Researchers say it’s often relatively small sections of high-crime neighborhoods that drive crime rates. University of Pennsylvania criminologist John MacDonald calls these places areas of “concentrated disadvantage.”

These aren’t just places where poverty, joblessness, family disruption, or social isolation is high – all those things are problems. MacDonald says these relatively small clusters can generate at least 50% of a city’s crime, so lowering crime there would have a outsized impact on decreasing crime and racial disparities.

JAY LINDSAY:

Cisco DePina was 17 when he joined a street gang in Boston.

It was called CV-Mob. And there's not much to tell about how DePina got started in that life.

At that time, he'd been thrown out of his high school in Boston for too much fighting. So, in the early mornings he'd be outside, walking around, going nowhere. Sometimes he'd tote a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English malt liquor. Others, it was a marijuana-stuffed cigar called a blunt. He occasionally interrupted this idleness by committing crime.

Soon enough, he was doing all that in CV-Mob. And often on a corner right near where he grew up.

CISCO DEPINA:

That's how I really became part of the gang. Just not having anything else to do and anybody else to go to. That's all I had was the people in my community. I just didn't care. I didn't care. I did anything basically to survive on that corner. Selling drugs, getting into fights, getting shot at, shooting, whatever it meant for me to survive. I was doing it.

JAY LINDSAY:

Back then, as now, DePina lived in and loved the Bowdoin-Geneva neighborhood. This neighborhood has a large immigrant population and is heavily Black and Hispanic.

It's also one of the city's highest crime areas. About a decade ago, The Boston Globe profiled it in a five-part series named for the neighborhood's 68 blocks.

The paper said the neighborhood was (quote) "often identified with the violence that has erupted there with disconcerting regularity over the decades."

Researchers say it's often relatively small sections of cities, similar to Bowdoin-Geneva, that drive crime rates and widen racial crime disparities.

University of Pennsylvania criminologist and sociologist John MacDonald calls these places areas of "concentrated disadvantage."

These aren't just places where poverty, or joblessness, or family disruption, or social isolation is high. It's where all those things are problems.

MacDonald says these clusters make up just 3 to 5% of places and street segments in a given city. But they generate at least 50% of its crime. He says lowering crime there would have an outsized impact on crime and racial disparities.

JOHN MACDONALD:

If crime and arrests go down in these areas of concentrated disadvantage in major cities, you would see it in the national trends, as well.

JAY LINDSAY:

My name is Jay Lindsay, and this is Six Hundred Atlantic, a podcast produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. This season, we're taking our lead from the Bank's 64th Economic Conference, which focused on racial disparities.

In prior episodes, we've looked at disparities in wealth, education, and geography. Today we're talking about crime.

This intersects with thorny and potentially explosive issues like police tactics, the causes of poverty, and the impacts of family breakdown. So, policy is difficult here.

But MacDonald says a greater awareness of the influence of areas of concentrated disadvantage can focus policy by guiding it toward interventions in specific places.

JOHN MACDONALD:

As opposed to thinking about broad-swath policies or programs that address an entire city, instead, you say, okay, here are the top 100 blocks that are generating the highest rates of joblessness, calls for service, arrests. What could be done to help improve the conditions in those places? It's a much more reachable approach than saying, "What can we do for an entire city?", for example.

JAY LINDSAY:

Tito SantosSilva is a former executive at Boston Uncornered. The organization seeks out gang members and tries to get them off the street and headed to college or careers. One of its success stories is DePina, who has worked there for the last 16 years.

SantosSilva says bringing down crime requires going straight to where it's happening and dealing with the people committing it.

TITO SANTOSSILVA:

Those who are driving the most violence inside of the community, those who are often seen as the disrupters in the community, are actually the keys to changing those negative kind of ideas of a community.

JAY LINDSAY:

Two striking examples of the nation's racial crime disparities are seen in homicide rates for Blacks and whites.

For Blacks, the mean homicide victimization rate between 2015 and 2019 was nearly 18 per 100,000. That's compared to about 2 per 100,000 for whites.

Meanwhile, the known homicide offender rate was about 14 per 100,000 for Blacks. For whites, it was about 1.4 per 100,000.

Researchers studying the roots of crime and these racial crime gaps are often looking at two strong correlations.

One is the link between poverty and crime, which is well-known and much-studied. The other correlation is between race and poverty. Data indicates that Blacks and Hispanics are about twice as likely to live in poverty as whites.

When researchers see statistics about racial crime disparities in an area, they're often exploring the link to poverty, as well.

But that link can be overemphasized, and other factors can be overlooked. Here's Boston Fed economist Jeff Thompson, who organized the Bank's economic conference on racial disparities:

JEFF THOMPSON:

I think a lot of other people are rightly disturbed by the idea of saying that crime is a function of poverty when most poor people are not involved in crime at all. And so, it is more complicated.

JAY LINDSAY:

For instance, is a poor area one where most people are working? Are families relatively intact? Are buildings and infrastructure in decent shape?

If so, then then these are likely not areas of the concentrated disadvantage. MacDonald says even in neighborhoods known as "high-crime" areas, the clusters of concentrated disadvantage there, the places that actually drive the crime, are quite small.

JOHN MACDONALD:

Most of the neighborhoods in most parts of cities have relatively low rates of crime and low rates of arrests. It's really a subset of areas within those places that are generating the bulk of the activity, and I think that's the part that is just not appreciated enough by the public, but also policymakers.

JAY LINDSAY:

In his research, MacDonald projects the impact of bringing the highest crime areas – those in the 95th percentile – down to the median crime rate. The potential effects are significant.

