John Jay College - The Center on Crime Prevention and Control

The Center for Crime Prevention and Control fosters innovative crime reduction strategies through hands-on fieldwork, action research, and operational partnerships with law enforcement, communities, social service providers, and other practitioners.

The Center is actively engaged in crime prevention initiatives in jurisdictions around the country and the world. It is particularly focused on issues affecting our most vulnerable communities: gangs and other violent groups, gun violence and gun trafficking, overt drug markets, and domestic violence. It is also focused on repairing relationships between those communities and law enforcement; strengthening communities; and reducing arrest and incarceration.

Much of the Center's work operates from a framework in which law enforcement, communities, and outreach and social service providers directly engage with offenders to set standards, offer help, and establish clear consequences for continued offending. This framework has produced the "Operation Ceasefire" model gang violence reduction strategy, the "High Point" drug market strategy, and is being further developed for other important public safety issues.

In June 2009, the Center launched the NATIONAL NETWORK FOR SAFE COMMUNITIES, composed of more than 50 cities successfully using these strategies around the nation and committed to their continued development and broader implementation.

FEATURES

"Opposing Cultures" Join Forces to Rethink America's Criminal Justice Crisis
Conservatives are starting to realize that it is “far too invasive, expensive and destructive to continue incarcerating every wrongdoer for every infraction.” Liberals are starting to believe that a groundswell among small-government conservatives could be just what is needed to take crime prevention approaches—aimed at reducing both violent crime and incarceration—nationwide. Newsweek reports how Center Director David Kennedy is actively involved in forging these odd alliances to change the way we think about crime.

Elected officials across the nation from both political parties have begun to examine ways to replace a tough corrections policy with a smart one. This Governing article tracks the theories and successful approaches that are at the core of the new thinking, including the Center's violence reduction strategies.

Director David Kennedy, in an interview with MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan, explains why the Center's proven and resource-neutral violence reduction strategies have succeeded where traditional approaches to fixing the criminal justice system or supporting distressed communities have failed.

Director David Kennedy's unusual strategies for tackling gang violence have had startling results in many American Cities. In this interview with The Times, he discusses their broad application and how they may also offer a solution to recent social unrest in Britain.

In this op-ed for New York's Daily News, Director David Kennedy argues, "Stop-and-Frisk is the Wrong Approach: There are More Humane Ways to Combat Crime." Since then, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, in an op-ed for The Nation, and Professor James Forman Jr. of Yale Law School, in a New York Times op-ed, have added their voices to ever-growing concern over the New York Police Department's damaging stop-and-frisk policy, recommending the Center's strategies as "the most promising and thoroughly researched" approaches to addressing crime and overincarceration in minority communities.

In this podcast by the Los Angeles Public Library's Aloud Series, Director David Kennedy discusses inner-city violence and the launch of "Operation Ceasefire" in Los Angeles with LAPD Chief Charlie Beck.

The High Point Drug Market Strategy is a law enforcement / community partnership that collapses drug markets, reduces violence by directly engaging dealers and their families, creates predictable sanctions, and offers a range of services. Watch this video to learn how the High Point partnership successfully implemented the strategy.

The New Yorker
Annals of Crime: Don't Shoot
Faced with record murder rates and deep distrust of law enforcement among minority communities, Cincinnati turned to the group violence strategy developed by the Center for Crime Prevention and Control. The result was a transformation of the relationship between the police and the community and a 50 percent drop in gang-related homicides.

________________________________________________

The High Point Strategy: Its Creation, Implementation and Future
Tate Chambers, Legal Program Manager at the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, lays out the history of the High Point strategy and explores how it has been evolving from a theory into a national movement.

________________________________________________

Law professor Jeffrey Rosen, in an article< for The New York Times Magazine, examines new thinking about deterrence and finds that tested approaches, such as the Ceasefire group violence strategy and the High Point drug market intervention, offer real promise to address the criminal justice system's legitimacy crisis while reducing rates of violence and incarceration around the nation.

________________________________________________

Gil Kerlikowske, the director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy, cites the High Point Drug Market Strategy as one of two models "worth watching" when considering new approaches to drug law enforcement. Click here for the full interview.

________________________________________________

Tracey Meares, Yale Law School professor and a member of the Executive Board of the National Network for Safe Communities, talks about her violence prevention work in Chicago, the High Point Drug Market Strategy, and police/community relations.Click here for the webcast.

________________________________________________

At the 2008 National Institute of Justice Conference, David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control, talked about his work to combat drug markets, especially the High Point Drug Market Strategy, an innovative program that is now being replicated in at least 25 sites around the country. This article, Drugs, Race and Common Ground: Reflections on the High Point Intervention, is based on his remarks.

________________________________________________

Michael Blass, a career law enforcement officer working for the Ohio Attorney General, wrote this essay after observing the first offender call-in of Ohio's Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV) on July 31, 2007.