New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey opened his revelatory 2018 book Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence by calling the dramatic fall in violence in American cities since the early 1990s a “fundamental change in the nature of U.S. urban life,” one that “no one predicted and that many people still do not believe.”
The book amassed a pile of crime statistics to counter that disbelief—and to show how the efforts of community activists and urban redevelopment deserved to share more of the credit with law-enforcement strategies for the dramatic crime drop American cities experienced between 1991 and 2014. As Sharkey described his research to CityLab’s Richard Florida, “it wasn’t just the police. It was about the transformation of urban spaces.”
In a follow-up study, Sharkey now throws into sharper relief one set of numbers quantifying how much African-American men—the demographic most vulnerable to violence—benefited from cutting the nationwide homicide rate in half. These are numbers that drew little attention when they appeared in the book. So, in updating and expanding on them in the journal Demography, Sharkey and Michael Friedson, a former student of his now on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, are leaning into the mic to say it louder for the folks in the back.
[For more on this story by MARK OBBIE, go to https://www.citylab.com/perspe...uneasy-peace/585280/]
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