Commitment to both accountability and caring

A riot following a police shooting in Cincinnati in 2001 prompted several years of a high homicide rate in the city. In 2006 leaders there called David Kennedy, who ran a program called Ceasefire and who had lowered the homicide rate in Boston, Baltimore, Minneapolis, among other places. Kennedy wrote an article for Newsweek on how the program works and what he achieved in Cincinnati.

I won't work through the whole article (it is worth the read). I will quote the summary paragraph from near the end.

The old duality is simple, and it may be comforting, but it’s wrong. We need to find a new, more complicated logic, and we have. It’s a logic that says no amount of law enforcement will ever work, that law enforcement as we’ve been practicing it is part of the problem. It’s a logic that says no amount of traditional social investment will ever work. It’s a logic that says, someone can be doing terrible things and still be a victim; someone can have done wrong and still deserve help; someone can have been the victim of history and neglect and it’s still right to demand that they stop hurting people. Not even remotely radical ideas: a good parent says, all the time, You’ve broken the rules, and I’m going to do something about it, and I love you and of course I will continue to care for you and hold you close. But radical when it comes to talking about crime, where commitment to accountability seems to crowd out room for caring, and commitment to caring seems to crowd out room for accountability.

All simply described as: building community.