In New York, for instance, disparities in Black arrest rates compared to the rest of the population would drop 30%. In Los Angeles, they would drop 29%. In Chicago, 25%.

Realizing such gains is an ambitious goal. And MacDonald advocates what are called "place-based" solutions to get there. This tactic brings improvements, resources, and programs to very specific geographic areas.

The idea is straightforward – that a focus on places will improve life for people there. But it hasn't always worked.

MacDonald says that, for instance, place-based programs that give tax incentives to hire workers or build housing in particular neighborhoods have a mixed record of success.

That's why MacDonald calls for more direct "bricks and mortar" projects – things like fixing abandoned houses, cleaning vacant lots, improving lighting.

He emphasizes these aren't just cosmetic changes. They make is possible for businesses to reinvest in an area. But he adds he knows it takes more than brick-and-mortar projects to meaningfully close racial crime gaps.

A cautionary tale for him is the commitment some cities have made to high-rise public housing projects.

JOHN MACDONALD:

If you think about it, the whole idea of high-rise public housing was a terrible idea. You take the poorest people and you're going to concentrate them in a place where they're socially isolated. Even with good amenities, unless you have the investment that kind of continuously keeps that up, it's like, "Of course that's not going to be a good model."

So, I think it is more than just bricks and mortar. It's also providing place-based changes that can actually bring people into communities from a diverse economic standpoint, so you don't have complete concentrations of poverty. The beginning of that begins with cleaning up a place so that's it's a more attractive place for people to move into.

JAY LINDSAY:

Boston Uncornered's strategy is heavily placed-based, and it's referenced in its name. The organization targets street corners in high-crime neighborhoods.

The organization says that 5% of all streets and corners in Boston account for 74% of all shootings.

Back when Cisco DePina was in a gang, a neighbor who worked for what is now Boston Uncornered was on his porch when he saw Cisco on his regular corner. Then, he saw DePina getting ready to fire a gun and yelled out his name.

CISCO DEPINA:

And I just took off and thinking, "I know I'm about to go to jail. He called a cop. This is it for me. I'm going in." But the whole day nobody showed up.

JAY LINDSAY:

The neighbor later told DePina about Boston Uncornered and kept at it through DePina's disinterest.

He'd ask DePina to play chess, play ball, or take a trip to a beach outside Boston. The man was also a teacher and invited him to classes that the program offered so he could get a high school diploma.

CISCO DEPINA:

And I'm not going lie, I came in probably three, four times and three, four times walked right back out. But the thing is that this door was never closed for me. This door was always open. No matter how I left, it was open for me to come back.

JAY LINDSAY:

Eventually, the program director made a deal with DePina: Come to class, and I'll pay you to clean the building afterward. DePina agreed, and that led to another proposal – one that's also at the core of Boston Uncornered strategy.

The group offered him a regular stipend, so he wouldn't go back to selling drugs on that corner to earn money and could continue to get his schooling.

Sixteen years later, DePina is the college readiness director at Boston Uncornered. Now, he spends his days trying to help kids who are just like he once was.

DePina says people working to reduce crime and racial crime disparities need to understand something about the gang members driving so much violence.

CISCO DEPINA:

That gang members are not bad people. They have the intelligence, they have the talent to become positive change agents.

JAY LINDSAY:

DePina works in a radically different environment than MacDonald. But they think alike when it comes to a strategy for reducing racial crime gaps: Find the place where conditions are worse, then go there and try to make things better.

CISCO DEPINA:

We identify a hotspot and then we just walk to that neighborhood, to that street, and then we start talking to individuals.

And I'm not going to lie and say it is easy because it's not easy. They might not hear you the first time, they might not even hear you the second or third time. But the key to it is not giving up. I keep going back, and we keep talking about it, and eventually they'll see that someone cares, and then they'll start to believe it for themselves, too. That they can do it.

JAY LINDSAY:

The Boston Fed's conference on Racial Disparities in Today's Economy was a place for clear-eyed, data-centric discussion on a sensitive topic. It was also somewhere to explore solutions.

But in today's polarized political environment, it's fair to ask whether solutions are really possible. So, that's what we did for our season's final episode.

The episode features a conversation with Georgetown's Harry Holzer and Brown's Glenn Loury.

Holzer and Loury are eminent economists. Holzer is a former official in the Clinton administration, Loury is known for his frank and sometimes heterodox views. Both were concerned about how our country's polarization would impact efforts to narrow racial disparities.

HARRY HOLZER:

Well, let's be honest. It's very difficult because polarization was very dramatic even before the murder of George Floyd, right? We've been drifting in that direction, politically, for decades. So, in that environment, it's going to be inevitable that it's hard to make progress on the kinds of issues we're talking about.

JAY LINDSAY:

Loury said he's looking for some Americans to step up.

GLENN LOURY:

I think we desperately need visionary leadership and courageous leadership.

JAY LINDSAY:

That's next time on Six Hundred Atlantic.

JAY LINDSAY:

Thank you for listening to Season 3 of Six Hundred Atlantic. You can find interviews and our first three seasons and subscribe to our mailing list at bostonfed.org/six-hundred-atlantic. Listen and subscribe to Six Hundred Atlantic on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and TuneIn.

The producers would like to thank our contributors for their time and insights. They are Francisco DePina, Harry Holzer, Glenn Loury, John MacDonald, Tito SantosSilva, and Jeff Thompson.

This has been "Enduring Divides," the third season of the Boston Fed's Six Hundred Atlantic podcast.