Black Americans face a paradox when it comes to crime and justice. Black Americans suffer disproportionately from most crime, yet when blacks and whites join forces to fight crime, the injustices felt in black communities at the hands of the criminal justice system are often either ignored or discounted by the larger population.

Escaping this paradox requires candor about the scope of the crime problem in Black America. There is good news here, as serious crime is falling in most major cities; but the levels of black victimization and black crime are still high. This chapter documents the extent of the crime and explores possible reasons for the recent declines within black communities.

Escaping the paradox also requires clarity about the injustices in the present system. At an individual level, the perceived prevalence by blacks of injustices within the criminal justice system has led to mistrust and has compromised Black America’s confidence in the system’s capacity to protect and mete out justice. At the level of policy, criminal justice is becoming much more harsh. There is evidence which strongly suggests that this is politically possible only because the policies, even when applied in a color-blind fashion, will apply principally to black Americans.

Understanding the scope of the twin problems of crime and injustice allows us to identity and support programs and policies that attempt to address both.

There is too much crime and too little justice in the lives of black Americans today. But while the problem of crime is widely shared in the United States, the problem of injustice is not. As a result, doing something constructive about the twin problem s of crime and injustice is politically complicated. Government agencies and officials across the United States enthusiastically attack the crime problem in ways that often either ignore or aggravate the problems of injustice with which black Americans are especially concerned. Quests for justice–for a government that acts fairly, equitably, and respectfully–although acknowledged, are frequently discounted when black Americans join forces with white Americans to fight crime. It is a paradox that black Americans, who suffer from crime disproportionately, have mixed feelings, at best, regarding its support of and confidence in the criminal as it operates today. The only way out of this paradox is to address the problems of crime and injustice simultaneously: changing the nature of the courts, criminal punishments and law enforcement agencies and their agents, while honestly acknowledging the scope of the crime problem and working for peace in Black America. It is difficult work, but possible; indeed, it is already happening.

This chapter examines the problem, injustice, and finally suggests strategies aimed at re-making the criminal justice system in ways that give us a way out of this paradox. To move forward, we need honesty and plain talk about the problems themselves.

People are hurt by crime; they are scared and angry. Public officials, criminal justice experts, and the captains of America’s new penal industries appeal to this pain, fear, and anger. Some even exploit the population’s anxiety for their own economic and/or political gain. At the risk of over-simplifying, these appeals might be tolerable if they also solved the crime problem. Unfortunately, the appeals are often followed by policies which have not significant impact on the crime problem. Despite astronomically expenditures of public money for criminal justice (about $2 billion annually for New York City alone), victims of crime remain uncompensated, young and old grow more fearful, and public anger only intensifies as the number of prisons multiplies. In the meantime, to those sincerely striving on modest budgets to lift the sieges of their neighborhoods, the causes of both crime and injustice seem distant and unyielding.

Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope and signs of progress today that can begin to allay the fear and despair that these issues so easily evoke. The level of reported violent crime is falling quickly in many cities, lowering the chances of victimization among black, as well as other urban dwellers. And the growing popularity of community policing has created opportunities for some criminal justice agencies and officials to improve their services and accountability to black Americans. Police chiefs and politicians claim the credit for the drop in crime as soon as they release the numbers; but they are not the only people who are contributing to a more peaceful society. Indeed, the public agencies are probably less significant than the individuals and local organizations throughout America’s diverse urban communities who have been working for peace as least as hard. These peace workers aim to do more than end the drug wars, the gang wars, and the gun wars: They aim to expand safety in their communities, to build mutual respect within an increasingly diverse Black America, and to build systems of mutual support with the agencies of government that should embody justice.

If we are to build on the gains of the last year or two, we must document, celebrate, and extend the contributions of these communities ands their leading citizens to the drop in crime, and perhaps even to an expansion of justice.

