No, D.C. Doesn't Need the National Guard to Reduce Violence. It Needs More Trees, Less Pollution & Fewer Blighted Homes
Green Living Plan: Elected officials must avoid the impulse to call on "more police" or "the National Guard" to make scared residents feel safer. Come up with a bold plan to invest in their spaces.
Publisher’s Note
As summers start earlier and get hotter, major American cities will experience surges in violent crime and homicide rates. Which is why it’s crucial to view such trends through a climate crisis prism. However, even as climate crisis has now escalated into something even more dangerously visible and dramatic, with a greater percentage of people experiencing direct impacts, most policymakers still fail to fully intersect environmental problems with other issues - such as urban violence - they, rightfully so, find more pressing. If they did, they’d find a stronger set of response strategies.
It is true that many cities, such as Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia and elsewhere are feeling like “warzones,” as one D.C. city Councilman Trayon White put it recently. We’re seeing that unfold now as homicide rates have escalated in recent years compared to pre-pandemic previous years for a number of cities, even as the violent crime rate in 2023, so far, did drop by 10 percent compared to 2022 … at least as CNN was reporting a few weeks ago …
The report analyzed homicide data from cities that make it readily available, including New York, Atlanta and Chicago. In the 30 cities examined, homicides declined 9.4% in the first half of this year compared to the first half of last year, with about 200 fewer homicides in that period.
Twenty cities recorded a drop in homicides in that period, while 10 cities saw an increase, the study found. Raleigh, North Carolina, saw the steepest drop of 59%, while Lincoln, Nebraska, saw a 133% increase in homicides.
Additionally, the study said a snapshot of its findings “suggests that levels of nearly all offenses are lower, or have changed little, in the first six months of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022.”
Gun assaults, defined as aggravated assaults committed with a firearm, committed during the first half of this year are 5.6% lower on average than during the same period last year, “representing 514 fewer gun assaults in the cities that reported data,” the report found.
Still that same Council on Criminal Justice report CNN cites does still point out increased violent crime compared to before pandemic, which is worrisome …
Violent crimes remain elevated compared to 2019, the year prior to the COVID pandemic and racial justice protests of 2020. There were 24% more homicides during the first half of 2023 than during the first half of 2019 in the study cities.
In response to this, state and local policymakers in particular will fall into the usual exercise (trap?) of staging press conferences with frustrated and anxious members of the public as a way to alleviate political stress. Typically, the elected official convening the press conference will, out of his or her own frustration, make some bold or off-the-cuff statement that may feed the emotional beast of the moment, but rarely offers any thoughtful plan for how to truly solve the issue. This was the case with Councilman White’s recent pronouncement that D.C. call in the National Guard …
We must declare an emergency regarding the crime and violence in our neighborhoods and act urgently. It may be time to call on the National Guard to protect the children and innocent people that are losing their lives to this senselessness.
But, instead of giving in to the usual brute force impulse that might play well at a press conference in front of a scared audience, it's time policymakers (especially those representing distressed and displaced Black communities) get smarter and use long-proven place-based strategies that actually work to significantly reduce crime. Those strategies are in plain view and ready to deploy. Yet, are they being considered and, if so, are they being tapped effectively?
Entire communities, such as the low-income majority-Black Ward 8 community White represents, could be mass mobilized for the immediate “Marshall Plan”-like activation of place-based strategies. Since places like Ward 8 are in a “warzone” state, it stands to reason they can be revived similar to how former warzones were rebuilt and revived in Germany and Japan following World War II.
It would require policymakers clearly articulating demands for simple quality-of-life, cosmetic, environmental and climate resilient investments that are a regular standard of living in predominantly white and middle-class to upper-middle class communities. To do this, dollars could even be coming from the Biden administration’s climate plan or the “Inflation Reduction Act” in some instances. But, in situations like this, rather than toying with resident anxiety, it might be more useful to coalesce residents around the idea that they can live in neighborhoods with more than adequate tree canopy, protections from an array of pollutants and the elimination of blighted and vacant property. All of this is possible and can be immediate. Indeed, a combination of these strategies could reduce violence in D.C.’s Ward 8 by nearly 65 percent.
