Congregations, the Government and Social Justice: Crime and Substance Abuse

Sacred Places, Civic Purposes
Congregations, the Government, and Social Justice
Crime and Substance Abuse

September 23, 1999

The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036

Morning Discussion
Lunch Keynote
Afternoon Session

MR. DIONNE: My friend Clarence Page is—and I could say this even though we are in the same trade—really one of my very, very favorite columnists and I am so grateful that he is here. Clarence is not only articulate in print; he is exceptionally articulate in person as you are going to learn. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. He is the author of Showing My Color: Impolite Essays on Race and Identity. And I love that title because Clarence is actually exceptionally polite. Just a bit ironic.

Julie Segal is the legislative counsel for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. She is chair of the Working Group for Religious Freedom in the Social Sciences, and I have learned that she is also part of a common ground group of a number of organizations that have been working on trying to find common ground on the issue of "charitable choice" and faith-based institutions.

We were really very lucky. We got some of the very best people in this field, and Chris Winship is one of them. He is chair of the department of sociology at Harvard University. He is the editor of Sociological Methods and Research, on the editorial board of Society, associate editor of the Journal of Mathematical Sociology. But he is a mathematical sociologist who actually writes in a language called English. If you want to see a very powerful comment on what we're talking about today, I recommend his piece in the last issue of The Public Interest. And so without further ado, I want to thank you all for coming and I want to thank George Kelling for giving this presentation.

MR. KELLING: Thank you for the credit, which I think is the wrong word, however. I think Jim Wilson and I rediscovered something by going out and looking at what was going on in communities, on the streets with citizens. And that idea was that minor offenses mattered in communities, matter a whole lot, and I will talk a little bit more about that. When I was first contacted about this, I demurred, saying I just didn't know anything about the church and crime. It was an issue that I hadn't given a whole lot of attention to. In my heart of hearts, however, it was something I wanted to address. Those of you who read the paper know that I am a former seminarian. After graduating from a Lutheran college, I went to seminary for years and am about a year away from being ordained as a Lutheran clergy person.

You must understand that this was a long, long time ago. I have lived and was reared in a world that was very different than many of you have experienced. I noticed I have some same-age colleagues here, but many of you do not live in the world that I lived in. It was a world in which as a child during the 1940s I could play in the streets. I lived across the street from public housing, and I regularly hung out and ran with kids from public housing. Most of them were white; some of them were African-American. We got into our share of trouble. Most of us stopped with shoplifting and other sorts of things. Others went on to more serious crimes, and I have friends who I not only have continued relationships with, but I also have friends, former friends, who wound up in prison and wound up dead.

I grew up in a very different social environment than what we experience today. I would add that in addition to my seminary background, prior to getting into this business of police research, which was clearly accidental and purely optimistic, I had a second incarnation and that was as a social worker; both my master's and Ph.D. are in social work. I have been a probation officer. I have run a psychiatric hospital for children. I have been a detention worker in the juvenile justice system and that again was in a different world than many of you have experienced. That was in the pre-Golf days. I happen to think that the Golf decision was a disaster for youth and I happen to think that we are living with the consequences of it.

And in a paper that I have co-authored with my wife on what is going on with juvenile justice now, we are basically arguing that prosecution is reinventing what probation and parole was in the 1950s and 1960s. I was the last in my office that adhered to a different means of doing probation and parole. I worked in the neighborhoods. I worked in the communities; I saw kids in police stations. I went into the schools. Jewish and family services contacted me every time a kid was going to get referred and we would work out a plan very early. I am very proud of that earlier practice.

But that's not why I was asked here. I was asked here because I have been involved in crime control—most famously or notoriously involved in New York City. I want to talk about what my experience was in New York City and relate it to the issue of the church involvement, and then talk about how I see the church or other organizations relate in kinds of relationships that are developing at the present time.

One other introductory comment. I know you will recognize two features. Although I am a social scientist, I am an acknowledged preacher. I do not ignore the fact that I am an advocate of causes. I am a strong advocate of causes. I know it as a social scientist, and I know that I carry certain ideological baggage. The second thing I never got over is a particular skill that we gained as seminarians and that was twisting the text to meet the message. We have lessons in the Christian church on every Sunday. There is both the gospel lesson and Old Testament lesson and oftentimes they get in the way of the message that you want to preach at that particular time, so the skill is twisting the text to meet the message and you will notice that I do it fairly liberally.

MR. DIONNE: Almost everyone on the panel is nodding at that.

MR. KELLING: But let me speak first on my assumptions. The first assumption is that control over crime is primarily maintained by what Cane Jacobs called "the small change of life." That is in neighborhoods and communities. The norm, the mores, the approvals, the care, the concern— those kinds of normal interactions and routine interactions of life is what is meant by the small change of life. More than anything else, those are responsible for crime control.

The second assumption is that the extraordinary crime wave that we saw between the 1960s and the 1990s was the result of the erosion of the authority of those institutions that maintained control over social life and maintained control over children and young people, as well as people who are prone to get into difficulty. A lot of major social events occurred to which we can attribute these changes in the authority of these institutions. During this time we embarked on disastrous social experiments that substantially eroded the authority of all the major institutions, including especially the family, especially the church, especially schools, and we live with the consequences of that at the present time.

Think, for example—regardless of what their goals were—of the consequences of expressway construction on neighborhoods, urban renewal, public housing, power block construction, school busing, withdrawing police from neighborhoods and communities and isolating them in cars, the de-institutionalization of the emotionally ill, and the decriminalization or virtual decriminalization of minor offenses.

While all of these changes were going on, criminal justice agencies were systematically withdrawing from neighborhoods, withdrawing from communities and getting involved in a case process mode of handling crime and delinquency. In the 1980s, for example, the International Association of Chiefs of Police published a book on police handling of juveniles. The conclusion of that book stated that the only thing that police should be doing regarding juveniles is arresting them when they commit offenses. The original idea of policing, not to mention the other organizations as well— prosecutors, courts, probation and parole— their original purpose was the prevention of crime. Since the 1960s, their purpose became processing offenders once they committed offenses. One of the most fascinating comments was made by a chief of police from Lowell, Massachusetts: "We all got very good at it." Police got very good at arresting. Prosecutors got very good at prosecuting, and I mean good, and I mean moral, and I mean legal. Courts did a good job. Probation did a good job according to that model, and we had a social disaster on our hands because what we discovered at the end of 1980s and into the 1990s was not only that we had imprisoned a whole generation of African-American youth, but we had lost control of our public spaces. By the late 1980s, we simply lost control over many areas of our cities and, by the way, those areas were predominantly poor and minority areas.

Finally, my third assumption is that current major reductions in crime are the result of communities restoring control over their public spaces, restoring care and concern over their youth and, in a variety of ways, reclaiming public spaces and reclaiming a certain amount of authority, control, and care over youth. Neighborhood organizations, religious institutions, developers, business associations, schools, transportation systems, housing authorities and others including public police and certainly justice agencies are not only striving to regain control over public spaces and youth on their own, they also have and are forming powerful working relationships that multiplies their impacts. You cannot prove these assumptions empirically. They are highly inferential. The evidence is historical and inferential rather than empirical. And I would just add, I think that the debate has been confused enormously by what has happened in New York City and the debate about New York City.

* * *

What happened in New York City is very poorly understood. I don't think Bill Blackman's book, Turnaround, paints enough of the background or the context in which the changes took place. Giuliani and his followers have politicized the crime reduction there to a tragic extent. We don't know what is really going on. But I think we have to understand that New York City has improved business districts, through reclaiming the subways, through eradication of graffiti in the subway, through reclaiming of Bryant Park and reclaiming of the areas around Grand Central Station, the reclaiming of parks in Brooklyn, Central Park, communities restoring control themselves and working with the police and other agencies. All of these things were in place when Blackman and Giuliani decided to say, Hey, by the way we've got about 40,000 cops. Why don't we do something, too? For those of you who don't know the history of the New York City police department, you will understand that the business of staying out of trouble by doing nothing was refined to an art in New York.

So out of these institutions and all of these comments, it would follow that I believe that the church is an important institution in terms of restoring civility, peace, and harmony to our communities. But it is a complex picture, because the church in my mind can also contribute to divisiveness, it can contribute to the breakdown of public order; and in the name of feeding the poor and clothing the naked, it can create one hell of a lot of trouble.