The burden of crime is widely shared across the color line. Black and white people across the United States are victims of crime, are afraid of being victimized, and pay the price of crime in endless installments. So it is good news for all that, in the United States as a whole, criminal victimization are slowly declining. The best evidence for this comes from the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted annually by the Census Bureau for the U.S. Justice Department. According to these surveys, the national rate of criminal victimization rose through the 1970s, peaked in the early 1980s, and has been coming down ever since.

But the United States is not one whole, and the crimes that cause suffering are different from one neighborhood to the next. When documenting crime in general, government agencies and the media pay most attention to "index crimes." There are four violent index crimes: (1) murder and non-negligent manslaughter; (2) rape, (3) robbery, (4) aggravated assault (meaning an assault with a weapon or causing an injury requiring medical treatment). There are three property index crimes: (1) burglary (entering premises to commit a crime, usually theft), (2) personal theft or larceny, and (3) theft of a motor vehicle.

Most of the index crimes that people report are property crimes, and these are the crimes that have been steadily declining across the United States for the past ten to fifteen years. In cities, people report property crimes in all kinds of neighborhoods, but the highest rates of theft are found in neighborhoods with lots of business activity and with middle- and high-income residents. Households with annual incomes of more than $50,000 have a theft rate 50 percent higher than households earning less than $7,500 annually. For burglary, the relationship is reversed, with low-income households reporting a rate almost twice that for high-income households. Black households experience all property crimes at rates greater than white households, but the difference here is not as great as that between the rates for Hispanics versus non-Hispanic households, high-income versus low-income, or urban versus suburban or rural.

Violent crimes, while less frequent, attract more attention. Nationally, these declined only briefly in the early 1980s, increased from 1986 to 1992, and leveled off in 1993 and 1994. In the nine American cities with more than one million people, however, violent crimes reported to the police declined 8 percent in 1994, and the preliminary figures for 1995 suggest that this decline is continuing.

Again, the risk of violent victimization is different for different people. Black and white women are victims of rape or sexual assault at about the same rates, with women in households earning less than $15,000 annually, showing rates three times greater than those in higher-income households, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey. For other violent crimes–homicides, robberies, and assaults causing severe injuries–young, urban, black males in low-income households experience the highest rates of victimization. It is in these crime categories that the recent reductions are most pronounced. Consider the risk of being shot, killed, or robbed in New York City. In the first six months of 1995, there were 1,608 gunshot victims citywide, 961 of whom were black. In contrast, during the same six-month period a year earlier, there had been 2,274 gunshot victims, 1,329 of whom were black. And the numbers had been even higher in previous years. Homicides also dipped dramatically after 1992, as did robberies after 1991. (See Figures 1 and 2)

What all this means is that there is still a lot of crime in urban America. But it also means that the risk seems to be coming down: that black Americans in most big cities are less likely to be robbed, shot, or murdered today than a few years ago. These figures also suggest that black Americans are committing less crime.

This last point–that black Americans are committing less crime–has received almost no attention in the national press. When violent crime was rising in many American cities in the late 1980s, press accounts were full of stories about the moral depredation of black Americans. But now, as the media report crime falling, they focus on the work of police and the number of people in prisons rather than on the changes within Black America.

To understand the fall in black crime, we have to understand where it is falling from. At the start of the 20^th century, W.E.B. Du Bois was alarmed by the high rate of crime among black Americans, attributing it to the high rate of poverty and to the degradation and social dislocation caused by Slavery. In the second half of the century, as crime generally increased, the high rate of black crime appears to have increased as well. The data used to derive black and white crime rates have been subject to criticism because most of the data come from arrest reports, which reflect policing strategies and prejudices as well as crime; but recent research has shown that the proportion of black arrestees on robbery and burglary charges, for example, is very close to the proportion of black offenders reported by the victims of these crimes in the National Crime Victimization Survey, which does not depend on police data. For the most serious crimes, the rates of arrest appear to be good indicators of rates of offending.

