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.”

The Solution To Black On Black Gun Violence (REDUX Originally Posted 2/12/15)

AmericanThinker |  Sociology, which is sometimes defined as the painful and tedious explication of the obvious, occasionally comes up with useful insights, or at least proof that some useful insights are true. That seems to be the case with a study by Yale sociologist Andrew Papachristos, published in the academic journal Social Science & Medicine, and featured in the Chicago Sun-Times.

It turns out that being arrested with someone else is the best predictor of who will get shot in Chicago. No, not by the police, as the Al Sharptons of the world would like to claim. Shot by another civilian, in the epidemic of shootings that have made Chicago at some times more dangerous than Baghdad.

If you and another person get arrested together in Chicago, you’re both part of a loose network of people with a high risk of getting shot in the future, Yale University researchers say in a newly published study.
Only 6 percent of the people in Chicago between 2006 and 2012 were listed on arrest reports as co-offenders in crimes, the study says. But those people became the victims of 70 percent of the nonfatal shootings in the city over the same period.

The logic is pretty simple: if you are the type of person who goes out and commits crimes with others, you are probably connected to people who commit crimes with some frequency.  And that puts you at risk of getting shot, because people who commit crimes sometimes shoot others who become inconvenient, or who just get in the way.

The study is done with social network analysis, studying who knows who and how they interact, and drawing up networks that reveal the clustering that results from various commonalities.

 The latest Yale University study was built on Papachristos’ previous social-network research into murders on the West Side. He had studied killings between 2005 and 2010 in West Garfield Park and North Lawndale. About 70 percent of the killings occurred in what Papachristos found was a social network of only about 1,600 people — out of a population of about 80,000 in those neighborhoods. Inside that social network, the risk of being killed was 30 out of 1,000. For the others in those neighborhoods, the risk of getting murdered was less than one in 1,000.

These statistics demonstrate the wisdom of the old adage, “Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.” They also show that it is not per se that is related to the higher incidence of violence in some black communities…

For every 100,000 people, an average of one white person, 28 Hispanics and 113 blacks became victims of nonfatal shootings every year in Chicago over the six-year study period.

… but rather the existence of networks of people who engage in violence and reinforce each other in patters of violent behavior.

There are some useful implications for policing in Chicago IF the race demagogues don’t start calling it profiling: Fist tap Big Don.

UMKC |  An ongoing law enforcement effort to rethink strategies to reduce violent crime in the Kansas City area has its own secret weapon: UMKC.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, part of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, is intimately involved in the Kansas City No Violence Alliance (NoVA). NoVA is a 2-year-old multi-agency effort to reduce gun-related violence.

Chancellor Leo E. Morton serves on NoVA’s governing board, and UMKC faculty members and graduate students are embedded in NoVA’s effort to implement a crime-prevention approach known as “focused deterrence,” which helps police look beyond individual criminals to the criminals’ entire social networks.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police this month called out UMKC’s relationship with the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department through NoVA when it awarded the department its 2014 bronze medal for Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award. The award recognizes law enforcement agencies that demonstrate excellence in conducting and using research to improve police operations and public safety.

UMKC became involved with NoVA at the very beginning. In 2012, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker came to Ken Novak, chair of the Criminal Justice and Criminology Department, to ask how UMKC could help curb a rising tide of violence on Kansas City-area streets. She’d heard about focused deterrence and its success in other cities and wanted to try it here. It just so happened that Andrew Fox had just taken a job as a professor in UMKC’s criminology department, and Fox happened to have experience with focused deterrence.

First At Visioncircle, Then Here In 2011 And Again In 2014

JoSS | This work was supported in part by Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research(ONR), United States Navy Grant No. 9620.1.1140071, NSF IRI9633 662 and the NSF IGERT 9972762 for research and training in CASOS. Additional support was provided by CASOS - the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, or the U.S. government.

Abstract: Given the increasing threat of terrorism and spread of terrorist organizations, it is of vital importance to understand the properties of such organizations and to devise successful strategies for destabilizing them or decreasing their efficiency. However, intelligence information on these organizations is often incomplete, inaccurate or simply not available. This makes the study of terrorist networks and the evaluation of destabilization strategies difficult. In this paper, we propose a computational methodology for realistically simulating terrorist networks and evaluating alternative destabilization strategies. We proceed to use this methodology to evaluate and conduct a sensitivity analysis of the impact of various destabilization strategies under varying information surveillance regimes. We find that destabilization strategies that focus on the isolation of individuals who are highly central are ineffective in the long run as the network will heal itself as individuals who are nearly structurally equivalent to the isolated individuals "move in" and fill the communication gaps.