My example is in New York City, where in 1989, I was asked by Chairman Kiley, Chairman of the Board of the New York State Transportation Authority, to deal with the problems of the subway. One of the biggest problems of the subway is that everyone knew what the problem was. The problem was homelessness. The New York Times knew the problem was homelessness. The other media knew that the problem was homelessness. The police knew the problem was homelessness. The Transit Authority knew the problem was homelessness. The New York City Civil Liberties knew it was, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All you had to do was to walk into the New York City subway, which if you will recall during the 1980s was the symbol of everything that was wrong with the cities in the United States, and a quarter of a million people a day were going under, over, around, blocking the turnstiles—it was an environment in which order had simply broken down.

In the meantime everyone was saying that until we dealt with the problem of homelessness, nothing could be done with the subways. Of course, waiting for that social revolution meant that passenger ridership would continue dropping, and the idea that was portrayed that somehow in order to restore order in the subway, it was a war on the poor, who weren't riding the subway. It wasn't the wealthy; it wasn't Wall Street brokers who were riding the subway. They were being picked up in their limousines. It was poor working people, many times going to work at jobs at $4 and $5 and $6 an hour, who were subjected to constant indignities of public urination, defecation, sexual activity, extortion of money, cup under the nose. This was portrayed as an expression of principles of democracy. Cup under the nose; a woman protests; the response was, "Shut your fucking mouth, bitch."

You know the story. We finally restored order. We did it very civilly. There was no increase in police complaints. We went out of our way to make sure that those people who were legitimately in need were taken care of, especially those who were in an emergency condition. But one of our problems was that suburban congregations were coming into the subway. They would come into the subway very nicely and they would bring in food and clothing. The food would be thrown around, and the people would strip in the subway platforms and dress on the subway platform. And then even the mayor's office proposed and supported bringing in portable showers and portable kitchens.

I suggested to Bob Kiley that he ought to get his degree in hotel management, because basically he was going to be running one. You know the outcome of that as well, because basically we changed the definition of the problem. The problem wasn't homelessness; the problem was illegal, disorderly behavior. It turns out that all kinds of those people were very nasty people. As many as one in ten were coming in these stations with weapons. They had warrants out for violent offenses, and the vast majority of a quarter of a million people were not those people. They had gotten into bad habits.

But that sends out a very powerful message that this was an environment out of control, and it scared all kinds of people. Now, I mention this with the church because it happens not just in the subway, but there are many neighborhoods in which churches sponsor programs for the poor, programs for the homeless and they are terrible neighbors. They are irresponsible neighbors. They claim no responsibility for what happens at their property, and as a result contribute enormously to the detriment of many neighborhoods. What I was struck by was the fact that the position of the churches regarding policy in the subway was one of defiance. I had gotten interested in trying to frame the nature of the relationships among organizations as they dealt with each other in some kind of use of the word "partnership" or "collaboration."

I have been interested in that because it turns out that maybe the church was right. I mean, maybe that was the proper position of the church. Maybe they properly defied us and that the role of the church in terms of dealing with problems in society can range from collaboration on the one hand—and by collaboration I mean that the organizational boundaries are penetrated by the organizations. I think Gene Rivers could talk to us about that, and Chris Winship could as well. If we go all the way to the other side, it is active warfare or legal attack, et cetera. So, if we are talking about the proper relationship between the church and the government and the church and other organizations, all kinds of considerations come in as to how the church positions itself on this continuum from collaboration to active battle.

It is not by accident that I mention on the first page that those of us who were German seminarians in the 1950s were very preoccupied with what happened to the church in Germany prior to World War II and during World War II. Dietrich Bonhoffer was one of our heroes. I remember one professor constantly ridiculing us by saying, The social gospel was more concerned about sewer systems than it was about the word of God. As I went on, I got more and more convinced that sewer systems were pretty important. (Laughter.)

MR. KELLING: But we were preoccupied at the role of the church. So, I spell that out. But then I make two other points in the paper. The first point that I make is that churches have to bother to get the problem right. If they are going to make a social contribution and be true to their own values, they have got to get the problem right. I use the example of the subway to say they had it all wrong, because to feed the poor and to clothe the poor in those circumstances was to perpetuate a misery and to perpetuate a suffering unless you really looked at the problem. If you went back into those subways you would have seen the "couchies" that had gone into the subway to die. The "couchies" are people who stole from their families and then they stole from the people on whose couches they had slept. Finally they were now back into the subways, and they had gone back in there to die.

The idea that churches would give moral support to keeping those people in the subway was an example of the church's immorality at that time. I was able to take the high-moral ground away from the church by pointing that out. Up to ten people per month without addresses were dying in the subway while the church was helping to keep them in the subway both by their practices and by their moral support of people who advocated keeping them in the subway for what I think were patent political reasons.

The second point that I make is not just to get the problem right, but also to figure out what the institutional capacity of the church is in terms of dealing with those problems. It turns out that it is not only important to get the problem right, but you have to make decisions about the means used to solve the problem.

Two issues ought to be of relevance to the church. Means can be highly unethical. Every application of a solution to a public problem needs to be reviewed for its morality and its constitutionality. The church ought to be prepared to be of enormous assistance in that review. Theoretically you are trained to do that and because you are reflexive in that regard, you should be aware that policy personnel tend to leap over those value considerations. You go very quickly from "this will probably work" to not reviewing what the ethics are of this particular solution. Furthermore, once you figure out the problem and you know some of the means, then you can figure out what the church can do.

Then the church can support things, it can oppose things, it can demonstrate against them, or it can make partnerships. But that seems to me to be highly dependent upon first getting the problem right, secondly making sure that the means used are ethical, and thirdly to make sure that you review your institutional capacity in light of the problem. It is not just public agencies that are guilty of the law of the instrument. The law of the instrument goes like this: you give a kid a hammer and virtually every problem needs pounding. That is part of the trouble with institutional capacities and applying them to problems. Thank you for your time. (Applause.)

MR. DIONNE: The almost-Lutheran Pastor Kelling has promised to translate his talk into theses that we will tack up on the wall behind me. He will self-censor those remarks about the cop as part of the theses. (Laughter.)

I very much appreciate that. You have given us a lot to talk about. What I would like to do is turn first to Byron. Speakers can feel free to come up here if they like or they can speak from their places. Byron, thank you very much.

MR. JOHNSON: It's good to be here and react to George's paper. That is an excellent paper. My comments, of course, will be brief. I am going to do comments in three areas.

First of all, looking at the paper, I find George's opening statement to be particularly interesting and that is, he knows very little about this topic. Especially in light of his seminary training, I find that to be striking. I think if you were to ask any number of social scientists they no doubt would start the paper the same way. I think it is an unfortunate realization that we know precious little about the intersection of base communities and problems and civility and how we solve them.

I was reflecting upon my college days and my graduate education, and I can tell you that not one course, not one seminar, not one lecture in ten years ever mentioned churches or congregations. If you scan textbooks in criminology, you will find that there is no reference to religion or churches or to congregations. I found two such references, one in a juvenile delinquency textbook and one in a criminal justice textbook. It is fascinating to me that something so obvious has been completely overlooked by a colleague in a field where I think that there is so much that we can learn. That is one observation.

The second observation is that on page five George states that, "Crime reductions are the result of communities organizing and regaining control of public places." I think he is absolutely right. He goes on to talk about the institutions in neighborhoods such as churches that have been a part of that reduction and this multiplier of facts. "The relationships," he says, "are vigorous and enduring." In the next paragraph, Kelling makes an interesting observation and one that I hope he will respond to shortly. That is that these are assumptions that are not inherently verifiable. As a social scientist, I think we can verify these kinds of things. I would not be in Neil Postman's camp who completely writes off social scientists because we have such great discoveries like people fear death and - (Laughter.)

anti-social people don't get along with other people. (Laughter.)

These are some of the hallmarks of the work we do in social science, but I would not go quite so far as Postman, but I do think that much can be demonstrated inherently. The last comment is George's discussion of the ways in which we can see collaborations, partnerships; we can see opposition between the faith community and government. This, I think, is potentially a gold mine area. In a day where Washington talks so much about coordinating community responses, it is interesting to me that until the last year or so, you would never see the faith community mentioned in RFP's that come out from Washington for these kinds of responses.