Judging by arrest rates recorded over the last fifty years, black crime rates have remained substantially higher than white crime rates in all the major crime categories, including theft, burglary, aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder. But at least since the 1960s, the fluctuations in the black and white arrests rates for some crimes, notably theft, burglary, and robbery have been almost identical. The black and white rates for each have risen and fallen together over these years, suggesting that the factors that lead to rising or falling rates of these crimes are affecting both black and white Americans. Black and white rates of homicide, in contrast, have moved separately after years of relative stability, both the black and white murder rates began to climb in 1963, the black rate faster than the white. Then, from 1970 to 1982, the black rate held steady or fell while the white rate continued to climb. From 1982 to 1985, both rates fell, but in 1986 the black rate began to climb steeply while the white rate held steady. It is this recent surge in the black murder rate alone, lasting from 1986 to 1992, that focused energy in black communities across the United States on the scourge of violence and the deaths it brought to so many young men.

Many people have associated the rise in the deadly violence within Black America with the proliferation of guns. Indeed, in 1987, 59 percent of homicides were committed with guns, but by 1993 it was 70 percent. And since 1993, in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York where homicides are now down dramatically, there are parallel reductions in firearm offenses. To address the reduction in black crime, we should therefore ask why in the last few years black Americans are engaging in less violent crime and using guns less frequently?

One explanation worth rejecting at the start is that black crime is falling because of the imprisonment of so many black Americans. Today there are over 1 million sentenced prisoners in state institutions and several hundred thousand more in federal prisons and local jails–many just awaiting trial. These numbers have tripled in the last 15 years. And while the numbers going into prison have grown, so has the length of imprisonment for violence: Since 1975, the average time served per violent crime tripled.

Some pundits, like William Bennett, the former Secretary of Education and Director of Drug Policy, have suggested that this growth in imprisonment is the major reason that crime is down. "Most prisoners are violent or repeat offenders," he insists, regardless of the crime for which they happen to be convicted most recently. So the more you incapacitate in prison, the less crime on the streets.

But crime rates have not responded to the growth in prisons as this argument predicts. As we have already seen, while the number of people in prison was steadily soaring in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, the rate of violent crime dipped then soared as well, apparently impervious to the increased incarceration of offenders. There is nothing about the growth in the number of prisoners since 1992 that would explain why the growth in violent crime stopped and began to reverse after 15 years of prison expansion.

Indeed, the recent reduction in violent crime may be occurring despite the burdens that these increases in incarceration are placing on urban, low-income communities. These are the neighborhoods to which prisoners return when released from jail or prison, and one overlooked result of the growth of the jail and prison population in the United States is that more people each year are returning to their neighborhoods having done time. Because their time in jail or prison has often made it herder for them to live and work peacefully in their communities, these ex-offenders often become repeat offenders. In fact, the larger the prison population has grown the higher the recidivism rate of those released has climbed. In New York, for example, more than half of those released now return to prison within five years. (See Figure 3)

People living in these neighborhoods know all this. During the community meetings organized to plan Harlem’s application for federal Empowerment Zone funds, for example, residents repeatedly surprised the experts in the priority they gave to jobs and training for those coming from Rikers Island, the city’s enormous jail compound, More than 20,000 men will return to New York City this year from state prisons, and many times that will return from shorter periods of time in the city jails. While some may have been chastened by the experience, most will have learned lessons and behavior that will make it harder than ever for them to avoid further conflict with their neighbors and with the police.

In the face of these realities, the last year or two of twenty years of growth in the prison population of the United States is insufficient to explain the recent reversal of violent crime rates. The answer is more likely to lie in black communities.

In the early 1990s, with violent crime among urban black Americans at its apex, Geoffrey Canada and his colleagues at the Rheedlen Center in Harlem organized the Countee Cullen Community Center in a Central Harlem school as part of New York City’s Beacon School program. They picked an elementary school with more than its share of problems: people selling drugs on its two corners and junkies sitting on an old couch right outside. The housing project and the neighborhood surrounding it had the highest number of children living in temporary housing in Harlem, and the week before the center opened a young man was shot and killed next to the school entrance.

