The United States is suffering from an epidemic of tragic gun violence. While a political debate rages around the topic of gun control, it remains important to understand the causes and possible remedies for gun violence within the current system. Andrew Papachristos is a sociologist who uses applied network science to study patterns of street violence in urban areas. His research shows that such violence is highly non-random; knowing something about the social networks of perpetrators and victims can help identify who might be at heightened risk of gun violence. It's an interesting example of applying ideas from mathematics and computer science to real-world social situations.
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Andrew Papachristos received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. He is currently a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. He is also founding director of the Northwestern Neighborhoods and Networks Initiative.
Click to Show Episode Transcript
0:00:00.2 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. It's undoubtedly very well known at this point that there is a problem with gun violence in the United States, especially compared to other countries. People debate how best to measure this, but compared to the countries that the US would generally consider its peers, that is to say other developed, wealthy, purportedly well-functioning societies, the United States has a lot more gun violence per capita than any of our comparison nations.
0:00:30.7 SC: Now, I feel a little bit weird because we're gonna be talking today about gun violence, but not about the kind of mass shootings that have been in the news recently. As I'm recording this intro, recently there was a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. There've been others really terrible events where someone is able to get a weapon that fires a lot of ammunition very, very quickly, break into a school or other kind of place where there's a lot of people and do an enormous amount of damage. This is clearly a problem. We're not talking about that one today. There are other problems out there. So today we're talking to Andrew Papachristos. Andrew is a sociologist at Northwestern University, just outside Chicago. And what he's doing is using ideas from network theory, something that we talked about before with people like Steven Strogatz, Andrew uses network theory to predict what kinds of people and specifically which people might be vulnerable to imminent gun violence. But not in the mass shooting sense, more like the gangs on the street, crews that get into flare-ups where they start firing at each other kind of violence. It's an interesting problem that sort of combines criminology, sociology and math because you use the math of the network theory to say, "Well, this person is in the following network, in the following ways with these other people that puts them at greater risk that they might otherwise be."
0:01:53.9 SC: For better or for worse, we have a lot of data out there on people, on who they talk to, who they know, who they've been in prison with, who they've been in a gang with, things like that, and the good news is that we can use that data to say, "Okay, this specific set of people might be a greater risk right now because there's recently been another shooting." Now, you can go in and try to protect the people who are more at risk than others. It's not in any sense of panacea, be all end all way to end gun violence, but we have so much here in the United States that it is a strategy that might be helpful when we're trying to deploy the resources we have in the most effective ways. I'm not personally enough of an expert to say whether or not this is the right way to go, or the best way to use our resources, but it certainly is an interesting combination of mathematical analysis, big data kind of analysis of sociological phenomena and real world applications that might help us to maybe save a few lives here or there. If we can do that, that'd be well worth the effort. So let's go.
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0:03:17.2 SC: Andrew Papachristos, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.
0:03:19.8 Andrew Papachristos: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
0:03:21.5 SC: Gun violence is what you work on as a professional past time. Whenever I get people in the podcast who work on these slightly touchy subjects, I'm kind of curious 'cause I work on physics and cosmology and philosophy, the beginning of the universe, and even those are touchy subjects, people get very emotional about them, but you work on gun violence, which I imagine must engender some reactions from people who hear about your work in the media.
0:03:51.2 AP: It definitely does. Gun violence is not unique to America, but there is a uniquely American take on gun violence and what Americans think about guns and how we use guns and our history with guns and the number of guns we have. And so I think a lot of what I try to do is understand the science behind gun violence. And there are, of course, interventions and preventions and policy measures that can reduce or make things worse. But by and large, what I try to do is I try to approach it as a social scientist to figure out how we can understand these patterns that we see, especially in cities, and especially when people are harming each other as opposed to suicide, which is the most common form of lethal gun violence in this country, which is quite different. So I try to look at assaultive gun violence, when people use firearms to kill other people. And I try to really kind of unpack those patterns that we see, not just aggregate statistics, so that we can hopefully do something about that problem and the situations that create them, and the currents that are both big and small that keep these levels of gun violence unacceptably and stubbornly high in some places rather than other places.
0:05:02.5 SC: Well, you mentioned already the fact that there is something uniquely American about this. Okay, let's try to quantify that, 'cause I think a lot of us recognize that America is an outlier when it comes to gun violence in various ways, so is that... Are we right about that and how much is it? And why is that true? Simple questions.
[chuckle]
0:05:21.9 AP: Simple questions. So clearly, the United States is not unique relative to say other European countries when it comes to things like robbery or non-gun assaults. We are unique when it comes to our gun homicide and gun assault levels of violence, which are tens of times higher than some of our other peers or who we consider to be our peers. Part of this, of course, is the presence of firearms, we have more guns in this country than people, which is not to say those guns are evenly distributed across households, they are not. Most people that own a gun own multiple guns, which is again, not uncommon of people that are into something. Some people are into shoes and sneakers and cars, and some people are into guns for whatever reason. So there's a unique part of this country that is about owning a gun, it is a constitutional right and is being upheld by the Supreme Court. There's also something uniquely American about the idea of arming ourselves to protect ourselves. So number one reason people carry or own a firearm in this country is for protection, and then sort of the tricky science part is actually owning and carrying guns actually makes you less safe.
0:06:35.7 AP: So despite that, this idea that guns will keep us safe is pervasive, and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether you live in the suburbs, doesn't matter whether you live in a neighborhood that is experiencing a dis-proportion amount of gun violence, the reason people carry guns is for protection. There's also an element in this country, which... This last surge in gun purchasing during the epidemic, people also arm themselves when they feel like they have to take care of themselves outside of the confines of the state, the state has let them down.
0:07:02.1 AP: The state's not protecting their interests or the state is actively harming them, which is also goes back to the founding of this country, and it doesn't just apply to one particular group or the other. The Black Panthers arm themselves for that very reason, and we're seeing militias arming themselves for that very reason, and private citizens purchase guns, 'cause they feel like they might have to protect their own selves, 'cause they can't rely on somebody to come when they call.
0:07:26.4 SC: So I think this is implicit, what you just said, but it's not just a matter of having more guns. If I recall correctly, Canadians have more guns per capita than Americans do, but the culture is very different. You're really putting your finger on the way that we think about guns and why we own them.
0:07:44.0 AP: I think that's right. I also think it's fair to say that there are guns that are... The ones we associate with violence, interpersonal violence, which are hand guns, which are hand guns that are often diverted from legal sources to illegal sources, so they are bought, they're stolen, they're traded, there are straw purchasers. This idea of a gun show loophole is not actually about gun shows as much as the lack of regulation for private transactions. Which is in most states in this country, I can sell you a gun without telling anybody, right? There are certain rules that I am supposed to uphold, you have to be of age, I have to reasonably believe you wouldn't fail a background check, but I don't have to do a background check if I'm a private citizen just selling a gun like I'm selling a private car to somebody. So there are guns that are the ones that are the problem, there are those guns, not all guns. Largely hand guns that are acquired illegally or that have somehow been diverted from these sorts of sources, which is also unique because they're durable. Guns are by and large durable goods, they're not like, say, drugs or some other food, whether you eat them, you ingest them, they're gone, you get more. Guns stay around for a long time, so they get... They move around.
