Today's episode of Issues Forums features a conversation with three of the city's preeminent criminologists and an anti-violence activist whose son was a victim of gun violence. They sat down to try to hash out some possible solutions to this city's most high-profile problem: crime, specifically, the skyrocketing murder rate.
Putting together a forum on this issue was a no-brainer. We learned from our trips throughout the region with the Counter Intelligence crew that crime was an issue, even in places that are relatively safe.
That anecdotal evidence was backed up throughout the primary election season by a number of polls, including each of the Keystone polls.
The primary candidates were not blind to this reality. Each of them released some sort of plan for dealing with violent crime. In fact, Dwight Evans based his entire campaign on making the city safer, "one block at a time." The most controversial, most discussed plan was, of course, Democratic nominee Michael Nutter's "Safety Now" plan which puts forward the goal of "Ten Weeks to a Safer Philadelphia."
While most of the discussion in the media and by the other candidates distilled Nutter's plan down to the phrase "Stop and Frisk," the plan (16 pages) actually goes a lot deeper, offering both short term and long term ideas for reducing the crime rate.
So check out the video and see what our guests offer as solutions for the crime problem, then compare that to Nutter's and Taubenberger's (which we'll link to when it's available) entire crime plans (not just the phrase "Stop and Frisk").
For some background info, here is some of the work of Professor Sherman that deals with Community Policing and selections from his book "Evidence-Based Crime Prevention" made available by Google Books.
Professor Harris, according to Temple's website, is "writing a book on the topic of matching delinquent youths to programs that builds on four decades of research on intervention-oriented classification systems and attempts to answer the question, What works with whom under what circumstances?"
A lot of Professor Kefalas' work focuses on the "family, community, culture, and class." And Dorothy Johnson-Speight is well known for her work the group, Mothers in Charge.