Hi! Happy…almost-mid-October?! Somehow?

Before we get to today’s Q&A, we wanted to highlight something that came up in our last interview with Laura Bennett: the FBI’s 2023 crime statistics. That data is out now, and it confirmed what more timely data sources had already told us: crime is down in nearly every category tracked by police, including, most notably, the largest reduction in murder since this data started to be recorded in 1960. We’re not data wonks, so we’ll leave the rest of the number crunching to experts like the folks at the Brennan Center who put together this helpful explainer. 

The increase and subsequent decrease in homicide was pretty historic and presents a rich vein of inquiry for journalists. What could cause such a dramatic change in nearly every small town, suburb, and big city in the United States? Certainly not small tweaks to local policing practices–what police do are doing in, say, Dallas does not affect homicide rates in every corner of the country. The obvious answer is the pandemic, but journalists have the opportunity to unpack exactly what happened during those years that led to such sharp changes in the murder rate. We’re also interested in stories about people’s perceptions of safety relative to what the data says. If people aren’t feeling safe, why not? (Maybe because their city is enveloped in chlorine gas from a chemical plant fire? Yes, we do live in Atlanta, in case you’ve forgotten!)

OK. All of this is a good way to tee up Jhumpa Bhattacharya, who is the co-founder of The Maven Collaborative and an expert on issues of racial, gender, and wealth equity, all of which are deeply connected to community safety. We asked Jhumpa to help us puzzle out some of the questions we were left with after our last interview, like what voters mean when they say they’re worried about crime and safety. 

Hannah and Josie: What does safety mean to you?

Jhumpa: Safety means the ability to be able to live your life with freedom and liberation. It means being able to thrive in the place that you live without fear of persecution or prosecution. It means choices.

Hannah and Josie: Similar question – what does wealth mean to you? How do you define it? 

Jhumpa: At the Maven Collaborative, our North Star is always wealth, and we have a pretty expansive definition of it. There’s the tangible definition of wealth of course – your assets minus your debts. But we try to ask our people that question; what does wealth mean to you? Black women often talk about things like safety. Yes, wealth means ‘I have enough money to thrive and buy a home and be safe.’ But wealth also means community. My community is safe. It means that my children have a roof over their heads, they have food on the table. And by children that they mean children of the community, not just people that they birthed or adopted, but the auntie economy, right? Wealth means being able to be healthy. So having clean water, land that is not poisoned, air that you can breathe. Wealth means that my communities are taken care of. 

Hannah and Josie: So wealth and safety are obviously deeply connected. What would you say to journalists who are covering public safety issues? What can they do better? 

Jhumpa: I think communities – particularly communities of color – sometimes think about safety in a very different way from journalists who report about safety. I live in Oakland. What do people think about when they hear about Oakland? They think about crime, but crime in a very specific sense – cars are being smashed, grocery stores getting robbed, that kind of stuff. And I'm not saying these aren’t real things. Violence is violence. But these aren’t the only kinds of violence happening. There’s economic violence. Communities that are completely disinvested in. For example, Oakland public schools are kind of crumbling. There isn't enough money in the budget to make sure everyone has a school that is walking distance from their home, and in Oakland there's no public school bus system, so parents are responsible for getting their kids to school while also working. That’s economic violence!

Hannah and Josie: Help people reconcile the differences between what we’re hearing about “the economy” and crime statistics and what people are actually feeling about their own safety and wellbeing. What does it mean for safety when we don’t invest in making neighborhoods livable, or acknowledging being in debt makes people feel unsafe, stuff like that? 

Jhumpa: We’re social beings. We inherently care about one another. When we see people suffering, it hurts us. Having to step over an unhoused person sleeping on the street…that does something to you on a soul level. We do inherently understand that we are interconnected. Fundamentally, people do “unsafe” things out of desperation. The more we restrict people's choices, the more desperate they become. 

Hannah and Josie: What other context is good for people covering public safety or crime to hear?

