When the story everybody knows is the problem

What story do you tell yourself when you hear “urban drug dealer”? Do you imagine a blinged-out thug driving an SUV with tinted windows and spinning rims?

What story do you tell yourself about the most effective way to deal with urban drug markets? Do you think about armed police breaking down doors and making undercover buys to nab dealers?

If so, you’re not alone. But according to David Kennedy, a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, those stories are not only wrong — they make the very real problem of urban drug trafficking even worse.

In an article in the February 9 issue of Newsweek, Kennedy explains that the cliché of the Mercedes-driving drug dealer “is not true. [Urban drug dealers] are scraping by, living at home,” not getting rich.

Kennedy also challenges the tough-cop approach to enforcement:

“We’ve been in this cycle in which law enforcement pushed harder and harder and harder, which drives the community further and further away,” Kennedy tells NEWSWEEK. “That creates additional space for the relatively few bad guys to operate, which makes law enforcement push harder and makes the community step further back.” … Kennedy’s research shows that shockingly small numbers of people—dozens, not hundreds—cause the violence plaguing cities’ worst areas. Most people just want a safe place to live, but feel anger toward heavy-handed police.

Questioning the truth of the standard cops vs. drug dealers story — one so accepted that it has driven the model universally employed by police departments nationwide — Kennedy conducted an experiment in 2004 in High Point, N.C.:

Kennedy got the cops to try a new way of cleaning up the corners. They rounded up some young dealers; showed a videotape of them dealing drugs; and readied cases, set for indictment, that would have meant hard time in prison. Then they let the kids go. Working with their families, the police helped the dope dealers find job training and mentors. The message, which spread quickly through the neighborhood, was that the cops would give kids a second chance—but come down aggressively if they didn’t take it. The police won back trust they had lost long ago (if they ever had it). After four years, police in High Point had wiped the drug dealers off the corner. They compared the numbers to the prior four years and found a 57 percent drop in violent crime in the targeted area.

Said Kennedy, “We’re in this spiral of decline, and the great revelation of the High Point work was that we can consciously step out of that spiral and, in fact, reverse it.”

How powerful are the stories we tell ourselves, the stories “everybody knows”? In the case of urban drug trafficking, the wrong ones were so pervasive and so potent, they were making the problem worse.

David Kennedy didn’t buy that story. Instead, he flipped the script, and as a result, “his tactics are being adopted by police departments from Atlanta to Seattle, with some spectacular results. One crime-infested Nashville neighborhood where Kennedy’s program was used saw a 91 percent drop in crime and prostitution in 2008, largely attributable to Kennedy’s good-cop, bad-cop approach.”

What stories that “everybody knows” are you accepting at face value? How are those stories affecting your beliefs, your behavior, and your decisions? Is the wrong story holding you back?

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::