Introduction
For reasons of national security it is important to understand the properties of terrorist organizations that make such organizations efficient and flexible, and based on this understanding devise successful strategies to destabilize such organizations or curtail their efficiency, adaptability, and ability to move knowledge and resources. The assessment of destabilization strategies poses a number of key challenges. What does the underlying organization look like? Does it evolve? What strategies inhibit or effect the evolutiuon so that the organization is destabilized? In this paper, we provide an approach to assessing destabilization strategies that draws on work in organization science, knowledge management and computer science.

Terrorist organizations are often characterized as cellular organizations composed of quasi-independent cells and distributed command. In a sense, this is a non-traditional organizational configuration; hence, much of the knowledge in traditional organizational theory, particularly that focused on hierarchies or markets, does not apply. To be sure, lessons can be learned from the work on distributed and decentralized organizations that provides some guidance. This work demonstrates that such structures are often adaptive, useful in a volatile environment, and capable of rapid response [1] [2]. In other words, we should expect terrorist organization to adapt, and adapt rapidly. This suggests, that in general, they should be difficult to destabilize; however, the traditional organizational literature provides little guidance on how to destabilize the organization.

In general, the organization's form or design profoundly influences its performance, adaptability, and ability to move information [3]. It follows that organizations can be destabilized by altering their design. The one caveat here, is that organizations, particularly more distributed and decentralized ones, are continually evolving [4]. Terrorist organizations are often characterized as dynamic networks in which the connections among personnel define the nature of that evolution. This suggests that social network analysis will be useful in characterizing the underlying structure and in locating vulnerabilities in terms of key actors.

In general, organizations evolve as they face unanticipated changes in their environment, rapidly evolving technologies, and intelligent and adaptive opponents. Over the past decade, progress has been made in understanding the set of factors that enable adaptation and partially validated models of adaptive networks now exist [5]. A key result is that, in the short run, there appears to be a tradeoff between adaptivity and extremely high performance in organizations [6]. This suggests that forcing an organization to adapt should reduce its performance. Thus, even if an actor is no longer key, the mere isolation of that actor may be sufficient to be disruptive. However, to assess this a model of organizational change and network healing is needed.

Since the destabilization of terrorist networks could inhibit their ability to effect harm, there is a profound need for an approach that would allow researchers to reason about dynamic cellular networks and evaluate the potential effect of destabilization strategies. To be useful, such an approach must account for the natural evolution of cellular networks. This situation is further complicated by the fact that the information available on the terrorist network is liable to be incomplete and possibly erroneous. Hence, destabilization strategies need to be compared and contrasted in terms of their robustness under varying levels and types of information error. In other words, it would be misleading to judge destabilization strategies in terms of their impact on a static an unchanging network [7].

These problems suggest the need for a new methodological approach. In this paper, we provide an approach based on the use of a multi-agent network model of the co-evolution of the network of "observers" (the blue network) and the "terrorists" (the red network) in which the observers can capture only partial data on the underlying covert network and the covert network evolves both naturally and in response to attacks by the observers. This approach builds off of organization theory and social network theory, as well as machine learning and dynamic network analysis. Specifically, we have developed a computational model of dynamic cellular organizations and used it to evaluate a number of alternative strategies for destabilization of cellular networks.

It is important at the outset to note that this examination of destabilization strategies is highly exploratory. We make no claims that the examination of destabilization strategies is comprehensive, nor that the types of "error" in the data that intelligence agencies can collect is completely described. Further, our estimate of the structure of the covert network is based on publicly available data much of which is qualitative and requires interpretation. Thus, this work should be read as a study in the power of an empirically grounded simulation approach and a call for future research. Further, we restrict our analysis to a structural or network analysis and focus on what does the covert network look like, how does its structure influence its performance and ability to pass information, how does it evolve, how can its evolution be altered (its behavior destabilized) through interventions focused on the nodes, and what interventions should be taken given the level of fidelity in the information that we have. Admittedly, in this complex arena there are many other factors that are critical, but they are beyond the scope of this study. Thus, from a straight social network perspective, this study suggests the types of methodological issues that will emerge when working with dynamic large scale networks under uncertainty.

To ground this paper, a short case description is provided of Al Qaeda with the focus on the network structure. In these two descriptions we draw on both military and organizational theory. This is followed by a discussion of the intelligence agencies engaged in anti-terrorist activity and the possible data and errors in said data. Our intent is to demonstrate, at a fairly high level, the context and the resultant information and modelling problems, not to provide a full analysis for intelligence or military operations. As good science often emerges from attacking hard real world problems, we are trying to provide sufficient detail to understand the basis for the problems that research must address, rather than simply provide a high theoretical description of general data problems. This is followed by a brief discussion of the applicability of traditional social network analysis and the need to take a dynamic network perspective. We then describe a computational model of terrorist organizations as dynamic evolving networks, and anti-terrorist bodies with emphasis on their information collection and destabilization strategies. A virtual experiment is used to examine destabilization strategies and the results are then discussed.

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.

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.

Go to:

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.