So, the connection, I think, is something that we need to look at; we need to understand about collaborations and partnerships and opposition. What does it look like? I think this whole array, this continuum that George correctly identified as an area we need to pursue is something that I hope we will launch in the next few years. I think, indeed, it is going to be a complex relationship once we get to understand it a little bit better. Thank you.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much. I was reminded as he was talking about social science of Bill Bennett's line at a meeting John and I organized about two years ago: "Social science involves the elaborate demonstration of the obvious by methods that are obscure." (Laughter.)

But Chris Winship is not obscure. So, thank you.

MR. WINSHIP: That's a charge that social science and sociology often gets. I was a professor at Northwestern for many years and I had a colleague who used to teach intro-sociology to 600 students at a time, twice a year. The way he would start the course is he would give you a set of about 20 claims that all seem totally obvious. Then he would demonstrate the fact that social science had actually shown that they were all wrong. (Laughter.)

The problem is we always talk about obvious things and both the positive and negative of both statements always seem obvious to us. It only matters what we think at the moment. (Laughter.)

My first comment is about needing to empirically test this. I am perplexed by George's comments that he doesn't think that these things can be tested. It's a great paper and it's a lot of fun. It's written in a very kind of folksy way. There are a number of real gold nuggets in it. I just wanted to point to three.

First is George's very important point that churches aren't always on the side of the good. I spent a chunk of my life living on the South Side of Chicago particularly in the 1970s. In that era there were a lot of major African-American churches that were extraordinarily closely allied with the Daley machine. At that time before Washington became mayor, it was very interesting to watch them support the Daley machine's efforts to keep the trade schools in Chicago totally white. Through the Daley machine, these black churches were very important allies in that effort. In Chicago that was very important because the way you got into the trade unions was you had to go to trade school before you began a job search.

Then another example comes from Gene Rivers who was a graduate student who studied theology. In this very modest-sized neighborhood there is something like 24 churches. That's really remarkable. Many of them are storefront churches. There are two interesting things that my students find. One is that the vast majority of churches in this neighborhood do not serve people who live in the neighborhood. They are serving people outside the neighborhood. The reason they are in those neighborhoods is because the rent is cheap. Second is that there is actually some conflict about what should happen in the neighborhood. These churches like the fact that the rent is cheap. They are not particularly fond of the idea that there might be a lot of economic development and that businesses might move in and raise the rent. So, I am all for the idea of churches becoming involved, or more involved, in social policy issues. I think George is quite right that their roles could be complicated and not necessarily in the best of directions.

The second point that I think is terrific about George's story about the subway—he didn't use it in his talk but he uses it in his paper—he talks about how social problems are best solved by dealing with them privately. This is a favorite theme of James J. Wilson. I think one of the interesting things about what has happened to crime in the last decade in this country is that we haven't made a whole lot of progress in dealing with poverty; we haven't made a whole lot of progress in dealing with single-parent households; we have made a little progress in dealing with bad schools. These are all the things the left has pointed to as the root causes of crime. Yet we have made enormous progress with crime. I think these examples suggest how important it is to look out of the box and think about solutions that may not necessarily be associated with the causes.

The third thing that George talked about that I think is tremendously important, and I would like to encourage him to do a lot more research in, is partnerships. At the moment we are in a period of glow about everybody needing to partner with everybody else and this is going to solve the world's problems. Of course, Boston and the Ten Point Coalition with the police there has been held up as one of the key models. One of the things I am concerned about is how little discussion there is about what the nature of these partnerships should be and what their purpose is and what their limits are. What Ten Point has accomplished in Boston is in part a political process to get the police to focus on the small number of youths that are truly the problem and not just broadly deal with minority youths in the inner city. Then too it provides the police what I call umbrella legitimacy for doing this work. When you think about it, this is a funny kind of partnership. It's a partnership in which you can be supportive of the police when they are doing well, but your ability to give the police legitimacy only hangs on your willingness to criticize them when they step outside those bounds. Now, in Boston it has worked pretty well so far because we have this great minister, Eugene Rivers, sitting in the back of the room who is always happy to criticize anybody— (Laughter.)

— at the drop of a hat. (Laughter.)

So, this winter when we had a street minister of color get arrested in the middle of a fight that he was trying to break up and he was sent to jail, Gene in his typical way was quite vocal in the press about the police needing to get its act together and to investigate. I thought that was just tremendous because he was able to step out of the loyalty he felt for the police that might have well inclined him to say, You know we should not be critical. He realized in this situation it was essential if he was going to maintain his credibility, which was enormously important for the police; right? Otherwise he would just be seen as having been bought off and repaying the debt. Then he stepped out and was critical and was able to be so highly critical. In general I don't think we thought nearly enough about what is going to make these partnerships work. I think the other interesting thing about George's paper is that he also talked about some subway types, and about some of the ways that partnerships can go bad and be problematic.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much. At some point I want to call on Gene. He'll be consistent; he'll criticize Chris Winship for praising him. (Laughter.)

He'll figure out a way of doing that. Now Clarence Page for an impolite response to a series of responses.

MR. PAGE: Thank you for that enlightenment there, E.J. Thank you very much. In fact, E.J. and I have a sort of mutual- admiration society here. He's helped to open my eyes to a lot of very interesting ideas. Then we both share a mutual interest in the issues that are being discussed today. So, I feel very honored to be invited to be here. Obviously E.J. has included me in his effort to get some token minority representation. (Laughter.)

The minority being the fact that I am a journalist. (Laughter.)

Since he is obliged not to speak for us in his position as the emcee, I have been brought in as a shill, no doubt. I will do my best because that is one area that I do know something about: media. I have covered some of the communities we have been talking about today in Chicago, Boston, Washington, et cetera.

I'm so glad Gene Rivers is here today so that I can talk about him impolitely right to his face rather than talking about an anonymous minister who I know. Gene is such a great case study for the kind of things that we are talking about here. Let me say first of all that I too enjoyed George's paper. I am just going to try to expand in my own way on a few points. First of all, I don't know how you could not know much about this topic, George. After all, we in the media have been covering it for months. It's been the flavor of the month. (Laughter.)

E.J. knows that for years I have threatened to write a book called "Pathologies of the Press." This came to me one day while I was on a panel with Ken Auletta who many of you know introduced the term "under class" into our vocabulary in the '80s. We were talking about housing up in New York. When we went to Q&A, a nanosecond passed before the question was raised, "What about the media role in all of this?" So, Ken responded that we thought a lot about the pathologies of communities, of people, of teams, of the under class, but that we in the press have pathologies too. I have been collecting a list ever since.

One of my pathologies is "what's-news" pathology. An old re-write man in Chicago once said to me, "Clarence, news is what's happening when things aren't going the way they are supposed to." There is a lot of truth to that. When things are going the way they are supposed to, it is not news. A family that works isn't news. A youngster who isn't joining a gang isn't news. A teenage girl who isn't pregnant isn't news. So, we tend to focus a lot on the problems. The worst pathology is the "we-don't- believe-it" pathology whenever something that does work comes along. Our mutual colleague Bill Raspberry calls himself a "solutionist." Why does he call himself that? Because he has focused on solutions; trying not focus on problems, but finding things that work. So, when something comes along that appears to be working, our immediate reaction in the media is disbelief, skepticism that can well over into cynicism. Now, skepticism is healthy in our business. The Chicago City News Bureau's slogan is, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." (Laughter.)

That's a wise slogan for young journalists coming along. We can get to the other extreme as the late Murray Kempton described us editorial writers as being sort of like soldiers that come down from the hills after the battle is over and shoot the wounded. (Laughter.)

He used to say here in Washington there are plenty of targets of opportunity these days. (Laughter.)

There are plenty of targets of opportunity in the social policy area. We can talk a lot about things that have not worked or have not appeared to work. One of the things that I think we have as a challenge today as folks in the media, as well as other folks, is to change some of the preconceptions out there.

This is where George's work has been so valuable, changing realities. For years we believed Times Square was not going to be cleaned up. This followed with a period that we believed that it could be cleaned up and that we were going to do it. Then the years went by without it happening; more and more the attitude prevailed that we're never going to clean it up. Well, today you can go to Times Square and you can see not only tourists and bountiful economic activity, thriving civic life, but you can also see parents pushing baby strollers and carriages through Times Square. I thought I would never see that. Of course, I've been told that some of them contain uzis. (Laughter.)