0:09:02.1 SC: You mentioned that suicides are actually the largest form... Largest way that guns kill people in the US. Give us a sense of the numbers, not just of suicide versus homicides, but also of what kinds of homicides we're talking about. 'Cause I know that when you study gun homicides in cities, that's sort of a very different kind of thing that might happen in rural areas or suburbs or whatever.
0:09:24.5 AP: Right, I don't have the suicide figures in front of me when we're there. But by and large, I'm pretty sure where there's almost five to one suicides for every gun homicide in this country, but obviously...
0:09:43.4 SC: Sorry. Sorry to put on the spot, I didn't mean to do that.
0:09:46.3 AP: No, no, it's okay. I don't study suicide, so oftentimes it kind of... It's... I neglect it as well. We talk about it in class, but it's not something I spend a lot of time on.
0:09:55.4 SC: But the point is, it's not 10% more than homicides, it's many times...
0:10:00.7 AP: At least.
0:10:00.8 SC: Several times.
0:10:00.9 AP: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. When we're talking about assault and violence, where you fire a gun at somebody and they get hit, or they get hit and die, and I should say we know very little about non-fatal shootings, 'cause data is very poor, and even in cities like Chicago, there are five or six to one non-fatal shootings for every fatal shooting, so you have literally tens of thousands of people who are injured with firearms that we know very little about. When it comes to homicides, which we have better data on, not perfect data, there are different types. And it's important to distinguish at least three of these types. One is, of course... Are, of course, mass shootings, spree shootings, the kinds we see that are going around the country again right now and as we're seeing in shopping malls and schools, and those are quite distinct from other two real types. One is intimate partner violence, which is again extremely serious, but a very different sort than the third, which is the lion's share of gun homicides, which is essentially assaultive, assaults. People that know each other, arguments, disputes, and that's commonly... That's kind of what shows up on the front page more often than not. And part of the reason it gets more attention besides is the large volume, the large volume of gun homicides is... Oftentimes, it's public. Intimate partner violence happens behind closed doors, so we often don't hear about it.
0:11:23.2 AP: We don't know a lot about it. It's a expressing problem which needs attention as our mass shootings, but every day sort of assaultive violence is the stuff that we often talk about. It's the stuff I focus on, it's also the stuff that creates additional trauma in communities. You're exposed to it, somebody is shot on your block, it impacts you, it impacts your kids, it impacts the school, it impacts the police. Those are the sorts of violence that we look at.
0:11:49.8 SC: So you said... You seem to say, when mentioning assaultive violence against people who you know or rival gang or something like that, is... Does that category also include if someone robs a bank and it goes terribly wrong and they kill somebody?
0:12:04.4 AP: Yeah, it would actually include them. But happens much more rarely than the former of course. There could be even a fourth category of state violence, especially those shot by police, and then again, of course, you branch off into, was it a commission of a crime? Is it a traffic stop? Was it a mistaken identity? Was it intentional? But in that case, again, those are smaller portions of the total. The majority of gun homicides are these assaulted interactions essentially.
0:12:33.3 SC: So that already tells us something that when there is going to be an assaultive homicide or rather... Let's just broaden it. When someone is killed with a gun by another person, it sounds like usually if it's not a mass shooting, it's by someone who they know or have some connection with in some more abstract way.
0:12:54.7 AP: That's right. So this idea of stranger homicide is actually quite rare. Two-thirds that we know of are by people that are known to the person who is injured or killed. And the other third, we actually just don't know. It's not that that other third was strangers, it's just that we just don't know who did it. And by the way, your enemy is often not a stranger, the person who you got into a fight with is often not a stranger. They're usually somebody you know...
0:13:17.9 SC: Tell me about it. [chuckle]
0:13:18.2 AP: From your neighborhood, from your class, from work, from the pub. They're not unknown. You know them, you just might not like them, which is different than a stranger. Because when we read about this in the media, of course, the fear that is stoked is that it can happen to anybody, it can happen anywhere, there are stray bullet killings that are... Accidentally kill somebody, but that is, again, not the norm. Most of this violence is happening in social networks, in small communities that people are known to each other, and I think it's important that we understand that they're all tragic, but they're not random.
0:13:56.0 SC: Of course, of course.
0:13:57.3 AP: And I think that helps us understand solutions as well.
0:14:00.0 SC: I mean, just to get on the table, the idea... I think that exactly because this is such a hot button issue and such an emotional issue, some people will be upset when you talk about certain types of gun violence and not others. You're choosing to focus on something, and I'll just go on the record of saying that I would like to understand it all so that we can diminish the rate of all of it, no matter what kind of gun violence it is.
0:14:24.6 AP: Yeah, yeah. I think that's fair. I think the only reason it's important to unpack it is the treatment, if you will. Or the response is not necessarily the same.
0:14:34.9 SC: Exactly, right.
0:14:37.1 AP: And I do think it's important 'cause we often talk about gun violence as an epidemic or a public health problem, which it is. If we take that literally, though, we do need to understand whether, A, it was intimate partner violence versus a mass shooting, is gonna elicit a different response, right? It's very hard to predict, in any real sense, mass shootings. You can look for warning signs, there are things like Red Flag laws, which are when you prohibit somebody from owning a firearm that can reduce intimate partner violence and mass shootings. But then there are other things that would necessarily apply to, say, a young man in Chicago's west side who's involved in a dispute in a crew, they're not using legal firearms. No flag would go off, they're probably outside of say a school system or a health system where a red flag would pop up. So the response needs to fit the sort of conditions at least in some sense.
0:15:31.3 SC: So just to ground us with some specifics, one of the papers that I saw of yours, I think that you sent me, was about the very short period of time between June 18 and July 5, 2020, so not long after lockdowns had begun with COVID and so forth, but there was a real spurt to violence in Chicago. So you're in Chicago, right? You're at... Where are you at? Sorry.
0:15:56.1 AP: Northwestern University.
0:15:56.9 SC: Northwestern. You're not really in Chicago. [chuckle] You're in the suburbs, but you're right there. I used to live in Chicago in Lake View. So again, not that much risk of gun violence in my neighborhood, although there was a lot of risk of drunken people coming out of Wrigley Field and swinging baseball bats, but that's a different worry. So you're looking at shootings in very localized neighborhoods relatively in Chicago, and so if I have the numbers right from that paper you wrote, in that two or three-week period, there were 416 shootings, 74 of which were fatal. So what do we know about why that happened? Was it just stir craziness from COVID, was it preexisting conditions that just coincidentally erupted or what?
0:16:44.4 AP: Well, I think if I had the answer to the why it went up question, I would be on the front page of every paper...
0:16:50.1 SC: You could be rich.
