What causes young inner-city men to kill each other?
Where do we start? At the root causes of poverty, discrimination, family breakdown, childhood toxic stress? With concrete societal failings such as bad schools, unsafe housing, lack of health care and few jobs? With a gang culture that accords respect to those who commit brutal crimes and serve long prison terms? With the easy availability of guns?
All contribute. But we can’t wait until we solve these enormous problems to keep young men alive. “Maybe you don’t have to solve poverty,” said Sara Heller, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Maybe you can attack more proximal causes. So much violence comes out of arguments. If you can get a kid to look away instead of throwing the first punch, you can avoid violence.”
On its face, this seems absurd. But consider the Chicago police’s analysis of murders. In 2011, of the murders for which researchers could identify a motive, only 10 percent were the stuff outsiders imagine: ruthless drug dealers vying for territory. The vast majority of homicides — 70 percent — were the result of altercations.
“A couple of young guys plus a stupid beef plus the presence of a gun equals dead bodies,” said Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago and co-director of its Crime Lab, an organization founded in 2008 that conducts gold-standard randomized controlled trials of promising interventions to prevent crime. Jens Ludwig, Crime Lab’s director, calls these arguments “Seinfeldian” — about nothing.