Nevertheless, there is no question that Times Square has been brought back. There are other communities in New York that have been mentioned as well. In Chicago there was a belief for 30 years that public housing was a horrible situation that could not be reversed and you could not restore stability to public housing. Then we had a public housing director who said, Let's just take one building and rebuild that, let's kick out the gangs, let's enforce the type of police agreement that the folks on Lakeshore Drive have, and that means real security in the lobbies, which meant metal detectors, et cetera, et cetera. There was a big conflict with the ACLU and other community folks. Then everybody sat down at the table and worked it out and came to a consensus and worked things out. Everyone was amazed at the agreement and at the results. It was always controversial, but it nevertheless resulted in a change of mind. Then when they realized change could happen, they decided to see if they could replicate it.

A process gets started. This is what happens when civility begins to be restored in communities. The fact that minor offenses matter is the second point that Kelling made that I want to expand upon in light of another remark he made in passing which was the politicization of crime reduction in New York City. New York is not the only place. You could go for the opposite model to Giuliani to Chicago where Richard M. Daley in his effort to reach out and form multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalitions around town has also politicized crime reduction in a different way by pointing out the successes of his administration in working with the communities. Unfortunately, statistically, the police misconduct complaints have not gone down in Chicago. The crime-reduction figures have not been as stellar as in New York and in a number of other places. Nevertheless, he has been able to maintain in general high-approval ratings and a rising plurality of victories when he runs for re-election, earning him the unofficial title of Richard II, sort of a modern version of his father, Richard I, Richard A. Daley who had some extraordinarily bad police and community relations during his tenure.

My main point here is that minor offenses matter. We need to care about minor street offenses, but enforcement must be done in tandem with the community. There must be a team effort. We cannot under-emphasize the importance of community policing in a very practical way. Now, Gene Rivers' stardom I have helped to add to, thanks to a profile on the NewsHour. We were talking earlier about how delighted at the NewsHour we were with the way this essay came out. We not only had Gene Rivers, but we also had a police officer who initially was a representative of an antagonistic relationship between police and community. Now, these two gentlemen have become allies. That made such a great story for TV. I said that some network ought to take it and make a series out of it. (Laughter.)

It could not be any worse than the series that they have on the air now. (Laughter.)

It maybe would help some minority representation in prime time. (Laughter.)

More important is that people need to see the dynamics of this. It was intriguing to me that this young police officer's next big foul-up, when he was persuaded to work with Gene Rivers and the community folks, was going back to his fellow officers who have gotten even more cynical than we reporters over the years about these new cockamamie ideas that come along. A number of those officers said, Oh, I just want to crack heads. That's the way it really works out there. So, there was a re-education process that had to go on within the police department. Now that I have added to his stardom and his national charisma, et cetera, Gene Rivers will be the first to say he did not do this alone. Gene Rivers did not reduce crime in Boston alone. He did not walk in and cast his lot upon the waters and suddenly the homicide rates went down. It was holistic; it was complicated, and there were a number of different community elements that were involved. Having said that, I want to say be not dismayed that the evidence of success has been historical and inferential rather than empirical, if history and inference matters. (Laughter.)

Anecdotes matter. I know sociologists hate anecdotes; journalists love them. As soon as we call them a case study, then the sociologists love them too. (Laughter.)

So, the fact is inference, history, anecdotes do matter. The stories on the street do matter. They help to change public perception and help to change our perceptions about what works and what does not. It also helps to put the good news out. It helps to raise approval as to how New Yorkers feel about the direction the city is going, how they feel about the city as a place to live, how they feel about their lives and the prospects for their city. All of these are going up. It has been said for the last two years that the city symbol ought to be a big smiley face, and that is in New York City, the most cynical place on the planet. Perceptions have changed and media have a role to play in this change. Members of the community have a role to play.

I come out of a life experience of black church work that certainly was politically, sociologically, and individually active. The high points of the black church in American history have been when the church went out to help build the community. The Catholic Church is certainly no stranger to this tradition. The problem over the past 30 years has been when institutions, government, media, et cetera have worked against church involvement rather than working with it. I am happy to see that today we are finding ways to utilize this very powerful instrument. It's going to be messy. Messiness happens. Maybe that can be good, too. Maybe it should not be too easily proved in an empirical sense because then we will proceed and think that we can simply replicate these matters and set up mechanisms that can be rubber-stamped around the country from one community to the next. I don't think that can happen. It is going to be complicated; it is going to be messy. But there is beauty in that and the best kind of accountability here is local, close to the people. Local church leaders know their community and the community knows them too and can see more easily if the money is being well spent or not and if the work is being well done or not. So, I've rambled on far too long. Again, thank you for this opportunity. I look forward to hearing what everybody else has to say. Thank you. (Applause.)

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. Clarence is right. I did want him here to speak for the much- maligned majority of journalists. Whenever I hear him speak, I can leave the room and say journalists are beautiful. (Laughter.)

So, thank you very, very much. He mentioned our friend, Bill Raspberry, and Raspberry has a habit of visiting local newspapers wherever he goes to talk to young reporters. He always stumps them because he always asks one question: "Please tell me something good that's happening in your community." (Laughter.)

Bill has said it is the one question that journalists have trouble answering. I want to turn to the audience. By the way, Gene keeps rejecting scripts for the show that Clarence suggested. He's insisting on this script called "Super Clergy." (Laughter.)

I would like for Gene to join in since he's been discussed so much here. Then I would like to turn to some other people in the audience before I turn to our other respondents. Could you join us at this point, Gene?

MR. RIVERS: I'm very impressed. This event is particularly refreshing. I think it is extremely important intellectually for there to be a whole national discussion around the faith communities. One of the things that has made Boston unique in a number of respects is the interface between the clergy and the academic and policy community. That really is very, very unique.

When I think about my colleagues, Jeff Brown, Ray Hammond, and a group of other clergy that were working in Boston, we were in communication with Chris Winship in a number of contexts so that the issue of how we tested in some general, theoretical way, how we replicated, how we researched, understood and evaluated our work, is something that was unique to our experience. I have done a lot of traveling and I don't know of any other city where that kind of interface took place, where the clergy invited and encouraged a systematic evaluation of our work so that we would not be deluded into smoking our own press clips. So, one of the things that was unique, I think, about what we did in Boston is that we invited the social science community in to help us test the work so we could distinguish rhetoric from reality.

George's paper, I think, is extremely helpful and right on target for me in a number of ways. Number one, churches doing and getting stuff wrong; up until 1988, there was a fairly traditional black-church model which is that cops were racists; the black community is this victimized community. It was a fairly simple song. I mean, there were just two parts and that's what you sang. In fact, you could build a career as some folks have done in some cities with the bad white cop or cops in the black community. It became an industry. What was significantly different, I think—and this goes to the broken window's thesis—is that we were forced to deal with what happened on the street. Because the discourse changes, it is one thing to go to meetings and do the dog-and-pony show and talk about racism; it's another thing when you are forced to confront the criminal elements of your own community. Once we were forced to confront the criminal activity as young men reported to us what they were doing, it complicated life. As Clarence indicated, things get messy.

I have sort of been on the left side of most things for 30 years. Once I was forced and once individuals were forced, however, to deal with the criminal activity at the street level, all of the rhetoric and ideology collapsed. What is very refreshing about what George has suggested—and this has also been reinforced in the work that Chris Winship, and others, have been doing—is that once you get on the ground and you really deal with what's going on, all the ideological nonsense collapses. The debate about church and state just becomes stupid once you get there and you deal with where people live. The real criterion becomes who lives close to the problem. When you live close to the problem, there are certain debates that are relevant because life and death is the issue. When you live safely removed from the problem, you can philosophically be as elegant and interesting and abstract as you like because you don't have to worry about who's on the other side of the door on most occasions.

So, I'm very, very encouraged. I am very, very thankful for this forum because the faith communities have to be encouraged to be at this table so that much of what we do can be critically evaluated. So, I am just very thankful.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you, Gene. By the way, when Gene said the church/state argument becomes stupid, I exchanged looks with Julie Segal who is from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. She told me the other day that she is sick and tired of being portrayed as the radical secularist. So, I want to say officially, Julie, you are not being pigeonholed today at all. (Laughter.)