0:16:50.2 AP: I think. Academics and criminologists have lots of theories about why it went up, and there are many of them, one of which is, yeah, people's routine activities change and they change in a way that led to increases in gun violence but decreases in other sorts of violence. So it's hard to break into your house if you're home, but if you're sitting at home looking at something on social media and your opposition is taunting you, well, you know right where they are and you don't have any place else to go. So it changed the way people could respond. Intimate partner violence would also go up if you're at home with your abuser and can't get out. So there are lots of reasons, it's hard to say which one it is. It also seems to be clear that people started carrying more guns during this time period because they were afraid because a lot of things were happening. But that report you mentioned point out the work my team and I had been doing for the past decade, which is when it comes to gun violence in cities. And here we've studied Chicago and Boston and Oakland and New York and New York and Cincinnati, and New Orleans, and even Evanston, which is where Northwestern lives, and we've noticed a pattern that is consistent, which is gun violence concentrates in very, very small social networks.
0:18:11.8 AP: Even in communities that have high levels of gun violence or experience high levels of gun violence, generally the victims and potential perpetrators of shootings are in a network of a couple hundred people, right, or depending on the city or neighborhood, a couple of thousand people. So in our study of Boston, 85% of all fatal and non-fatal shootings happened in the network of 700 people, less than 4% of this community's population. And in Chicago, when we did the whole city of Chicago, again, less than 4%, about 75% of the fatal and non-fatal shootings. And when I'm talking about networks here, I'm talking about instances where people were either engaging in a crime together or arrested together or were co-involved in an event that elicited some system response. But we can think of it broadly as the people you hang out with. The people that hang out with, that would have your back in a fight tend to be your network, and it turns out what we found in Chicago in general, but during this three-week period was that your probability of being a victim is directly related to how many people around you are getting shot.
0:19:18.9 AP: So if you're friends, if you're in parts of a network where victimization are happening, your probability sky rockets, and in fact, these can create cascades. So one person gets shot and then a few days later somebody else, or months later, somebody else. It's almost like a chain, a chain reaction, if you will, and what we found during those three-week period was all of these old well-worn pathways, these old networks that had been in the neighborhood, sometimes active, sometimes un-active, started popping up.
0:19:51.0 AP: So again, not in new places or unexpected places, but among groups and individuals and crews who are already at high level at risk. All of a sudden, the lights started going off and shooting started to happen, and in one of these chains, for instance, there was four shootings in 10 days, and in another one, there was six shootings within 15 or 16 days. Right, but again, a sequence that was knowable and predictable potentially, and part of what we are arguing and continuing arguing is that that's the sort of information that can be actionable for on-the-ground violence prevention efforts to try to get ahead of not just shootings but trauma and responses to people who might be victimized.
0:20:33.0 SC: So the idea is that obviously different sets of people have different likelihoods of being in one of these terrible shootings depending on your income, your geographic location, your race, your age, and things like that, but you're saying there's sort of even more fine-grained data about who your friends are, that could be used to really say, no, you in particular are at heightened risk.
0:20:56.5 AP: Right. So the first way you sort of describe it are usually what we call the risk factors approach, and to summarize a century of research, living in a poor neighborhood being young, being black or Latino, being male, all of those things carry high levels of risk in this country, for a great many things, from heart disease, to dropping out of school, but especially to gun homicide, to being a victim of gun homicides, one of the leading causes of death for young black men in this country, and young black women. Latinos, of course, have higher rates than their white peers, but by and large, this is one of the main killers of young men of color. But when you start to look in a city like Chicago and say you're going to, again, say the west side of Chicago, well, those risk factors describe 90,000 people.
0:21:47.1 SC: Yeah.
0:21:48.9 AP: And I'm using air quotes here for the radio, "only a few hundred will get shot," so it's not being poor or being in a neighborhood that has been dis-invested in and segregated for centuries, that's part of it, but most people that live there don't get shot or don't shoot anybody. So how do you go from these structural conditions, which are real, which create these networks to trying to figure out who's in harm's way today, and that's the jump we take, right?
0:22:16.7 SC: Yeah.
0:22:17.0 AP: You wanna create small networks with a lot of guns in them, you could have a segregated neighborhood with high-rise housing projects and you close schools, right? But that condition is there and what needs attention, and in the meantime, you have to save lives and sort of this network focus is really... It's more triaged and it is changing structural conditions, but you need to do both, of course, but it is a piece of information and set of analytics that can be used to potentially, again, mitigate trauma and maybe reduce harm while you're trying to figure out the big stuff, but the end result is not a vague description of risk factors, it is potentially some estimates of like, yeah, Sean's in harm's way or Andy's friends are getting shot, maybe we should reach out to Andy and that becomes actionable, again, for the ground prevention efforts.
0:23:07.1 SC: So was this particular jump in June, July 2020 a Chicago phenomenon, or did it happen in other places as well in the US?
0:23:17.7 AP: So it happened in most... It happened across the US. Chicago is definitely not unique, nor was Chicago the highest increase. Some of the highest increases happened in cities we're not talking about Buffalo, Flint, New York. Chicago did horribly. Let's just be clear.
0:23:36.2 SC: Of course. Sure.
0:23:36.8 AP: But it affected the whole country, the country as a whole. Chicago probably had the highest number, which we continue to do, but we're not usually the highest per capita, and Chicago had a horrible 2021. Things are looking a little bit better so far this year in Chicago, but it's way too early to know what's gonna happen.
0:23:53.3 SC: This might be jumping ahead, but is there some sociological theoretical explanation of why Chicago in particular is very bad? When you say Buffalo, Flint, I can see economic issues that are looming very large, Chicago seems to be economically to be doing pretty well, at least it was when I lived there. Obviously, it has a tremendous history of segregation and racial issues, but other cities do, too, New York, LA, whatever, or there might just be kind of special circumstances that we can't explain with some grand sociological theory.
0:24:29.5 AP: Well, first of all, Chicago is special. Let's just be clear, [chuckle] it's the greatest city in the world. However, to answer your question, Chicago... I would say today, the best comparison would be Los Angeles in the 1990s. Some of the things that keep Chicago's homicide rate higher than its peers and often gets compared to New York and LA has to do with the levels and the size of the city. What keeps Chicago unique, one of the things outside of segregation, racist housing policies, and all the things that kind of create neighborhoods that have high crime rates and keep that in that way is its history of gangs in the city, which is fundamentally different than some of those other cities. LA had a similar history as did New York, but their gangs didn't grow as big and as pervasive as Chicago's in terms of the level of organization and politicalization, and that still lingers to this day.
0:25:32.4 AP: Guns. Chicago recovers more guns. There are more guns in Chicago than there are in New York or LA, and part of that is not necessarily the city's gun laws or the state's, but our proximity to states like Indiana, which is where our second largest source of guns come from, which is largely a cash and carry state. And the two other ones which are really important and there are others, one is the continued dominance of a political machine system, which has slowly changed over time, but that's part of what keeps crime in some neighborhoods and not in other neighborhoods, it creates the boundaries, almost criminal logical gerrymandering in a sense where... I'm gonna actually write that one down...
0:26:13.3 SC: Yeah, that's good. I like that.
0:26:16.0 AP: But it's pretty much what you have. If you're a powerful ward boss, you can get services, cops will come, they will do sweeps and serve warrants, and the last thing which is so important in Chicago is, of course, the utter lack of, I'm using the word reform broadly, but change in policing in this city. So I point to LA because LA had similar gangs to Chicago in the '90s, horrific scandals and policing. The Rampart scandal was one of the worst in the history of this country. It's no longer the worst. Chicago is beating it with the new Watts scandal, but it was one of the worst, and they had a consent decree and they had a massive shake-up of that department. Now, I'm not saying that's the solution, 'cause the same time LA did that, they also started their grid office, which was their public office for gun violence reduction. Chicago just started that office two years ago.
