Engaging the Victim’s Voice in Public Safety Research

I recently attended a National Institutes of Health (NIH) meeting concerned with criminal justice interventions. Speakers emphasized the importance of involving people with lived experience—which everyone understood to mean persons who have experienced arrest and incarceration.

As I nodded in agreement, my mind drifted back 45 years to my own lived experience, the first time I was robbed or beaten in New York City. At 17, I walked into a Washington Heights subway station, where I was jumped by some teens who wanted my watch. I didn’t want to give it up. They smashed my head against the concrete floor and kicked me until they wrested it away. A cop arrived soon after. Visibly horrified to see this slight high schooler so bloodied, he took me into the station bathroom and carefully cleaned me up. “I don’t want your folks to see you like this.” He and a colleague took me home.

Then my mind drifted 44 years to when my gentle cousin Jesse was beaten to death by a 16-year-old boy he surprised robbing his apartment. Jesse was like a brother to my mom. Her life was never the same after that.

These and other crimes cast long shadows. I carried accompanying racialized fears through my young adult years. One day in 1988, I boarded an elevator in Boston. An imposing Black man bounded in behind me. I felt myself involuntarily flinch, only to hear: “Hello Harold.” It was Professor Glenn Loury, a grad school mentor.

It’s been 35 years since anyone placed an unkind hand on me. Much of my research concerns crisis response, violence prevention, and related challenges. I travel Chicago’s late-night “EL.” I visit jails and prisons doing this work. Now that I have gray hair and resemble TV Grandpa, my safety issues have largely evaporated.

My racialized fears have similarly evaporated. Boys and men under criminal justice supervision are often surprised that I’m not scared of them, particularly when most tower over my 125 lb. frame.

Many, themselves, have been victims of violence. We discuss same-and-different aspects of our experiences. I came away from that subway mauling believing that I should call police should my safety ever be in question again. These boys and men communicate that this is the precise opposite of their experience.

Our political right and left commonly fail to properly engage the victim’s voice, as we consider America’s outsized violence rates, which dwarf those of other democracies.  Both sides could apply a more rigorous and empathic lens to our human obligations to crime victims and to persons accused or convicted of crime.

When I was victimized, when my cousin was killed, I was struck by how many people communicated that the way to honor the victims, the way we comfort and heal survivors, is to brutalize the perpetrators. Following this logic, we inflict gratuitous cruelties on millions of incarcerated people, stamping permanent scars on them and others in their lives, with scant evidence that such brutalities serve a useful purpose. A far better way to honor crime victims is to actually listen to them, to meet their needs, and to honor their values.

Victims indeed have a stake in ensuring that perpetrators are held to account. Deterrence and accountability matter. At the same time, surveys indicate that most victims are more focused on prevention and restitution than on retribution. This is the animating imperative behind restorative justice interventions. Such victim perspectives also roughly match the evidence concerning what actually prevents crime. Daniel Nagin aptly summarized a long line of criminology research: “Certainty of apprehension, not the severity of the ensuing legal consequence, is the more effective deterrent.”

Potential perpetrators must know they will be held to account. That’s a heavy lift in the communities most challenged by crime. Fewer officers per crime, unaddressed social distress, and our nation’s weak controls over powerful weaponry combine to magnify the risks, lethality, and impunity of community violence.

The low priority often applied to crimes perpetrated against persons involved in the underground economy further amplifies the violence. Ten years ago, our team interviewed incarcerated Chicago gun offenders, 47% of whom had been wounded by gunfire. When we asked: “Why were you carrying an illegal gun?,” a common response was “Why do you think?”. Respondents communicated their clear belief that police didn’t care about their well-being.  And the more likely our respondents were to know who shot them, the more reasons they had to avoid cooperating with police. Given their life circumstances and criminal-justice risks, many concluded they needed to fend for themselves, with predictable consequences for others in their lives and for their communities.

The staggering depopulation of vibrant, but high-crime, communities is one consequence of such challenges. Many families–particularly those with boys attending public schools—have left Chicago’s South and West sides.  Violence and outmigration erode home values, undermining communal wealth and the retirement nest eggs of remaining residents.

