I don't think I've ever reviewed a book on the blog before -- maybe this prior post would qualify -- but I recently finished Don’t Shoot, by Paul David Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College in New York. It's available on Amazon here, and I thought that others might find it interesting. Kennedy has worked with police departments across the country for several decades, initially trying to devise strategies to reduce gun violence, and later trying to address open-air drug markets, which he views as a critical blight on inner-city communities. At least to hear him tell it, his work has been successful on both scores. At a minimum, it has been very influential. The $2 billion federal program called Project Safe Neighborhoods is based, at least in part, on his ideas. Some of Kennedy’s most famous work has been here, in North Carolina, especially in High Point. In collaboration with others, Kennedy devised a strategy of building federal drug cases against the most active dealers, then calling the dealers in to a meeting with police, showing them the evidence, and telling them (1) that if they kept dealing drugs, the police would arrest them based on the evidence they already had, and the dealers would be sent to prison, but (2) that if they stopped dealing drugs, social service agencies would help them change their lives. According to Kennedy, the strategy totally shut down High Point's notorious drug markets without requiring many arrests, and without creating a vacuum to be filled [...]
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