0:27:11.7 SC: Okay.
0:27:12.9 AP: So we haven't seen their reforms for the justice system, we haven't seen investment in on-the-ground community violence prevention, and our gangs and our politics were stuck essentially decades behind. So I think those are some of the key, key reasons that kind of keep our homicide levels higher, and I actually think we need to address all of those, starting from systemic racism all the way up to investments in community and violence intervention efforts to see real change in Chicago.
0:27:40.3 SC: But maybe the optimistic way of reading what you just said is that police reform and changing in police practices or neighborhood, I don't know, outreach practices, etcetera, could potentially have a really big positive impact.
0:27:55.2 AP: I think they can. I think the key is you have to do them all at once. So I think going back to the networks we study like, yeah, you can stop bleeding in networks, but the network is huge and it's gonna win, so unless you do something to mitigate, say, people's entrance into the network or dissipate, say, segregation that can do those sorts of things, you're just gonna... You're just gonna try to stop the water from coming through the dam in some ways. So for example, when you look at trying to change policing efforts and investment in community-based violence prevention efforts and then Chicago's... Again, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's the largest single investment in community violence intervention in the city's history, upwards of $36 million, has a police budget of 2 billion, right, and we have... Excuse me, we have 12,000 police officers and we have 200 street outreach workers in the city. So you're trying to build a profession of, say, street outreach with good investment for the first time ever, but it's not on par with what it even needs to be close to being so. I think you have to kind of get those things...
0:29:10.4 AP: And I did mention in LA, they both had some serious efforts at changing the structure of policing as they were also increasing investments in community violence prevention, and they were doing those things at the same time, and if you look at Los Angeles today and their grid office, they have officers that are assigned to these community places... Is the relationship always great? No. But there is information sharing, there are accountability mechanisms in place, and there are just some things that we need to figure out that we're just starting. I actually do think that the starting of the office... Excuse me, the expansion of the office for violence prevention in Chicago was great. The state of Illinois also just created its own office for violence prevention. That is hugely important. It turns out there are other cities in Illinois, and some of them need a lot of help, and they haven't been getting attention because of the dominance of Chicago in the public narrative.
0:30:06.9 SC: I wanted to ask more about the gangs, 'cause clearly they play an important role and I suspect that the typical person's view of gangs and how they work, etcetera, it doesn't perfectly match up with the reality of it, especially since you said how Chicago was especially a prevalent case, whereas since I lived in both Chicago and LA, if you asked me, I would have said LA is the gang city much more than Chicago is. Is that just 'cause I'm out of date?
0:30:32.8 AP: Yeah, it's just...
0:30:32.9 SC: Things have changed.
0:30:34.0 AP: You haven't realized Chicago's special-ness enough, essentially. So I don't know enough about LA in terms of its neighborhood factors. I would assume it's more similar than dissimilar to Chicago, but today, street gangs in Chicago crews, cliques, they're much smaller than they were in their heyday of the '90s. They're very neighborhood-based. There are some groups that are still more organized and involved in high-level criminal activities, but very few. There are, by some estimates, 900 small cliques and crews in the city of Chicago, and most of them, again, are bound to a particular neighborhood, a couple of blocks that they have been. Their history goes back years and years and years and decades, but the dynamics change quickly, a lot of it has to do with, in Chicago, it's tied to, again, old disputes, new disputes, things that might flare up online and could lead to offline violence, which happens, but not as often as the media would have you think. But they're small, they're small crews that are really tied to a neighborhood and their friends, and that part is not as different than groups in other cities. It's this long legacy, right? The length with which people can trace back their ties to such and such a group goes back generations, and it has meaning, gives meaning to life.
0:32:04.8 AP: So sometimes it's a voice of resistance, sometimes it's a voice of protection, and that's one of the things that happens as a real simple example when you ask people how they find their guns. The idea of a gang, the fundamental reason people join gangs, is for protection, which is the same reason people buy guns. And who in Chicago are more likely to have guns? Gang members. So if you're feeling you need protection, safety in numbers, and they have access to weapons, that's kind of a dangerous mix for the people who are involved because it really does... The truth is the more you're involved, the more likely you are to get harmed, and even though you need safety, and that fact, that fact that people feel so unsafe they're willing to do things they know will make them less safe speaks to just the level of need there is to make people, especially young people, feel safe in schools, in their community, in their homes, and that's a tall order. That's a tall order that is not just one system or one agency, it's definitely a whole level thing.
0:33:10.8 SC: And so it's not just the essence of what is going on with the gangs here. It's not Al Capone, a machine that is like doing big high level crime or anything like that. It's more like a local, social, us against the world kind of thing. If I'm a kid growing up in a certain block of Chicago, what you're telling me is that life is tough, it's dangerous out there, and I'm gonna seek safety in the gang that has been either running, I guess, or at least involved with my block for decades now.
0:33:44.6 AP: That's right. And I just wanted to just reiterate again, if there are 900 crews in Chicago, there are probably a handful that are actively involved in some organized stuff, and every year, every other year, you'll see a big federal case from the US Attorney's Office. Those four or five groups that are involved in that should be treated in that way, figure out the activities, but that means 895 of them are not. [chuckle] And so the danger when it comes to policy is that you treat those 895 or 885 as if they were Al Capone or The Gangster Disciples of the '90s, or whatever the case might be, and they're just not. And that's the slippery slope with gang policies. Gangs become a catch-all for everything bad and evil and the boogie man, and in reality, most are as you described, a crew of people on the block who are protecting themselves and their friends. And by the way, sometimes avenging them and that creates problems that need resolution for sure, but I think, again, I think our US Attorney's Office in Illinois makes these big cases 'cause they can, 'cause it's happening, but we have to remember that most groups are not that.
0:34:55.6 AP: Most groups are these sort of side corner groups, and some of them are a little bit bigger, but they're small, and the history is there, and it's tied to a very specific place that's been segregated and locked up and locked out for generations.
0:35:10.5 SC: Other than just sort of mutual protection or even just socializing, are the gangs also involved in the drug trade or petty crimes or protection rackets, anything like that? I don't know what the life of a gang member is really like, to be honest.
0:35:23.4 AP: I think... So I think the best way to describe delinquent or criminal activity of gangs is a cafeteria style, which is most groups do a little of this, a little of that. We sell something, we steal something, we're bored, we had a party, we had a fight. Most of it is not extremely well thought out or planned, quite the opposite, most of it's very haphazard. Violence is ever-present in their lives. It occupies, consumes, traumatizes and re-traumatizes, but they don't spend every... In fact, they spend most of their days in total compliance with the law playing video games, looking at social media, hanging out, basically what young people do or people in their 20s do, most of it is not spent thinking about or engaging in crime, but violence is ever present, it really does consume all of their energy and time, but it's not something they're engaging in constantly. If that were true, the levels of violence would be even worse than they are, but it's not... It's sporadic, it's rare, but traumatic and lingers like a ghost on the block that haunts them and re-haunts them.