Canada describes the Beacon School program and Rheedlen’s version of it as a "community development strategy." The community center makes use of the school building from 3:00 p.m. into the night, providing a range of services and activities for kids and families. But more than that, Rheedlen’s center became the hub of a host of community organizing activities. As Canada explains:

"We knew that the truth of the matter was that most people in the neighborhood were good people, not involved in crime, drugs, or anything else illegal. They just happened to be poor, and often scared. It was the fear that had run them inside … We knew we had to get them back outside and talking with one another."

Over the next few years, the Countee Cullen staff built a program activities curriculum for adults–including education, aerobics, and African dance–late night services and sports for adolescents, and the availability of trained social workers for families that needed intensive counseling. But beyond the walls of the school, the staff organized a block association, they sponsored several performances by a theatre company right on the block, they created a play street for neighborhood children, and they helped the center'’ Teen Youth Council fight to have cigarette and alcohol advertising outside replaced by an advertisement for the United Negro College Fund.

Today, crime and violence are down in that neighborhood, and the drugs and the violence are gone from the street corners around the school. There are fewer killings, there are fewer guns. Why? Is it the Beacon School? Is it the Mayor’s and Police Commissioner’s new police strategies? These same questions could be posed in neighborhoods across urban America where black crime has begun to decline.

The answer, of course, is neither and both. Neither the Beacon School program nor the strategies of the police are sufficient to explain the drop in violent crime: the same strategies and programs are not producing the same effect everywhere, and crime is falling in other places where these particular programs are not in place. In the late 1980s, moreover, people in one neighborhood or another were trying very similar policing and community development strategies without bringing down the crime rate. But both of these forces together may represent something new and very powerful: not just a good police strategy or a good neighborhood program, but a determined focus on reducing crime and violence in black communities that unites the efforts of local police, local activists, and local residents. In Harlem and in dozens of other urban black communities, the last three years have seen a far-reaching, but not necessarily formally "organized," mobilization against violence that has included religious leaders, gang leaders, schools, parents, and businesses in addition to the police and other government agencies. That each program or strategy within this broader mobilization is only a partial solution, that none on its own can actually solve the problem of crime should not distract us from the contribution that each makes.

In this corner of Harlem, it may be the combination of Rheedlen’s local leadership, government support through the Beacon School program, and the police department, together with dozens of unrecognized active residents that made the difference. In another neighborhood, a different combination may be equally effective. The point is that the government programs and police strategies provide a framework within which people in a community can work together to make a difference. Without good people–organizers, local police, adults, and children from the community–no pre-packaged strategy is worth much. Without supportive government policies and programs providing a framework, the most creative people cannot sustain these kinds of efforts. The remarkable thing about the last few years and the falling rates of crime in these neighborhoods is that both government agencies and community institutions, while in many instances distrustful of one another, seem to be working toward the same ends and reinforcing each other’s efforts. It is only a beginning–there is still far too much crime and fear–but it is a promising beginning worth noting and exploring its potential for use in other communities.

If the experience of criminal victimization binds Americans together, the experience of injustice tends to divide blacks from whites. Injustice comes in the form of mistreatment by police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, probation officers, prison guards, and parole boards. It comes in the form of laws and policies that damage the families and communities of black Americans. And these days, it increasingly comes under the banner of fighting crime. Again, we see the paradox: these are the institutions that are widely expected to solve the problems of crime, yet the people who need them most have learned, justifiably, to mistrust them.

The pervasiveness of injustice in ordinary encounters between black Americans and the justice system was brought home to me when colleagues and I at the Vera Institution established the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem in 1990. The office–a new kind of public defender–under contract with the city and state governments provides free legal representation to Harlem residents accused of crimes; but unlike a traditional public defender that gets its work from court assignments, the Neighborhood Defender Office gets its cases when Harlem residents call for help. The call usually comes from a relative or a close friend of someone who has just been arrested.