10% More Trees = 12% Less Violent Crime
As cities get hotter, of course we should expect they get a bit more violent or less safe to live in because their less cool. In the case of D.C.’s Ward 8, immediate expansion of tree canopy, or shade, could provide both violence reduction and greater climate resilience. As a 2022 Science Direct study reveals …
Of particular relevance to the present research, Ward 8 has the highest ranking for social vulnerability to climate impacts, such as heatwaves and flooding (Department of Energy and Environment 2016). Given its status as the lowest-urban tree canopy ward, this is unsurprising: UTC often serves as a proxy for climate adaptation, with lower rates of UTC translating to lower climate resiliency (Barron et al., 2019). Fig. 2 presents the most vulnerable populations per D.C. ward. Dark red indicates areas of the city that are most vulnerable while green indicates the least vulnerable populations. As the figure shows, vulnerability is not evenly or randomly distributed across the city. Populations at risk, as defined by a high sensitivity and low adaptive capacity, are located in Wards 1, 4, and 6 with the largest populations in Wards 7 and 8.
It then comes as no suprise that violent crime in Wards 7 and 8 are so much higher compared to Wards further West in the city considering there is very little tree canopy. Greater tree coverage, as our Green Living Plan recommends, translates into far less crime: A University of Vermont-led study looking at Baltimore showed that simply planting 10 percent more trees in “UTC” deprived neighborhoods reduced crime by 12 percent. Double that tree planting and just keep doing the math. Climate bonus: cleaner air and natural stormater management in a space with high air pollution rates and prone to floods.
Less Vacant Properties = 30% Less Violent Crime
If we’re talking about Washington, D.C.’s Ward 8, and policymakers such as Councilmember White are truly concerned about the violent crime, what is he, Mayor Muriel Bowser and others doing about the removal of vacant land and other blighted property that’s long been a problem in that section? Researchers in recent years have also concluded that the elimination of vacant property reduces crime by nearly 30 percent, with a University of Penn study putting that theory to the test in Philadelphia …
Significant reductions in crime overall (−13.3 percent), gun violence (-29.1 percent), burglary (−21.9 percent), and nuisances (−30.3 percent) were also found after the treatment of vacant lots in neighborhoods below the poverty line. Restoration of this land can be an effective and scalable infrastructure intervention for gun violence, crime, and fear in urban neighborhoods.
Climate bonus: creation of urban farms and increased food security. Plots could also be used to build solar panel installations to power neighborhoods.
Home Repairs = 22% Less Violent Crime
Blighted properties, as well as abandoned and unlivable homes, including those containing low-income residents who regularly suffer from lack of air conditioning during the summer or the spread of mold and pests year round, are also a contributor to violence. Frustrated residents living in unhealthy home conditions are living in environmentally unsafe conditions that translate into more crime. Where is the bold home repairs program in cities like Washington, D.C. if we’re truly trying to reduce and eliminate violent crime? As another Penn study showed, the use of Philadelphia’s Basic Systems Repair Program for blighted, unhealthy homes translated into a 22 percent drop in violent crime in those neighborhoods ….
This data revealed lower instances of all crime, including homicide, on blocks with a single BSRP-repaired home compared to blocks that were eligible for a BSRP-repaired home but did not get the intervention.
Climate bonus: building climate-resilient homes that are prepared for hotter temperatures and climatic weather such as major rain and wind storms. Also increase solar power connectivity.
In 3 Steps: A 64% Drop in Violent Crime
We didn’t call the National Guard, either. Implementing all of the above, just three simple strategies applied to all residents and all blocks Ward-wide - in a bold and sweeping “Marshall Plan” approach that does not displace or remove residents - resulted in a combined 64 percent drop in violent crime at minimum. We didn’t even factor in the sudden economic activity or residential job creation that would result from pushing these strategies. Nor did we account for the sudden burst of movement all throughout a section like Ward 8 from a wide range of businesses, contractors, government agencies, non-profits and, more importantly, residents or members of that neighborhood who would be needed to complete this work. We didn’t even include the full removal of trash (resulting in a nearly 10 percent drop in crime, according to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice) or exploring how to alleviate air pollution in Wards 7 and 8 since researchers are continuing to find more correlations between toxicity in the air we breath and violence. We simply instituted three particular strategies which policymakers, if they were really thinking, could start implementing today.