Our next respondent is Sandy Newman, then Joyce Ladner will speak, and then Julie.

MR. NEWMAN: Thank you. It is great to be here. I must say I have learned already from reading these papers and hearing these comments. I really look forward to hearing your opinions and having you help me form an opinion on the question George and John raise in their papers. My reaction to George's paper is that he is right on target by saying we need to get the problem right. That's very important. He's right on target by saying communities, their norms, and the caring in those communities makes an enormous difference. I think not only of the work that Reverend Rivers is doing, but also of work that secular colleagues like Linda Bowen at the Funders Collaborative on Violence Prevention or Jack Calhoun. Jack is a minister but the organization is secular as a national crime prevention counselor program. The work these people are doing in community building and the impact, I think, is pretty clear from the anecdotes and case studies that come from more rigorous social science research.

That work is having an impact. At the same time, I think it is important to realize there is not one problem that we need to get right, but many. I think George would agree that, while he described homelessness as not being the problem in the subway, that it was, in fact, a part of the problem. There simply were other solutions that did not aggravate the crime problem. There were a lot of other problems going on at the same time. The other thing is that sometimes—and here I've caught on Chris' comment—we may not have to agree on the problem to recognize the solution. The solution may not flow automatically from a description of the problem.

So, we know right now a great deal about what works to keep kids from becoming criminals. I want to focus on that for a moment. We know, for instance, that quality, early-childhood development programs for kids from birth to kindergarten can dramatically reduce crime. One study in Ypsilanti took a group of at-risk kids, divided them into two random groups. Half of the group got a quality preschool program plus 1 ˝ hours per week of a home visitor providing coaching to the parents in parenting skills. The other half did not. The two groups merged together when the kids started kindergarten. Researchers went back 22 years later and looked at arrest records. Do you know that the kids that had been left out of that program were five times more likely to be chronic offenders than the kids who had gotten that early-childhood program?

Do we know that early-childhood programs can make a difference? Absolutely. Now, some people would say, "Well, that's part of community building. I am fine with that." Some people might put that in a different category. It doesn't matter so much how we categorize it, but there is a solution there and it needs to be part of our arsenal of solutions in the fight against crime. I should tell you, by the way, just to put what I am saying in perspective, that Fight-Crime, Invest in Kids is an organization made up of 550 police chiefs, prosecutors, sheriffs and victims of violence who are mostly people who had children or other family members murdered. So, we don't come at this from a sort of wishful-thinking perspective, but from one that says let's really see what works to stop crime.

We know that early-childhood programs work. We know that after-school programs work. Some of you, I think E.J. mentioned, have really drawn on FBI data and some work by Howard Schneider down at the National Center for Juvenile Justice which showed that peak hours of juvenile crime are the after- school hours when violent juvenile crime triples in that first hour after school gets out.

We know that after-school programs dramatically and immediately reduce that crime. One great study, a very vigorous social science study done actually across four cities, tells of the quantum opportunities in the after-school programs. Again, they randomly assigned kids from welfare households either to be in the after-school programs or to do without them when they started high school. Over the high school years, the boys left out of the programs were six times more likely to be convicted of a crime than the boys in the programs. Over all, boys and girls that were left out were four times more likely to be convicted of a crime during those high school years. There were, of course, other benefits such as the kids in the program were 50 percent more likely to graduate high school, and were far more likely to go on to secondary education. We know that after- school programs work. Early childhood programs for kids in poverty, such as Head Start, serve four in ten of the kids who need it. It is so under-funded that it cannot possibly fully meet the standards and can't really be expected to produce the same results without additional investment in quality.

The Child-Care and Development Block Grant which is supposed to help low-income working parents get quality child care for their kids serves one in ten of the kids who need it. We know that quality child care these days costs $12,000 easily for tuition. You tell me how those low-income workers are supposed to pay for that. We can go on. In fact, I think Jay handed out with the papers this morning a School and Youth Violence Prevention Plan that our members have developed which calls for making sure that all kids have access to early-childhood programs, that we intervene with programs for troubled kids, and that we provide parenting coaching, and other child-abuse prevention services. We know that being abused as a child increases the risk that the kids will become criminals. With the help of David Old's rigorous studies, we also know that home-visitor programs that provide parenting coaching can cut child abuse by up to 80 percent in the first two years; cuts kids' arrests in half; cuts mothers' arrests by two-thirds.

So, if those are part of the community-building solutions that George is talking about, I'm in full agreement. If they are left out, then I say that these kinds of things need to be added in. I'm not alone. Our members, who include, by the way, Bill Bratton, agree that these are key parts of the solution. You may have seen a piece that Bratton and I wrote in the Boston Globe a couple of years back that basically focused on these kinds of solutions. Not only has the National Sheriffs Association, which consists of the major cities' police chiefs, endorsed this plan, but also the National District Attorneys Association has endorsed many of its components. The plan has been endorsed by prosecutors associations in California, New York, and Illinois ranging on to states like Maine, Rhode Island, Utah, and Arizona, which few people would describe, I think, as bastions of liberalism.

There is a broad consensus among the people on the front lines. As Reverend Rivers says, when you are dealing with the problem up close, the ideology breaks down. One of our sheriffs, a conservative Republican sheriff in Colorado, says I am a conservative Republican; I'm not for big government, but it is a matter of how we invest our resources and we need to invest them in things that work.

My concern is that we really mean to reject a focus on root causes and solutions which, whether we think they are dealing with causes or not, are proven to work. I am not sure that George really means to reject it as much as to say, Let's not use it as an excuse. But if we do that, then we let government off the hook. Now, whatever we think about the role that faith-based communities have to play—and I think it's a major role and, in fact, John points out in the paper that we will talk about later that Bush and Gore agree the faith-based communities can't do it all—government's most fundamental responsibility is to protect the public safety. It cannot do that without making kinds of investments that are proven to help families get off to the right start. Whether those services wind up being delivered by churches, as many Head Start Programs and other child-care programs are, or they are delivered by secular institutions, government needs to step up to the plate as well. Thank you. (Applause.)

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. I am grateful for that because when he responds, I would like George to talk about the link between these types of prevention, pre-school or after-school, and also the broken-window sort of prevention. They are sometimes cast as alternatives. I'm not sure they are, but I would like you to put that in the context of your reply. Next I would like to call on my colleague and friend, Joyce Ladner.

MS. LADNER: Thank you. Good morning. As I listened to George and more as I read his paper, I decided that I am a sociologist who likes to raise anecdotes to the level of case studies— (Laughter.)

I thought about how social control, which is essential to what he is talking about, was maintained through informal relationships. In times past before the era of the two decades of the 1970s to the 1990s, we saw the destruction and the deterioration of a lot of our institutions, that had maintained that. I grew up in a little community outside Hattiesburg, Mississippi, called Palmer's Crossing. My mother's name was Annie Ruth and she was called Miss Annie. All southerners have nicknames; there were two people in the community who got drunk publicly and they dated each other. They were young. One's nickname was Slingshot, and her boyfriend was called Sapo. I think his name was Sam Poe; so they called him Sapo for short as a nickname. Whenever they passed our house drunk, they tried to literally slip past because my mother was like the woman on the stoop always watching. She would run to the porch and say, "Oh, you're not getting past me without me seeing you drunk. Come here." She would set them down at the kitchen table, gave them lots of black coffee; no sugar was allowed. She gave them this lecture about how to make something of themselves and how "your mama is very disappointed in you and you don't want to hurt her by continuing to misbehave this way. You know this was not the way you were raised."

George Kelling was saying that we have seen the destruction of these informal institutions; and more than the institutions, we have seen the destruction of the relationships that maintained social control, that dealt out negative sanctions for misbehavior, as well as positive sanctions to reinforce good behavior.

I think there are several strengths to his presentation. One is the personal approach as the advocate, but also as a true believer who does understand at the same time the more academic and professional side of his craft. A very important contribution here is his noting, as do many historians, that it's not the big events that define an era and that underlie the phenomena that we are examining as a society. It is, however, the cumulative impact of the little events—the day-to-day sanctions of a Miss Annie who was telling these people that they had stepped outside the traditional boundaries the community had defined for them and that their behavior was no longer within the norm.

