A narrative-driven
exploration of policing and the punishment of disadvantage in
Chicago, and a new vision for repairing urban neighborhoods
For people of color
who live in segregated urban neighborhoods, surviving crime and
violence is a generational reality. As violence in cities like New
York and Los Angeles has fallen in recent years, in many Chicago
communities, it has continued at alarming rates. Meanwhile, residents
of these same communities have endured decades of some of the highest
rates of arrest, incarceration, and police abuse in the nation.
The War on
Neighborhoods argues that these trends are connected. Crime in
Chicago, as in many other US cities, has been fueled by a broken
approach to public safety in disadvantaged neighborhoods. For nearly
forty years, public leaders have attempted to create peace through
punishment, misinvesting billions of dollars toward the suppression
of crime, largely into a small subset of neighborhoods on the city’s
West and South Sides. Meanwhile, these neighborhoods have struggled
to sustain investments into basic needs such as jobs, housing,
education, and mental healthcare.
When the main
investment in a community is policing and incarceration, rather than
human and community development, that amounts to a “war on
neighborhoods,” which ultimately furthers poverty and disadvantage.
Longtime Chicago scholars Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper tell
the story of one of those communities, a neighborhood on Chicago’s
West Side that is emblematic of many majority-black neighborhoods in
US cities. Sharing both rigorous data and powerful stories, the
authors explain why punishment will never create peace and why we
must rethink the ways that public dollars are invested into making
places safe.
The War on
Neighborhoods makes the case for a revolutionary reformation of our
public-safety model that focuses on shoring up neighborhood
institutions and addressing the effects of trauma and poverty. The
authors call for a profound transformation in how we think about
investing in urban communities—away from the perverse misinvestment
of policing and incarceration and toward a model that invests in
human and community development.