Chicago is making strides in violence reduction, including a 29% homicide drop between 2024 and 2025. Racial disparities, however, remain stark. Last year, 315 Black Chicagoans died by homicide, about 41 per 100,000 population. Over the same period, non-Hispanic White Chicagoans experienced 16 homicides, less than 2 per 100,000, roughly the homicide rates of London, England and Paris, France.

Such disparities underscore the social justice imperative to have more effective public safety policies, including properly deployed, well-resourced police, acting in partnership with the community, alongside other efforts to serve areas challenged by crime. Democratic strategists distance themselves from slogans such as “defund the police,” which alienate communities across every boundary. These slogans are more than a tactical liability for one party. They express a fundamentally misguided view of what’s required to implement evidence-informed public safety measures.

In 2016, I served on Chicago’s Police Accountability Task Force in the aftermath of Laquan McDonald’s murder. A continuing refrain was that police were more patient and humane within low-crime communities–for the simple reason that they were not being called away to address a flood of other emergency calls.  On a Saturday night in Hyde Park, officers can spend an hour calmly assisting someone in mental health crisis. They can’t do the same in Englewood or Garfield Park.

We in public health and social work sometimes lack self-awareness regarding these realities. If I attend an evening seminar on Abolitionist Perspectives on Policing, I walk safely to my 9:30 train across spaces protected by security cameras, well-patrolled by the University of Chicago Police Department. At that same hour, 2,000 feet south, many seniors are afraid to wait outside for the bus. Local stores face financial challenges from retail theft in a community where the number of patrolling officers per crime is perhaps one-fifth that of Hyde Park.

In conversation, Yale’s Phillip Atiba Solomon offered a useful provocative question that speaks to these challenges: “What if we took an Abolitionist perspective to mean: “What would the Abolitionists have done?”

W.E.B. Du Bois explored these questions in his 1935 history, Black Reconstruction. Abolitionists and their successors did not seek to abolish police or prisons. They wanted these organizations and institutions to operate with justice, effectiveness, and true accountability to the communities of a formerly-enslaved people: ¹

While all instruments of group control–police, courts, government appropriations and the like–were in the hands of whites, no power was left in Negro hands. If a white man is assaulted by a white man or a Negro the police are at hand. If a Negro is assaulted by a white man, the police are more apt to arrest the victim than the aggressor; if he is assaulted by a Negro, he is in most cases without redress or protection.

Gunnar Myrdal’s 1943  volume, An American Dilemma,² similarly documented the sense that Black Americans “are left practically without police protection,”  Like Du Bois, Myrdal noted how the refusal to hire Black officers encouraged police misconduct and worsened crime. Using strikingly modern language, his informants noted that Black officers “can arrest offenders with less show of force, partly because they know their way around in the community, and partly because they are personally respected.”²

Meeting our current challenges requires that we reform and strengthen criminal justice systems, following where the evidence leads to promote public safety, and to integrate such measures within the broader portfolio of economic development, and health and social services to address the causes and consequences of crime.

Meeting these challenges also requires active collaboration among the public health, social work, and law enforcement communities. Evidence-informed policing strategies show promising results. Hot-spot policing, focused deterrence, and  technologies such as street cameras and ShotSpotter can assist in deterring and addressing gun violence. Such technologies also facilitate rapid medical response when gun violence occurs. Alternate mental health crisis response models also show promise. Some reduce the police footprint. Others provide multidisciplinary responses where police are required, but where clinicians add expertise and can deescalate situations of potential violence.

In pursuing these strategies, we have much to learn from Abolitionist perspectives communicated by Du Bois and others. They sought to honor the humanity of incarcerated persons and others under criminal justice supervision, providing effective assistance to persons convicted of crimes, not a solely punitive response. They sought to provide effective protection for potential crime victims without replicating the brutalities of police racism, centering the values of affected communities while implementing effective public safety and victim assistance interventions where fear of crime and its practical consequences bring such palpable harm.

That’s the perspective we in the public health and social work communities must embrace, as we address population health consequences of brutal carceral systems, and as we confront the widespread human pain that arises from incarceration and crime.

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