0:36:39.0 SC: I'm kind of intrigued by the role of social media here, which I had never really thought of. Are the gangs insulting each other on Twitter or... How is this working?
0:36:50.0 AP: So I'm gonna have to defer to some of my great colleagues, Forrest Stuart at Stanford, Desmond Patton at Columbia, and Jeffrey Lane at Rutgers. It's complicated. So first of all, I don't know anybody between 14 and say 26 who's not on social media. So it's important to distinguish, this is just normal behavior, being on social media, connecting, ribbing people, trolling people, it's not necessarily nice behavior, trolling people, but it's just part of...
0:37:23.6 AP: I have teenagers myself. It's just part of what we do as a society. What's happening on social media is people are using it to taunt rivals, to disrespect rivals, to honor their friends, as one of our colleagues, Desmond Patton, talks about, to express grief deeply in ways that are hard to do in other spaces. All of that's playing out online. The vast majority of these things that happen online never end up in violence. They are in fact ways to do symbolic violence, which is not good either, to be clear. The problem is, of course, when it does lead to offline violence, and we don't actually know enough about it yet to understand what it does. It does seem... In my assessment, it does seem to make things ramp up much more quickly because it's non-stop, right? And it can... Especially where music is concerned, real music, you can tell your story, or you can... It's out there and now other people can view it, so it's almost public, it's public displays, people are watching and seeing and reacting, which is not then different than what people do offline, except it's immediate and you have a broader audience...
0:38:37.4 SC: It can spread very... Go viral, right? Yeah.
0:38:39.1 AP: It could spread very quickly. But again, the link between online and offline violence is it's hard to make it causal, but it definitely does happen, and I think people are working on it to try and understand how can that be used? Because I will also tell you, outreach workers in the city use it to calm things down as well, right? So you can use those tools and there are plenty of people talking about, well, can we have trained social workers in this space or people that can respond and outreach workers and violence prevention are sort of doing that naturally. But again, it's sort of part of what you do, you got somebody's name, you look them up, you Google them, right? So of course, it's gonna permeate that part of work and culture as well.
0:39:20.5 SC: Part of me wants to say that we should try to replace actual fights with guns on the streets with fights in World of Warcraft or something like that, but I think you're probably... You're implying maybe that if they did that, it would just spill over into the streets anyway, so maybe that's not the right thing to do but...
0:39:36.9 AP: Well, again, I think we just need to take stock of where we are as a society, this is not new, right? We used to... The 1940s, there were entire senatorial hearings on Mickey Mouse and comic books and MAD Magazine, because it was a new form of media or record hearings around Ozzy Osbourne or NWA. This is a common theme, this is just the latest way of things kind of getting out there, but the speed with which it happens is quite different, of course, 'cause it's immediate and it can kinda... There are some thing that don't get to calm down as much.
0:40:06.8 SC: And you mentioned a little bit, but I wanted to focus in on just for a second, the role of the police in this. It can be for better or for worse, I imagine. Do you think that there's an issue where police are just sort of ignoring certain neighborhoods, letting things go, or is it that there's a strategy that is just ill-suited to the circumstances in these certain neighborhoods?
0:40:29.4 AP: Well, it's... So yes and yes. I think, again, the crime map in Chicago about which neighborhoods have the highest levels of violence hasn't changed in this century, so it's not a secret to anybody how those places are policed or, of course, severe, right? And in fact, it's changed and between the '60s and the '80s, the cry was there was no police presence, and now we're on the other end of the spectrum where everything is hyper surveilled. So I think the idea of being constantly surveilled and constantly incarcerated or stopped is still true. I think it is a tragic way of life, and it hasn't changed, and I think that's kind of what some of the calls are. There are things in, of course, policing that... And again, what we know about a policing that is associated with gun violence reductions, it's actually limited, very small and very precise, it's the opposite of stop and frisk, right? So policing that is known to have an impact on gun violence tends to focus on a small number of people, a small number of places and a small number of behaviors, which is an argument for more focused rather than broadened policing powers and policing activity.
0:41:42.2 AP: There's still a lot of problems which can 'cause damage, of course, as well, if you get the wrong people or you're looking at the wrong behaviors, but by and large, the research suggests that focused policing is much more impactful on levels of gun violence than expansion of it, but they continually show up in the same neighborhoods time and time and time again, so neighborhoods are subjected to the same sorts of surveillance and policing, and it spills over into schools and parks and libraries and sort of other spaces as well.
0:42:10.6 SC: So I think this is where the network analysis stuff that you mentioned earlier begins to come in. There's a network of people... Let me just ask the obvious question. Are we talking about networks of victims of shootings or networks of people shooting other people?
0:42:25.5 AP: So great question. So when I'm talking... The networks are created through instances of co-arrest or being stopped together by the police, so it is actually setting aside anything around culpability, it's an observation made by police at a point in time and space. There are biases in police data, which are important. We're able to see a lot of those. So say, failure to comply often is something that's officer-based. Robbery, assault, arson, things like that tend to be coming to the attention of police from civilians, so we take all those things to account. But basically, if you and I rob somebody together, we have a tie, and then if I committed an assault with somebody else, we have a tie and you string these things together, and it creates actually a network of risky behaviors, right, things that are inherently, you and I are engaging in a behavior that could be risky.
0:43:26.0 AP: But to your comment about victim and suspect or people that are involved, I focus mainly on victims. One, because in Chicago, we have abysmally low clearance rates, but more to the point, violence prevention is about saving lives, and focusing on who's in harm's way, who's experiencing trauma is the kind of most immediately actionable information, and we generally have all of the information about who was injured, and from a public health standpoint, it shouldn't matter whether you have a felony conviction or are a bad parent, or you dropped out of school, none of that should matter if you're focusing on saving somebody's life. So the focus tends to be on victims, but the victims and suspects and sort of everybody else who's involved, they're all in the same network basically, but really valuing the life and prioritizing that is really key as we think about how you use these things for intervention purposes.
0:44:25.3 SC: But as far as your data are concerned, then, if there is someone who gets shot just as an accident or was an innocent bystander during a robbery, they would still count as in your network 'cause you're not trying to... You're not deciding ahead of time. That doesn't count.
0:44:41.9 AP: Correct, correct. They're in there, and by the way, one of the things we learn by having them in there is many of these sort of stray bullet incidents aren't that far stray, they're tragic. They weren't the intended target, but they were literally standing next to somebody who was and so... And by the way, this often happens... And you can change the name of the individual. I often do this when I go to different cities. I'll describe a seven-year-old who got shot at a park or a birthday party, and their parent or their cousin was the intended target, and we hear about the young seven-year-old, but we don't hear about the 27-year-old who was holding their hand, and so tragic, but not random, right? And that's...
0:45:26.8 SC: Well, I guess that's... That was gonna be my next question. I mean, are there... Do we count also people who are clearly related, either socially or biologically to the person in the network or an associate of them or... How much subjectivity versus objectivity is involved in drawing the lines between who's in a network and who's not?
0:45:48.5 AP: In our particular case, we still rely on a metric that we have for everybody, right? So if we have all of the, say, arrests in Chicago, that's what includes you in the sample, which by the way, to your point means we're severely underestimating relationships.
