because scant empirical evidence bears directly on the explanation of differences in personal violence by race and ethnicity. Aggregate studies based on police statistics show that rates of violent crime are highest in disadvantaged communities that contain large concentrations of minority groups,5 but disparities in official crime may reflect biases in the way criminal justice institutions treat different racial and ethnic groups rather than differences in actual offending.7 More important, aggregate and even multilevel studies typically do not account for correlated family or individual constitutional differences that might explain racial and ethnic disparities in violence.8,9

By contrast, individual-level studies tend to focus on characteristics of the offender while neglecting racial and ethnic differences associated with neighborhood contexts.4,10,11 Individual-level surveys of self-reported violence also underrepresent Latino Americans even though they are now the largest minority group in the United States.12 Blacks residing outside inner-city poverty areas tend to be underrepresented as well, even though there is a thriving and growing middle-class Black population.13

Recognizing these limitations, 2 panels from the National Research Council and other major research groups called for new studies of racial and ethnic disparities in violent crime that integrate individual-level differences with a sample design that captures a variety of socioeconomic conditions and neighborhood contexts.5,14,15 We accomplish this objective in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), a multilevel longitudinal cohort study that was conducted between 1995 and 2002. The study drew samples that capture the 3 major racial/ethnic groups in American society today—Whites, Blacks, and Latinos—and that vary across a diverse set of environments, from highly segregated to very integrated neighborhoods. The analysis in this article focuses on violent offending among participants aged 8 to 25 years. We also conducted an independent survey of the respondents’ neighborhoods, which, when supplemented with data from the US Census Bureau and the Chicago Police Department, provide a broad assessment of neighborhood characteristics to complement individual and family predictors.

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COMPETING EXPLANATIONS

Our theoretical framework does not view “race” or “ethnicity” as holding distinct scientific credibility as causes of violence.16 Rather, we argue they are markers for a constellation of external and malleable social contexts that are differentially allocated by racial/ethnic status in American society. We hypothesize that segregation by these social contexts in turn differentially exposes members of racial/ethnic minority groups to key violence-inducing or violence-protecting conditions.17 We adjudicate empirically among 3 major contextual perspectives that we derive from a synthesis of prior research.

First, the higher rate of violence among Blacks is often attributed to a matriarchal pattern of family structure; specifically, the prevalence of single-parent, female-headed families in the Black community.18,19 Some have augmented this view by arguing that female-headed families are a response to structural conditions of poverty, especially the reduced pool of employed Black men that could adequately support a family.20

A second view focuses on racial differences in family socioeconomic context. Many social scientists have posited that socioeconomic inequality—not family structure—is the root cause of violence.21,22 Black female-headed families are spuriously linked to violence, by this logic, because of their lack of financial resources relative to 2-parent families.

A third perspective is that racial and ethnic minority groups in the United States are differentially exposed to salient neighborhood conditions, such as the geographic concentration of poverty and reduced informal community controls, that cannot be explained by personal or family circumstances.17 Prior research indicates that Blacks and, to a lesser extent, Latinos, are highly segregated residentially.23 Although never tested directly, the implication is that neighborhood segregation may explain individual racial/ethnic gaps in violence.24

A prominent alternative to our approach highlights “constitutional” differences between individuals in impulsivity and intelligence (measured as IQ).25–28 Although low IQ and impulsivity may be sturdy predictors of violence,5,26 their potential to explain racial/ ethnic disparities has rarely, if ever, been examined.5,6 We thus assess the constitutional hypothesis that racial/ethnic differences in measured intelligence and impulsivity, more than economic, family, or neighborhood social context, stand as explanations of the observed racial/ethnic gaps in violence.

Collective Efficacy Or Cohesion Is The Predictor Of Violent Crime

NYTimes  |  The largest study ever undertaken of the causes of crime and delinquency has found that there are lower rates of violence in urban neighborhoods with a strong sense of community and values, where most adults discipline children for missing school or scrawling graffiti.

In an article published last week in the journal Science, three leaders of the study team concluded, ''By far the largest predictor of the violent crime rate was collective efficacy,'' a term they use to mean a sense of trust, common values and cohesion in neighborhoods.

Dr. Felton Earls, the director of the study and a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard School of Public Health, said the most important characteristic of ''collective efficacy'' was a ''willingness by residents to intervene in the lives of children.'' Specifically, Dr. Earls said in an interview, this means a willingness to stop acts like truancy, graffiti painting and street-corner ''hanging'' by teen-age gangs.

What creates this sense of cohesion is not necessarily strong personal or kinship ties, as in a traditional village, said Robert Sampson, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the study. It does help if many residents in a neighborhood own their homes or have lived there for a long time, Mr. Sampson added.

But cohesion, or efficacy, seems to be still another quality, Mr. Sampson suggested, ''a shared vision, if you will, a fusion of a shared willingness of residents to intervene and social trust, a sense of engagement and ownership of public space.''

The finding is considered significant by experts because it undercuts a prevalent theory that crime is mainly caused by factors like poverty, unemployment, single-parent households or racial discrimination.

These problems do play a role, according to the new study. But some neighborhoods in Chicago are largely black and poor, yet have low crime rates, it found -- so some other explanation is needed for the causes of crime.

The study has been conducted in all areas of Chicago since 1990 as part of a major continuing research program known as the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. It was financed at first by the MacArthur Foundation and the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, and now also has financing from the National Institute of Mental Health and the United States Department of Education. The study, which has so far cost about $25 million, is scheduled to continue until 2003.

The research team selected Chicago as a site because its racial, ethnic, social and economic diversity most closely match those of the United States as a whole, Mr. Sampson said. For the study, Chicago was divided into 343 neighborhoods, and 8,872 residents representing all those areas have been interviewed in depth.

Among those neighborhoods with high levels of cohesion, the authors said, are Avalon Park, a largely black neighborhood on the South Side; Hyde Park, a mixed-race area around the University of Chicago, and Norwood Park, a white neighborhood on the Northwest Side.

The study at least indirectly contradicts the highly acclaimed work of William Julius Wilson, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who in a series of books, most recently ''When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor'' (Knopf, 1996), traces many of the troubles of poor black families in Northern cities to the disappearance of factory jobs as industries moved to the suburbs or overseas.

Both Dr. Earls and Mr. Sampson said they thought that the results of their study suggested that Mr. Wilson's argument was too narrow and did not account for the differences in crime they found in largely black neighborhoods. Still, Professor Sampson acknowledged, concentrated poverty and joblessness ''make it harder to maintain'' cohesion in a neighborhood.