What he is asking us today is that in the absence of negative sanctions, how does one maintain informal social control in an era when not only have the formal institutions deteriorated to a great extent, but also the informal sanctions that existed over the generations have deteriorated as well? That cumulative impact has eroded when we don't know our neighbors, when we don't dare discipline the children or the teachers don't dare discipline the children for fear that even the parents will come to school and curse them out. We have seen deterioration and reciprocity of the shared values and the shared responsibilities that people had toward each other. This is, indeed, what constitutes the most serious problems in the communities.

There are a lot of questions. I don't think we have a uniform set of definitions. I don't think we have had one since the 1960s when, for example, people throughout the nation—north, south, east, and west—and across class and ethnic boundaries said it is a national social problem when we deny people the right to vote. That is why Martin Luther King could be galvanized as one symbolic leader. There were thousands of people like him in local communities that could organize people of all stripes to try to solve a problem.

We are talking here about the decline of pattern behavior that imposed social order. We are talking about the ordeal of civility; how civility has essentially disappeared from a great portion of American life, one aspect of which has resulted in crime. When he mentioned community policing, what struck me is that the reason we are embracing it as much as we have is because it is a manifestation or a way to recreate a sense of community among people for whom the community does not exist anymore. When Gene Rivers and Jeffrey Brown and some of the other clergy in Dorchester were able to go out and walk the streets at night and talk to the young men, they could engage them in part because even though they were in the territories whose rules had been designed by the gang members, these young men were responding to the fact that there was this face-to-face interaction and the fact that community was being restored there.

We have seen this occur just as on the PBS program that aired last night on things that work such as in Benning Terrace here in Washington—The Alliance of Concerned Black Men walked the streets where gang killings had been rife and had really shot our numbers through the roof. Now they have not had one; not only that, but these young men are now working for $8 an hour on jobs in public housing. They talked about their experiences. They were glad to get the jobs; they were glad to get out of that life of crime.

I think one of the other questions that he raises is how do we practice a social gospel today; how do you apply the rules and the norms of the faith community to the social problems today? We have to go back three decades again to the 1960s when churches were, in part, the leaders of the civil movement for equality, and for equal rights. What are today's problems that demand the application of a social gospel? How do we merge the secular and the sacred or the sacred and the profane? How is it that so many of these churches continue to exist in the midst of some of the most crime-riddled communities? How is it that they open only on Sundays and Wednesday nights for prayer meeting? (Laughter.)

How do we provide more incentives for them to remain open? How do you build community when their memberships have moved to suburban communities and have come back in on Sundays to the services?

We say that the faith community should do more. I think that it was John's paper that stated that only a small percentage of churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques apply for the government grants. How do you build in the technical expertise in smaller congregations that are sitting in the midst of the worse kinds of social problems? How do you give them assistance? How do you assist them in becoming much more active? Can crime prevention also occur in the absence of recapturing public space? I was particularly concerned when you used the concept of victimless crime, because I don't believe there are any crimes without victims. That is a polemic that goes back at least to my graduate school days almost 40 years ago. But all crimes do, indeed, have victims. Prostitutes are themselves victimized. Drug users are victimized, and they are harming other people. They're harming their families, as well. These may be indirect consequences, but the consequences are real, nevertheless.

The issue of how we develop more effective partnerships has already been raised with elaborations. But how do we approach this problem through the recreation of community and uniform values? How do you build a consensus around what is most important? What are the most important problems to attack? How do we socialize the young people to be law-abiding and to embrace the values and the norms of being law-abiding and respectful of authority figures if they don't get this training necessarily in the home or if the traditional institutions have abdicated the responsibility for teaching such values?

I am concerned about how you ward off these problems on the front end so that you don't have to deal with them at the criminal justice level. New York City is mentioned a lot here, but what are the costs? When I think about Giuliani, I think about the people who have been absolutely destroyed by some of these policies. The crime rate goes down, of course, but then you have Louima and Diallo. I'm sure they are on a lesser level; probably there are an awful lot of such people. I believe that if the faith community had been at the table in a very meaningful way as these policies were being developed, then it may well have lessened the impact or the implementation of these harsh, get-tough-on-crime policies of the Giuliani administration.

Instead of continuing to lock people up, how can churches get some of these people who have committed lesser offenses paroled to congregations? That's true especially for the young. I don't reject the root causes because, as Sandy said, we are letting government off the hook. How do we develop a paradigm as a combination of looking at root causes?

And finally, we are looking at all of these events episodically, at one point in time. Eva Throne, who is a member of the Group of Communities, got Gene Rivers to come down to speak at a conference she had on sustainable community development here at Brookings last April. She talked about the second generation of young criminals who say that they were born into criminality by virtue of having fathers who were criminals and that they are more venal than the generation before them.

This is a continuous problem. The question is how do we build in dynamic processes and models that can be tinkered with, that can be dynamic, that can be applied, and that can be essentially sustainable? Thank you very much. (Applause.)

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. I'm very grateful for that discussion. When Joyce was talking about her mother, it made me realize that what I thought when I grew up was Catholic guilt was alive and well down in Mississippi. (Laughter.)

It also reminded me of a wonderful line that Ernie Cortes of the Industrial Areas Foundation once used. He said, "When I was a kid, my neighborhood was organized as a conspiracy—parents conspiring against me to make me behave." I think, in a way, we are talking about how to recreate that conspiracy. I do hope that either in the morning or in the afternoon we can get to Joyce's point about the social gospel. I think what is happening in this national discussion is that there are really two sides to the social gospel. One is the responsibility of each individual to behave with decency, civility, and respect. Then there is the responsibility of each individual as well as the community to reach out to the least among us. The emphasis historically in the social gospel has been on the second, and what we are looking for is how one combines those two pieces of that same gospel. I use the word gospel, but I think it is, if you will, also a social view that extends beyond believers in the gospel.

I am very honored to call on Julie Segal, who I must say cares about this issue not only because she cares about the First Amendment, but also because she cares passionately about the good work all these groups are doing and is actually trying to figure out how you promote this work and, in her view, respect the First Amendment. Julie Segal.

MS. SEGAL: Thank you. I wish I didn't have to be here. Where did Gene Rivers go? (Laughter.)

MR. DIONNE: He'll be back.

MS. SEGAL: I wish I were here really for my own edification. I majored in sociology in college and this would be very interesting for me to sit with a bunch of sociologists. They closed the sociology department at my school actually after I graduated. (Laughter.)

But I had nothing to do with that. My office thinks I am here to be the opposition on this panel. I told Staci Simmons when she called and asked me to participate that I demurred similarly. I said I really did not want to participate. I didn't really think I was an appropriate addition to the conversation. But that is before I read John's paper.

I thought this meeting should focus on the creative and successful special service programs provided by the faith community. I thought frankly it was a way to expend one of the valuable spots on the panel on someone who has really nothing to add other than being a perceived naysayer and explaining about the constitutional implication of using public funds in certain religious organizations. Although I genuinely wish that I didn't have to be here and I wish that "charitable choice" and other proposals that seek to impermissibly provide tax funds to religious organizations without appropriate constitutional safeguards hadn't really co-opted much of the discussion about public and private partnerships. I think this meeting will be productive if by the end of the day we find that we are probably closer together than we thought we were. I don't think I am going to be the opposition on the panel that my office thinks I will be. I also appreciate E.J.'s interest in making this conversation open to the harshest critic.

Since I am here, I may as well share a few of my thoughts on the subject of publicly funded social-service programs in churches and other houses of worship. I am going to do that in a little more detail this afternoon. But first, with respect to Dr. Kelling's paper, I actually found myself, as I was reading it, assisted greatly by the paper's continuum of inter-organizational relationships as he described some collaboration to active battle. These definitions were helpful and succinct on the many forms of public/private partnerships. I don't object to any of them. They actually make part of my point. There are many different kinds of relationships that religious groups can have with government other than the use of tax funds.

Dr. Kelling also makes the useful point that more of a relationship is necessary than just "fund me and leave me alone" or "I'll go about my business and you go about yours." I actually find it interesting that, as I understand them, none of the relationships in the continuum actually involve funding at all. So, while I would strongly agree with Dr. Kelling's conclusion that religious groups should be at the table as players in any community problem-solving effort, I need to emphasize his point that all the proposals must stand up to moral, legal and constitutional scrutiny. I guess that's where I come in. (Laughter.)