0:46:04.7 SC: Got it. Okay, good.
0:46:05.5 AP: Right? So if you rob a bank with somebody, it's probably not a stranger, it's probably somebody you know, could be kin, could be a neighbor, it could be somebody... A classmate. It's probably somebody you've known a long time, but we don't have that information. At a minimum we have, we were connected at least once, sometimes more than once, but we're probably underestimating behavior, and of course, most incidents never get reported to the police to begin with, so we're continuing... So our estimates are extremely conservative if you have information like you're talking about, and we see this qualitatively, like when we're working with partners or we're trying to understand more about a particular neighborhood or a group or whatever, then we start to get into this information and to your point, yeah, somebody's former romantic partner or their neighbor of 20 years, or their cousin, or their uncle, but we just don't have that systematically, but qualitatively, it seems to be true, but I don't have it at the same level of analysis as these other instances.
0:47:07.8 SC: You kind of begin to see, as a scientist, why the surveillance state is so attractive because we'd have so much more data if we just tracked everybody who knew everything about them, and could plug it into a computer. I'm not actually in favor of a very high level surveillance state like that, but the data would be cleaner if we knew everything.
0:47:24.0 AP: So nor I'm I, to be clear, and also to be clear, we're using publicly available arrest records, so we're not using CCTV, license plate readers. All of those things are a totally different level, again, going to... We rely on basically public data, you can go to your court and get arrest records. We're just looking at the digital versions of those, which again, in most cases, are available. We don't even have to FOIA them, but you could. It's just a matter of looking at them slightly differently. Of course, the surveillance state in that way is also... Goes horribly wrong. I know you were teasing. We're on tape here. I wanna make sure that we state very clearly what we are doing and what we are not doing.
0:48:12.0 SC: You're not allowed to joke on the podcast without immediately saying that was a joke, otherwise people will take it out of context. That's absolutely true. But that does bring up the prospect of perhaps, or maybe it's already happening, collaborating with either police departments or public health agencies or something like that. You say that you just see publicly available data, but are there further perspective investigations in the future where you use other kind of data sets.
0:48:37.8 AP: So you named two... So short answer is, there's lots of potential uses for the science, but you've name two agencies that use them very differently. You mentioned the police and public health entities, there's a third one which I'm working, which are community-based entities. Police have used these technologies and approaches and it hasn't gone extremely well, and it hasn't gone extremely well because they've done typically what police do, they get some print out, they make a list, and then do what cops do, which is they work a list, and whoever's on the top of the list is number one and whoever's number two is number two, and that's how policing tends to work. They work calls, they work lists, which is problematic when it's something that's imperfect like data and analytics, right? When you look at the predictions or when you look at these statistical models, they're pretty good. They give you information, but if you follow them blindly, it's problematic. It's especially problematic when it's done from the arm of the state that treats a victim like an offender.
0:49:46.8 SC: Sure.
0:49:47.4 AP: So as soon as we start going into this world of trying to find a suspect or trying to find, and I quote, "offender," there's this little thing called the constitution and even bigger thing called morality about how do you that in a way that's fair and just and transparent, and we haven't seen that done successfully yet in the policing context.
0:50:05.7 AP: In the public health context, the science is exactly the science of contact tracing, it's literally finding out who's in harm's way, getting resources to keep them safe, and it can be done successfully, and we've seen this done by the way, in other epidemics, the HIV epidemic, when have outbreaks of other infectious diseases. COVID is one example, but COVID spreads much more quickly than gun violence, it's an airborne pathogen, right, and so it's harder to contain COVID. Gun violence is relational. So it does not... It's more like a blood-borne pathogen than an airborne pathogen, but you're still tracing these patterns. This is what street outreach workers do, which is... The last thing I'll mention where we're trying to find the use is street outreach workers, these people with a lived experience that are trying to stop disputes, they literally place themselves in these networks. That's how they do their job, they're trying to figure out what are the active disputes, how do I get myself situated in there such that we reduce harm? That's a perfect use for it. That's not tied to overly harsh penalties or removing somebody's liberties, also not without potential problems, but there are ways we've done this again in public health that I think offer at least a starting point to use it.
0:51:29.8 AP: The last thing I'll say in this comparison is when you think about science, right, science is providing some tools. How do we use that tool? So when you think about spatial models, well, it can help get a fire truck to the scene of a fire more quickly, or it can be used to direct a drone, same math, but the use is fundamentally different, and we need to be honest about how it's being used. As an academic, I try to say, "Here's what I think." I try to work with partners to make sure that happens, but science gets out there in peer-reviewed journals and anybody can pick it up and take and go with it. I'm trying to figure out ways to improve that approach, but it's tricky.
0:52:17.7 SC: Well, I love the fact that you bring up the idea that the cops just tend to have a list and work the list, and what you're doing is something a bit more sophisticated than that because you have more information than just an unordered list, and this is where it becomes a little mathy, a little sciency in a fun way. When you have these networks, so you have nodes who are people and they're connected by relationships. As far as I know, I'm not a super expert, but there are different kinds of networks. There are dense networks, sparse networks, small-world networks. Are there characteristic features of the kinds of networks that you're seeing?
0:52:51.7 AP: So this is a great question. Let me also just say when you talk about... We all live in these worlds, right, and we all know a lot about our own small world, and so when you bring these images, say, the street outreach workers or teachers... My sister is a teacher, and we often talk about what... I was like, "Tell me what's going on in your school." She starts describing, and I see network images, right? So if you have that image, if you have the road map, the whole road map and you have experts that can be like, "Let me tell you about this network," I can only say you and I robbed somebody together, but then somebody is saying, "Now, let me tell you, Sean and Andy played football together, and Sean used to date Andy's sister, and then they broke up and then he would hung out... " All of a sudden, the context becomes important, and you only get that by engaging local experts, good preachers, teachers, cops, outreach workers, social workers, they know a community or they should know a community. That's what makes this information actionable, and that's what didn't happen in some of these instances, like if you're just working a list, you don't care whether Sean's already got a job and turned his life around, he's on the list, right?
0:54:04.2 AP: What similarities are we seeing in these networks, what are we seeing? To answer your other question, one, they're super small and they're super concentrated, so even when you think of a neighborhood that's disproportionately impacted by gun violence with, say, 40,000 people, this network has a couple hundred people in it, it's very small. It's also not secret. That's the other thing, if you actually talked to folks, they'll be like, "Oh, there's a crew over here, who's in the crew." They can tell you these things. So it requires, again, being really connected to community approaches or the community itself to make it actionable, so it clusters. It's very small, and this is true in most communities, in most cities, regardless of city size, regardless of the size of the neighborhood, it's a very small part of any community that is actively engaged in these things, and then of course, the other kind of thing we're seeing which is more the rule than the exception, is gunshot victimization cluster, they clump together. So even within this space, this social space, there's still a pocket where these shootings cluster, which again, when you think about the implications for immediate intervention, setting aside large scale interventions that are needed to keep people out of these networks in the first place, it means you're talking about focused interventions that can reach people as opposed to broad-scale stop and frisk, right?