Jhumpa: Well, we aren't understanding the problem correctly. We're not diagnosing the problem correctly.  What we need is more money in communities. People aren’t inherently “bad”!  Most people do things like smash a car window or take something out of a trunk because they are desperate. If we gave them opportunities, if we actually allowed them to have good jobs – jobs that give them benefits, where they could actually live where they work… that’s getting to the root causes of violence, and these are the conversations we need to be having. But it is a longer trajectory. It’ll take more time to see the fruits of that labor, but look at the research. 

Jhumpa raised several points that we think present great opportunities for follow-up reporting:

• Talk to voters about what makes them feel safe (or unsafe). 

  • There is plenty of research to back up Jhumpa’s point that lots of things other than crime impact people’s sense of safety. One study found that vandalism, trash, vacant buildings, and even sidewalk quality significantly impact people’s perceptions of their neighborhood’s safety. Dr. Jennifer Robinette, at Chapman University, does a lot of research surrounding this stuff and could be a good source for more reporting. 

  • We wouldn’t be surprised to hear voters say that things like school transportation impact their sense of safety. We were both kinda floored to hear that Oakland doesn’t have a bus system for kids in public schools, but apparently it’s really not that uncommon. The state of California doesn’t require any districts to provide transportation to most students, and only about 8% of kids in the state get to school on a public bus compared with something more like 40% for the rest of the country. (Thanks Katrina Schwartz at KQED for that reporting!)

  • The Maven Collaborative has a family sustainability calculator that offers a more realistic picture of family wealth/financial vulnerability in California versus some of the federal stats. It’s looking at precarity through the lens of costs of housing, childcare, transportation, food, taxes, etc… This is a great jumping off point for conversations about safety with voters. 

• Informing voters about causes of and solutions to violence

  • Jhumpa raised an important point about the underlying forces that contribute to violence and other kinds of crime. While access to guns receives quite a bit of media attention (if not policy action), other drivers like income inequality and residential segregation come up less in most of the reporting we see. We’d love to see more reporting that informs people about these big-picture causes of violence (since, as we know, there are so many misperceptions about crime and safety in the US). 

• Voters are looking for solutions to crime and violence, and political candidates are making the case for a whole bunch of different approaches. The Prison Policy Initiative just published a helpful new resource that can help journalists vet policy claims made by political candidates on the campaign trail this election season. (This piece is framed as a resource for advocates but it includes links to data and research that journalists might find useful.) 

Some good stuff we’ve read recently:

• Chicago had already indicated they’re going to break their (very expensive, like $50 million expensive) contract with ShotSpotter, the AI software that is supposed to identify gunshots and report them to police. One of the most dangerous things about ShotSpotter is the way it sends armed police expecting to find someone with a gun into situations that obviously don’t need escalation. (It’s impossible to forget that a ShotSpotter response led to a Chicago police officer shooting and killing 13-year-old Adam Toledo.) A new study shows that not only is the software unreliable, it actually slows police response to 911 calls down significantly. The WBEZ interview with the author is really interesting. 

• This horrifying story by Sam Levine in The Guardian about employees who weren’t allowed to leave their jobs at a Tennessee plastics factory, despite the rapidly-rising floodwaters during Hurricane Helene, underlines how dangerous workplaces can be. Several employees at Impact Plastics were killed. A reminder that CJJ has this resource bank for non-traditional public safety stories – you can filter by subject matter, including ‘workplace violations.’ It’s just a jumping off point, but there are a lot of resources from places like the Bureau of Labor, OSHA, NLRB, and more.

• Keeping on the theme of climate disaster, here’s some good reporting from The Intercept’s Schuyler Mitchell on the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Helene for people incarcerated in Western North Carolina. And despite pretty dramatic warnings to evacuate the area from officials as Hurricane Milton was approaching Florida, Newsweek (and others) reported that people jailed in Manatee County would not be evacuated. The plan was to move people to the top floor of the jail, if need be. Gloria Oladipo at The Guardian reports the plan (or lack thereof) was similar for prisons in the area. 

One more thing before we go: 

• We want to lift up this cool new association of gun violence reporters whose goal is to provide a place for people covering gun violence to collaborate and learn from each other. Anyone who covers this beat in any way is welcome to join. You can learn a little more about it here.