The partnerships in Dr. Kelling's and in John DiIulio's paper look fine to me with one exception. I have little if any objection. However, they do need to be examined to make sure that they're kosher under the constitution. Stupid or not, it needs to happen. If we are going to discuss tax funds, then you have to discuss the constitutionality of publicly funded programs at churches and other houses of worship including synagogues, mosques, and temples. I'm definitely not saying here that faith-based organizations cannot have partnerships with government. I am not even saying that faith-based organizations can't get tax funds to provide services on behalf of the government. Instead, I am saying the constitution must be a factor and if religious organizations are going to get money, they need to do it right.

Why is that? By way of introduction for this afternoon's session, I think it is important to start with a little bit of an explanation of why the separation of church and state is important and why it is not nearly this ivory-tower concept.

What is the separation of church and state? First of all it is one of the most maligned and misunderstood concepts in current political discourse. Most policymakers forget that church-state separation is a two-way street. Based on the religion clause in the First Amendment, the establishment clause provides for no establishment of religion. The free-exercise clause is that government cannot hinder religion. These two clauses together protect the government from the impermissible influence of religion while protecting religion from the intrusive influence of government.

The separation of church and state requires that religion operate free from government intrusion and that government not sponsor or endorse any specific religion, or religions, generally through actions such as funding or other promotional activities. This protects the taxpayer from what the founding fathers considered a religion tax, which is financially supporting a religion with which you don't subscribe. It also deserves the credit for enabling religion to flourish in this country. Without the separation of church and state, religion would not be able to operate without the ties that bind. So, since religion must be free from government intrusion and government cannot do anything to advance the religious mission, funding arrangements are necessarily carefully examined because very few things could hinder a religious program other than the regulations that accompany the money, and very few things could advance religious mission more than actually paying for it.

In addition, what impact will the government dollars have on autonomous faith-based programs? As I just mentioned, concerning the regulations that accompany the money once government starts funding churches, people will rightfully demand accountability on how the funds are spent. I will just finish up by saying I do believe for the record it is possible for government to work in partnership with religious institutions with or without public funds. John DiIulio's paper this afternoon details many partnerships that I think are encouraging and should be expanded and advertised frankly.

A final point, I hope that we can talk about resources other than public funds. I think the corporations have a lot more that they need to be doing dealing with the issue. They are an untapped resource that I hope the conversation can address later. Thank you. (Applause.)

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much, Julie. I kept looking at Keith Pavlischek of the Center for Public Justice and I couldn't tell whether his face seemed to say to me, "I am not sure I am hearing this." (Laughter.)

MR. DIONNE: I hope you guys can all get at that at some point. I want to make sure George Kelling has a chance to respond to all this before lunch. Joyce mentioned Benning Terrace and the Alliance for Concerned Men. I do appreciate Tyrone Parker being here with us today from that organization. I hope you will join us in this conversation. Before I turn to George, I want to see if anyone wants to put more questions, criticisms, praise—all are acceptable on the table. Sir?

MR. BANKS: My name is Banks and I am a Washingtonian. We have to think about what the basic problem is that causes these people to become involved in crime. I don't think it is a riddle; I think most of the people who are involved in crime somehow have been deprived of the independence to move forward in the society of which they want to become a part. Unless we address that point, we won't find solutions. The second thing is my experience is that non-profit, concerned-based efforts to help the poor is the most unregulated enterprise in the country. Everybody can do anything they want, no matter whether it is needed, or whether or not it is acceptable. There are churches from Tennessee that have been set up in the middle of Anacostia because they want to come to Washington to demonstrate their effectiveness. Well, Anacostia has undergone some big changes. The media doesn't write about it. We have 3,000 subsidized units which were clustered together, yet demolished. A new relationship between residents in community building has been taking place. The crime rate has gone down 40 percent since 1990.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you, sir. Mr. Banks is with the Anacostia Congress Heights Circle of Hope. I don't want to put you on the spot now. I would love John Carr to join us at some point because he is working with the Catholic Bishops. The Catholic Bishops are thinking a lot about the role of the church and the problem with crime, and I do hope that at some point in the course of the day that he will talk about what they are up to. Sir?

MR. DEAN: If I could make a quick comment. Unfortunately I will not be able to be with you after lunch. I represent a non-profit called Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America. It came out of the Bush administration. There was a presidential drug advisory council of business leaders that met for about three years to try to figure out how to help communities who were developing these coalitions to help themselves. It refers to a lot of the issues that are in this paper. What we try to do is help the communities bring the multiple sectors together in their community, of which the faith-based community is a part.

Many of these coalitions have a faith component. They try to determine through scientific methods what their genuine problems are which are unique to their community— and then they attempt to actually build a plan to try and solve those problems. These sectors we are talking about are the faith community, the business community, the education community, the media, local leaders, and both secular and government leaders.

I think that we have seen over the last seven years this method begin to work around the country. The initial thrust obviously was on drugs and alcohol abuse— and then there is the related violence that continues to occur. The problem that we are experiencing is that there are many faith communities and many of these coalitions. There are over 4,000 of them where the faith community plays an active part, but not to the degree that we believe that they should play on the whole. I think that this is a great opportunity for the faith community to be involved—and they do not have the problems that Julie talked about because they will be working through their community coalition and not working directly to resolve the problems.

So, I wanted to make that statement just to let you know that we exist. We are about 4,300 strong now. There is one in Boston, Chicago— you name it. We are working closely with the faith community but we are interested in increasing that relationship with the faith community because we see them as a critical component to helping solve community problems. All communities are unique and different; similar, but unique and different. Thank you.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you, Mr. Dean. I want to bring George on to reply to lots of things. When you have mayors coming—politicians and journalists are alike in one respect; they are often late. (Laughter.)

So, we may have more time than we think. On the other hand, they are always in a hurry once they get here and are on tight schedules. (Laughter.)

So, I am going to try to work within those contradictory restraints. I want George to come up and reply to all of that.

MR. KELLING: Once against, this is twisting the text to meet the message here as well. (Laughter.)

MR. KELLING: Let me make several comments. First of all regarding victimless crimes. I have always thought that was a dreadful idea. All of my writings have thought that it is extraordinarily naive. I not only take your point that prostitutes and drug users are victims, but also left out of that equation and left out of the whole seriousness of this equation is the fact that communities are victims. Unless we understand that, we will be going off into bad social policy that atomizes the problem. Until you think of the communities as victims, I don't think you can possibly deal with the problems.

Second, regarding root causes. Part of the reason why I began by saying that I had been in seminary, am a social worker, and have done therapy is that it's easy to demonize a good share of my position about things. I am deeply concerned about root causes. I am deeply concerned about economic justice, as well as racial justice. I worry about those things a whole lot. I think that the withdrawal of police and the criminal-justice agencies at a critical point in our history when we were heroically dealing with civil rights and trying to learn to live together in a new pattern was a historical disaster. So, I do fuss about those things a lot, but understand what happened to a good share of policing. What happened is as follows. Crime is caused by racism, poverty and social injustice. In order to deal with crime, you have got to deal with those root causes. Now, this is the left version, but criminologists and sociologists largely are over on that side except for John - (Laughter.)

It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it. (Laughter.)

With relish. (Laughter.)

But that went on. Now, police can't do anything about those problems. Ergo, police can't do anything about crime. Some of the original models of community policing were sold on those terms, and that is that we are going to be nice people and we are going to facilitate relationships, et cetera. Part of the reason why patrol officers gag on community policing is that they have uncoupled crime and policing.

We lost in that idea the prospect that criminal justice agencies can prevent crime. Police can prevent crime by presence. They can prevent crime by reducing opportunities. They can prevent crime by restoring order. They can prevent crime by targeting as they are doing in Boston, which Chris and Gene have talked about. The focus has got to go back to the role of the police, the role of prosecutors, the role of the courts to prevent crime and not just process it once it has happened.

So, I am constantly criticized for not being concerned about issues of social justice. My concern is to hold agencies accountable for dealing with what they were sponsored for in the first place. Now, they do other things; I want them to do other things. But the idea of root causes became a gigantic copout for criminal justice and police agencies.

Why is crime dropping? Well, crime is dropping because the economy is so good. That is why I keep harping on the subway and earlier experiences in New York City. The economy did not change; drug use patterns did not change. The number of youths was increasing during that particular time. That is why we have got to get history right. So, I am deeply concerned about root causes. I am for after-school programs.