0:55:35.4 AP: It's the opposite of that, it's... It's kind of focusing on particular behaviors, particular individuals, particular geographic locations. And that's where the attention is. And you can do that with therapy, you can do that with interventions, you can do that with jobs, you do that with schools, but you also have to know what are those individuals in that network need. Do they already have high school diplomas? Do they already have jobs? Maybe they don't need a job 'cause they really have one, spoiler alert, they need jobs. [chuckle] But if I already have a job, the job program is not appealing. If I already have a high school diploma, I don't need a GED program. We are smart enough as humans to be able to figure out what individuals who are in, say, a small network need. You ask them, actually, or you ask people who know them, "Hey, there are these 20 folks in your neighborhood, do you know them? What do they need?" And then you can kind of direct accordingly, it can't just be, "Everybody needs to do these three things, go." It has to be like, "What are we learning about the problem?" It might not involve groups or gangs, it might be a family dispute, it might be intimate partner violence. It's important to know that, and every neighborhood is a little different.
0:56:45.5 AP: In Chicago, Latino communities have a very different sort of gang presence still than Black communities, they're just... They're different groups. You can't do... You can't cut and paste. You gotta understand the context. Conversely, Black communities don't have to fear ICE the way Latino communities did especially under Trump. There was a clear fear that rose during those four years that changed the dynamic of people talking to people. And you wouldn't expect that, say, in a Black community in Chicago.
0:57:14.7 SC: Well, I'm not sure how helpful it is to your research, but I do have to ask about the topology of these networks. Are they situations where there's like a set... A very, very, very small set of super influencers who know everybody, or is it that everybody else in the network knows everybody else? I mean that I would presumably suggest different strategies for dealing with things.
0:57:38.6 AP: So there are different topologies. The general rule is in networks, but we also see this where violence is concerned. Most people have one or two ties, most people, most humans, we're talking about people, they age out of crime. When you think about young men in particular, young men in particular do a lot of risky stupid things until they're 26, 27 years old. This is true of humanity. And so that's what we see. Most people have one or two ties. And then there are some people that have a lot of ties. And the people that have a lot of ties are hubs, they are... You use the word influencer. We can think about super spreaders, right?
0:58:27.3 SC: Yeah.
0:58:28.1 AP: This idea that they are people who navigate different sorts of networks and bring stuff with them. And part of what we're seeing is that those folks are especially vulnerable 'cause they are... Again, let's just use the context of street crews or gangs. If you're hanging around with one gang, we know it increases your rate of victimization. But if you're starting to hang around with two or three or four different crews and those crews don't like each other, either you have some kind of pre-disposition to make everybody like you or you're really putting yourself out there. And you can be putting out there for all sorts of reasons, family ties that [0:59:08.0] ____.
0:59:11.4 AP: It could be an inadvertent ties about schools or sports, or you could be running a scam or an operation, or you could actually be engaging in dealing firearms or drugs. Whatever, I don't know. But that person who's connecting disconnected parts of the networks, they're unique and there aren't as many of them. Most folks have one or two times and it's not even a... It's not a, let's say, big deal. It is a big deal 'cause it puts them in harm's way, but it's not for stuff... We're not talking about kingpins. Most of the people that are caught up in these spaces are just regular folks doing their thing.
0:59:48.2 SC: I mean, I guess that's the point. The short lesson here is that it's not really a dictatorship with one person ruling everything and telling everyone what to do. It sounds like it's a little bit more organic with people knowing each other and knowing each other.
1:00:03.5 AP: Yeah, that's right. I think... Let me... Just to say one important caveat. There's... And then let's put this in scale. Right now, it's hard to estimate. There are about 900 crews, gangs in Chicago. The way vast majority of them are these neighborhood-based, small entities, which is a departure from Chicago in the '90s, of course, but most of them are these street crews, 20 guys, very informal structures. There are absolutely one or two or three, maybe even 10 groups that are more organized and really involved in deeper criminal activities. On those 10, though, it turns out the law enforcement knows how to make cases on those 10. They've been doing it for years. The mistake is when you treat those other 890 like those 10, which is those other 890, which is the majority of the groups, they're just different. They are... It's not an on/off switch. It's a toggle switch. We have this crew, it's from the block, there's some family ties in it. If somebody gets hurt, we rally together and things get amped up, and then it kinda just calms down, and then I get a job, and I leave, or I have a kid and I stop hanging out. It's much more amorphous than that, which makes it a little scarier in some ways 'cause you don't have these nice, neat categories, gang A, gang B, gang C, gang D. It's messy.
1:01:33.2 AP: Unlike Chicago in the '90s, people liked it. There was this nation, there was that nation, we didn't get along. I could draw a schematic, everybody understood it. It's not like that anymore. And it's not like that in most cities in the US. So what we're... Yeah.
1:01:46.1 SC: Part of your ambition obviously is just as an academic, you wanna understand what's going on, but you also want to do some good here because it does seem like there's room for doing some good and the good to be done is not just help to arrest people who shoot others, but to prevent it from happening ahead of time, to give some warning. Can you say a little bit about how we would imagine in a very specific way, what we would do to lower the chances that someone is going to be a victim of one of these shootings?
1:02:16.5 AP: Yeah, so I think the first thing, if we take the lessons we've learned, and again, I wanna stress that this is more of the triage approach, but you do need to combine it with thinking about these bigger issues, like keeping people out of these networks in the first place. When there's an event, when there's a shooting, saturating that part of the network with a trauma response could be life-saving, which is you can help mitigate retaliation, which happens in about a third of the cases in Chicago, but more than that, if you reduce the trauma of the people involved, you are saving lives. And we're starting to see this in hospital-based programs as well. They're starting treating the victim's trauma immediately, and the victim's family's trauma immediately by trying to connect them with services, by trying to divert aggression, by trying to really understand and unpack the health consequences of individuals that are involved. I think that's one of the most promising things, but we're still learning a lot about that.
1:03:23.1 AP: So one of the differences in our prior research on, say, PTSD, a lot of which, say, comes from veterans, veterans have, in theory, left the war zone as it were, they're not home, and so how do you re-integrate a vet into their home life, which is in theory, safe? A lot of the people who are caught up in shootings, they go right back to the same block, they were shot 600 feet away from their home and they walk past that every day. And so they're re-traumatized simply by living in the same neighborhood and they see the people that shot them.
1:04:02.3 AP: So it's different. It's new. And understanding that element that you have to deal with the trauma and people that are continually re-exposed to it, and then somebody else gets shot on the same block, that's unique and we need to really triple down on that and invest in it and understand that it is different than other contexts and it's also thinking about... It's not like the public health system has a glowing report card from Black and other non-White communities in this country. There's cynicism, there's estrangement, there's all of these things that have been done, Tuskegee experiments and beyond, that we need to understand in this context.
1:04:49.7 AP: But I do think responding to precise parts of a network quickly can reduce some of the trauma. It won't eliminate it. I think it's... When we get into this world and we use words like prediction, chasing that as the answer is not the solution, understanding it's more information that you can respond to quickly, that's kind of the key, in my opinion.
1:05:17.2 SC: But let me just try to...
1:05:19.3 AP: Figuring out how to respond quickly... Yeah.
