Mayor de Blasio just rolled out a $13 million, “evidence-based” plan to stop the wave of shootings around the city by hiring ex-gangbangers and felons to be “violence interrupters.”
One problem: The “evidence” doesn’t exist.
City officials and criminal-justice advocates claim that the “Save Our Streets” pilot program in Crown Heights “reduced shootings by 66 percent.”
This statistic was trumpeted at the mayor’s press conference last Wednesday and repeated in media accounts.But that number was apparently plucked out of thin air.
The Center for Court Innovation — which both implements and evaluates Save Our Streets — claims at best a 6 percent reduction in gun violence in the neighborhood . . . and admits that the drop “was not statistically significant.”
The philosophy behind Save Our Streets, according to the Center for Court Innovation’s Ife Charles, is that gun violence is a disease: “Quarantine an area, and then saturate the area with some sort of antibodies to help eradicate the violence.”
The “antibodies” in this case are ex-cons who are hired because they “know the streets, have been there and have credibility.”
These “interrupters” follow gang “beefs” on social media and rush to the scene of potential fights in order to defuse tensions.
Great . . . except there’s no evidence that paying convicted murderers, rapists and drug dealers to counsel young gangsters prevents violent acts.
The mayor calls Ife Charles, the coordinator of Save Our Streets, “the general of the army here, who has shown that this is the way forward.”
But Charles either lied or made a massive error when she announced that her own report showed “a 66 percent reduction in the shooting incidents that took place within our particular catchment area, once the program was implemented.”
In fact, the report — “Testing a Public Health Approach to Gun Violence” — clearly states that “results showed that average monthly shooting rates in Crown Heights decreased by 6 percent from the pre to the post periods.”
Aside from the fact that the only data point offered as evidence for this “data-driven,” “evidence-based” program proves absolutely nothing, isn’t it a little weird for the city to put $13 million towards hiring experienced street criminals to advise apprentice street criminals?
City Councilman Jumaane Williams dismisses this objection, pointing out that computer companies hire hackers to advise them on security.
Of course, computer hackers know a lot about computer security, while violent street criminals know a lot about . . . committing crimes?
In the absence of hard data, it’s unclear how much good the “interrupters” do, especially because all of their successes are self-reported. Anecdotes about confrontations between gangs are cited, and the “interrupters” offer assessments about how well they did.
Unsurprisingly, the “interrupters” reported a 90 percent success rate, which the report at least invites us to “interpret with caution.”
The “interrupters” also make a point of not disclosing information to the NYPD in order to maintain their “cred.”
So if some young gang member is carrying a gun around, the “interrupters” will strive to convince him not to use it, but they won’t tell the cops.
The city’s spike in gun violence may leave liberals and policy types scratching their heads, but regular New Yorkers probably recall that we recently had a solid approach aimed at getting illegal guns off the street.
Stop-and-frisk was a robust and proven method that not only captured a lot of guns, but also made would-be gunslingers wary about carrying their pieces around in the first place.
Instead of cockamamie plans for what the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald calls a “social-service slush fund,” tried and true police work would address the gun problem directly.
Seth Barron runs City Council Watch, an investigative Web site focusing on local New York City politics.