In Columbia, South Carolina, a police officer was sent in to pacify a public housing development that was completely out of control. They always had to send in two cars. The second car was simply to protect the first car because they would burn it otherwise. Now, officers park their cars there; the officer walks through; the kids follow him around. He is a Pied Piper. So, what does he start doing? He discovers that after school all the kids are hanging around in his office. Why were they hanging around in his office? Because it was a safe place; it's clear that they need protection; it's clear that they need other things. So, he is starting a volunteer program. Do I think he should do that? Sure, I do. Do I think he should continue? No, he ought to get out of that business. He should not be doing for that community what they should be doing for themselves. He should be getting the volunteers, and getting the pros in that business to take care of those things. So, my concern has been a deliberate, narrow focus on how criminal-justice agencies may prevent crime, because we know how to do that now. That is my first comment. I deliberately overstated that a little bit to deliberately try to attract a little debate, and I got it from my social science - (Laughter.)

New York happened, and there is this scientific argument about what happened in New York City and why the changes have come about. Ultimately this is not going to get resolved empirically. This is going to get resolved in terms of historical understandings of things that transpired and inferences from those historical understandings. Why people have stopped committing crimes in New York City is not going to be answered empirically. I think we can make powerful arguments—and I think history and case studies and inferences are powerful arguments— but I don't think we should copout and think we can ultimately solve this empirically.

Not only that; things are happening so quickly in the United States that you can't even keep up with them as you go from community to community. I would bet you that John is experiencing this as he goes from community to community to community. You just go, Hey, wow. What's happening is just unbelievable and it's happening spontaneously. If I were to say New York City stopped controlling crime so that we could conduct an experiment to demonstrate this, everyone would laugh at me because life is simply going on very, very quickly. Broken windows and root causes; I don't see broken windows and root causes as a contradictory concept. I see them as very complementary.

When I talk about the weakening of authority, I think about the weakening of authority of the family. Let me give you an example. When I went back to the juvenile court in Wisconsin in which I work— I went back in mid- 1985—it turned out that at that time in this post-Golf era with great concern for the liberties of children, what they decided was that as a parent I have no standing whatsoever if my child is accused of stealing a car, for example. If my son stole a car and I said to my son, I want you to go to court and admit that you stole the car and live with the consequences, I have no standing. My son would be appointed an attorney. The attorney would plead my child innocent. If I want to hire an attorney to voice my interests, I can do that.

Now, what kind of a system is that when the state has inserted itself between myself and my holding my child accountable? We can talk about similar things in education. We can talk about similar things in a whole series of dimensions. On the one hand we are saying to people we have to have family responsibility, and on the other hand we continuously erode the authority. I know what we are trying to do. We are trying to protect children from cranky parents. We are trying to protect children from cranky schoolteachers and cranky authorities. But, in this world kids have a lot more to fear than cranky authorities. They have to fear themselves. What we have done is to create a juvenile justice system.

In earlier days, if my father tipped over an outhouse, that was serious. If I smashed light bulbs, that was relatively serious. You've got to do burglary, now, and beyond burglary most of the time for the crime to be considered serious. Burglary and car theft have been virtually decriminalized for kids. I mean, by the time we get these kids, they are going a million miles an hour. Then they splatter. Three strikes and you're out. That doesn't mean anything to a 13-year-old. What I am arguing for is to stop these kids civilly, to stop them early, and to get control over them. I mean, they are really at the mercy of themselves—think of what a half-wit you were at 12 or 13 or 14. (Laughter.)

I can talk to the men here. Remember? (Laughter.)

I stopped. Why did I stop and not go along with my buddies to get beer from the store? Because I knew my father would kill me— and I really mean kill. (Laughter.)

I lived in a world with predictable outcomes. When I did psychiatric treatment of kids, the most critical thing for settling them down was to help them to understand an orderly world so they could deal with their problems.

So, I think it is absolutely consistent. We can get into a whole lot of trouble and in a big debate about New York City. Again, I think it's been badly represented by the media; it's been badly represented by Giuliani; it has not even been thoroughly represented by Bratton. Understand that the use of force in New York City is as closely controlled as almost any city in the United States. Certainly the use of force is much less than that of Washington, D.C. You name the city and you will probably support this assertion less, and I am talking about shootings, et cetera. Now, the Diallo thing— that's shooting. In my mind that was a brew of scared cops. The thing that bothers me most— and Gene is nodding— is that these cops are scared. They are terrified. They have no experience in minority communities. Then you have scared cops and you have kids with high-powered guns. You have white cops going into African-American communities, and they are terrified.

The problem in New York is not the overall strategy of orderliness. The problem there is how to deal with getting guns off of the streets. That is very important because one explanation of why so many people are not dying and why they are going to have to close up trauma centers soon is because people aren't carrying guns on the street—they are fearful they are going to be caught by the cops. Now, the question is how you are going to get them. In New York they decided to do special units. Now, special units are a real problem. You get very aggressive officers; you get officers that go into strange neighborhoods. They don't know the good guys from the bad guys, et cetera. On top of that, the purpose is to collect guns. But, ostensibly, if you are good at getting guns that means that fewer people are carrying guns. But that means that you have to get the staff up and you have to start broadening the net. Special units are a real problem in American policing. They are a problem in other forms of policing as well. They are very militarized; they are very problematic. But understand that it is a trade-off here. The trade-off is that if you want to get guns, you need to figure out how you are going to get guns and how you are going to get guns in New York.

You don't need a racist cop explanation for the Diallo incident. You don't need that. It's an insufficient explanation. What you need is a scared cop and a furtive move and one cop stumbled and they are all going to pull that trigger as fast as they can.

I think we have to talk very discreetly about separate problems, just as there were separate problems in the subway. Whoever mentioned it, you're right. There was a problem with homelessness in the subway. The problem was you get some very naďve kids coming into that subway and they were preyed upon and they were victimized. Our goal was to get to those kids just as quickly as we could; get them out of there; get them to service. We referred and referred and referred. That was a sub-problem of a larger problem, and there were other sub-problems as well.

Ms. Ladner raised the issue of what one is to do in terms of when the informal has broken down. I think it did, and I think we are rebuilding it somewhat artificially. People are putting on hats, baseball caps, and citizens groups are walking the streets working to get other citizens to re-claim the public spaces—they are trying to figure out ways in which churches and other agencies can restore what we lost for a whole variety of policy reasons and social changes.

Let me go specifically now to the church and one thing we have not talked about a whole lot and that is the simple assertion of the faith community or the faith-community moral authority. There are issues that they should be dealing with, for example, a moral decision. It was the policy in New York City that you do not eject people from any facility when it gets to be 32 degrees. Now, from my point of view in terms of restoring order in the subway, that had the potential of a disaster because it meant that any time it got cold, order would break down and all kinds of problems would reassert themselves. The discussion that we had about how to manage that 32 degrees issue was a moral discussion. One captain in a subway broke down and cried. He said, "My parents were in Dachau. I'm not sending anyone out to die." This was an intensely moral issue. Fortunately there was a Jewish chaplain that we brought into the conversation. We looked and tried to consider moral guidance about those things.

I would emphasize in my closing in terms of my comments here that it seems to me that that is something you have to think about a whole lot—about how you use that moral authority to give policy people guidance and if no other way than how to think about values. If you look at the police problem—solving methodology now, they call it SARA. It stands for scan, then access, then response, then access, although I don't quite remember. In no place is there a moral evaluation in the means involved. That, I think, is the churches' specialty, and I would especially ask for their external, constant harping on us in terms of managing the moral dimensions of social policy. Thank you. (Applause.)

MR. DIONNE: Thank you so much. We know about the broken-windows theory. Now we have the half-wit theory. (Laughter.)

I know that a lot of people who read me regularly think that has broad applications, that half-wit theory. (Laughter.)

What we are going to do now is to go upstairs. We wanted George—and he did an admirable job of setting up some of the broad issues. John is going to come this afternoon and talk more specifically about the churches. Now, we have lunch upstairs with our mayors. (Applause.)

top \| home \| search \| site info \| contact us!
The Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington DC 20036 Telephone: (202) 797-6000 \| Facsimile: (202) 797-6004 \| E-mail: Brookings Info Comments on this Site