1:05:19.5 SC: Let me just try to distinguish between what seem natural and obvious to me, which is that literally the family members that go to the hospital with the shooting victim deserves some care and attention to help them get over this trauma, but then, are you suggesting that there are people that you can identify as being in the network with that victim, even though they don't go to the hospital, even though they weren't there, but is there a broader strategy just to warn people or help them lower their chances of being part of the cycle of violence?
1:05:53.3 AP: Well, that's a good question. I think for folks that have been in... And shoutout to other first responders in this space. When you're in a hospital room after a shooting, it is a microcosm of the neighborhood and the dispute in many cases, so not only of the victim and their family or somebody showing up there, so are the police. Oftentimes, other people are injured as well. And so you have in a matter of minutes or hours, you have the victim, the victim's family, the police, the healthcare system, potentially child and protective services, who's in... Everybody is converging in this time and place while somebody's going through the worst moment of their life. And so it is an opportunity to see and be firsthand proximate to those folks that you might not have information on and reach them. And by the way, when I talk about family, I don't... Just going back to the parts of our conversation, the average age of a homicide victim in Chicago is 27 and a half years old, it's almost 28 years old.
1:07:01.7 AP: When we look at some of the programs who are serving this population, a good chunk of those 27 and 28-year-olds have kids. So you now have a child whose parent has been shot, potentially murdered, might be incarcerated, and we talk about a cycle of violence, that's an instance where the cycle of violence is occurring, a child experiencing this trauma, now having to have a parent who's dead, incarcerated, or injured. That kid needs some attention, too. Right?
1:07:33.6 SC: Right.
1:07:34.2 AP: Getting that... And when we work with outreach organizations and are dealing with folks that are injured and have survived, I can't tell you the number of times people said, "I wish this was there when I was 12, or when I was in middle school," or, "What about my little cousin?" or "What about my kid that had access to these things?" So thinking about those moments when you can make those connections to non-punitive ways to improve people's lives, I think those are opportunities. To be clear, I think this space is... People are innovating right now because we haven't done this, and especially as we're in a time when there's an increase in gun violence nationwide, the potential for innovation is huge, but it means we gotta listen to folks that are doing the work, and it's to listen to doctors, first responders, community violence preventionists, educators, social workers. There's lots of folks that know a lot about this that are there. How do we boost the things we think are helpful, and how do we turn down the things we think are potentially harmful?
1:08:35.8 SC: Which makes me wonder, I mean, coming the other way, do you find that those people who you just listed, as well as the law enforcement side of things, do they listen to you as the ivory tower academic from Evanston coming in and saying, "You really need some more network theory in your life?"
1:08:53.6 AP: Well, yeah, of course they listen to me. No. I like to think they listen to me. I should be more precise and say I get invited to these spaces and to be clear, I'm honored to be in those spaces, because I'm also invited into, again, from neighborhood organizations to the state houses, and I'm glad that I'm in those spaces and I appreciate being in those spaces. I think they listen. The understanding that some of these things don't work on an election cycle is tricky, or funding cycle is tricky, but I think people inherently understand the importance of under contexts and networks. I think we err in the policy realm towards individual explanations. And as a sociologist, as a social scientist, crime rates are way more than people making bad decisions. That's an overly simplistic view of crime and violence. But... You laugh. That's where a lot of our programming and responses are, trying to get people to make better decisions.
1:10:04.7 AP: Now, let's be clear, plenty of people make bad decisions. I'm not saying people don't have choices and everything is forced. People make choices. Choices are a ton. So if you feel unsafe, if you feel your life is in danger to you carrying a gun even if you're prohibited because the state is not there for you, it is a reasonable choice. But then it comes back to, why are there so many guns in my neighborhood? Why is the state failing to protect me? And why am I in harm's way to begin with? All of those things, they have nothing to do with your choice.
1:10:35.5 SC: You just froze.
1:10:37.0 AP: They have everything to do with the context in which you live. And that part is harder to kinda think about in just an individual response. And going back to something we said earlier, if you follow the program and you have 100% attendance and you get shot, does the program fail because your opposition didn't change their behavior, even if you as an individual changed your behavior? It gets really, really complicated really fast. Even when you see approaches that are trying to focus on individuals and change behaviors, which is important, again, you don't want people carrying guns, you want people to make better decisions, you want them to get complete education and so on. You're gonna have individuals who complete the programs with 100% attendance, who stopped carrying guns, but the neighborhood hasn't changed. And so they're victimized not because they're still involved, but because the opposition is still involved.
1:11:34.1 AP: And so if you're not paying attention to the context, all of a sudden what looks like an individual failure isn't. And it's tricky 'cause, again, you wanna reach people and have services, but understanding context is so key and thinking about neighborhood level interventions, how do you understand the dynamics in the whole neighborhood, how do you understand all these other reasons, we can't keep our eye off of that. So we can't just... We have to move beyond purely individual solutions, though we need plenty of individual solutions as well. We need everything. But I do like to just caution that how we understand patterns is much more than just individuals.
1:12:17.5 AP: Going back to networks, networks aren't about one person. They're about a system. It's a system's approach to understanding these things and that involves understanding dynamics and time and context and all the other things that are involved. And then you can kind of zoom in and out when you need an individual approach, it's an individual approach, when you need something larger, it should be something larger and do it all at once. PS. So...
1:12:41.5 SC: Well you've certainly given us a lot to think about. Let me just, maybe for a final thought, ask whether or not this kind of way of thinking about things extends to the other kinds of gun violence that we opened the podcast talking about, about suicides, mass shootings. You've been talking, focusing on a specific way the gun violence happens. Are there broader lessons to be drawn for this way-higher-than-it-should-be number of shootings that we have in our country?
1:13:08.6 AP: Yeah. It's hard because I don't study... I don't study suicide, but because suicide seems isolated, it's actually almost the inverse. So when we think about what we know about suicide attempts, say, among high school-aged students, we actually know that those that have sparse networks or no networks have more suicide attempts. Slightly different though than the types of networks that we're talking about. So there's potentially some relationships, but I don't think it's the same pattern just given the isolations. It's really hard to understand mass shootings in this context only because, again, in most cases, the target has some network-related purpose, my former school, my current school, a lover, a workplace that I was involved in. So it's not a random connection in some instances, but it's not quite as clustered as you might think. Again, thinking about warning signs, red flags, even in the domestic violent situations, intimate partner violence, red flags kinda tell you, it's still not random, still a network, we have an intimate relationship, but it's slightly different. And I don't know enough about it to say. I think that becomes important.
1:14:34.9 SC: As usual, this is a perfect place to end in the sense that you just said you don't know enough, which is good. I like it when people say they don't know enough about something, not everyone is willing to do that and occasionally, it's exactly the right thing to say. So Andrew Papachristos, thanks very much for being on The Mindscape Podcast.
1:14:50.9 AP: It was a pleasure, I really appreciate it, and happy to follow up on anything.
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Sounds like Andrew Papachristos has a good plan for alleviating gang related violence in urban areas. He emphasizes that in order to be effective social workers who take part in the program have to become personally involved in the communities that are at most risk in order to spot warning signs of violence, and to be on hand to treat traumatized victims, families of victims and associates in order to prevent retaliation if it does occur.