A surprising number of calls are about routine encounters between residents and police that go wrong. One of the early calls came from a man who had been awakened in the middle of the night by someone leaning on his apartment’s downstairs doorbell. It was the police, trying to get into the building by ringing buzzers at random. When he came downstairs and realized that they had no business with him, he told them off and found himself arrested. He was released without charges the next day.

Another man, walking with his granddaughter in a park adjacent to Harlem, was stopped by the police who, based only on the man’s presence in a park near a homeless shelter, thought he might have kidnapped the girl. He, too, was briefly arrested and, in his case, separated from his granddaughter.

A young man, on his way, to pay his tuition at the city university, was stopped and arrested because of his proximity to a drug market; his cash was confiscated. It was months before the police and prosecutors agreed to return his money to him.

On the scale of human rights abuses around the world, these qualify only as petty harassment; but it is not their severity that makes them significant, it is their pervasiveness. Such stories, and worse, are generated every day and circulate through the community, forming the general background within which Harlem residents understand the criminal justice system. There are versions of these stories circulating in virtually every black family in the United States. In stark contrast, they are largely unknown in white families.

The reaction of city officials when the Neighborhood Defender Service brings lawsuits on behalf of the victims of these injustices is also telling. In the case of the man awakened in the middle of the night, for example, the city attorney defending the police department was baffled by the lawsuit. The attorney was willing to concede almost immediately that the police had violated this man’s constitutional rights, but could not understand that any harm had been done. "Where are the damages?" the attorney asked, suggesting that this was a frivolous suit.

The damage, of course, is evident throughout Black America. Law abiding black Americans who do not have the money or status to insulate themselves from these kind of encounters, fear the police and the prospect of wrongful arrest. While most of this fear has been concentrated among young black men, it is increasingly present among young black women as well. Even among those whose good fortune has allowed them to live and work in neighborhoods where such harassment is uncommon, there is a healthy distrust of police encounters and a constant attention to things like dress and behavior in public that might provide some degree of protection.

If these stories were the only evidence of injustice and the mounting distrust between the victims of crime in Black America and the criminal justice system, the solution might be straightforward: better training, supervision, and the institutional discipline to remove the offensive behavior from within the system. Although these strategies are worthwhile, the accounts of injustice are so prevalent that they are also easily interpreted as evidence that the society as a whole places little value on justice in Black America. Unfortunately, that perception is further reinforced by evidence of a more systemic bias.

In 1990, the Sentencing Project attracted national attention by reporting that one-in-four black men in their twenties throughout the United States was either incarcerated or on probation or parole. In 1995, the same group reported that the proportion had grown to one-in-three. While no one disputes these statistics, some see them as evidence that young black men are committing a lot of crime, while others see them as a sign that our criminal justice system is becoming merely a system of policing and imprisoning Black America.

Both are right. As we have seen, young black men are indeed committing a lot of crime, but the criminal justice system that deals with crime reeks of economic and racial bias. And while it is almost impossible to separate the effects of these twin biases, the experience of those administering the system provides simple evidence of the racial component.

Just as it was important to understand the component parts of the crime problem, it is necessary to understand the components of the justice system. The police are the most visible part. They are present in record numbers throughout urban America, and are expected to do everything from solving murders to directing traffic. While much of their attention is devoted to serious crime, most of the arrests made by police are for minor offenses where their discretion is far greater. In 1993, for example, police officers throughout the United States made more than 14 million arrests, but only about 750,000 of these were for violent index crimes, and about 2.1 million were for index property crimes. In the same year, the police made 1.5 million arrests for drunk driving, 1.1 million for drug offenses, 1.1 million for minor assaults, about 725,000 each for disorderly conduct and public drunkenness, and more than 300,000 for vandalism.

Prosecutors take over the cases after arrests, deciding whether or not to press charges and what sentence to insist upon in plea negotiations. More than 90 percent of criminal convictions are obtained as a result of guilty pleas. Here, too, the discretion of prosecutors is greater for the less serious offenses.

While judges have limited power to dismiss charges, their principal role is in sentencing. In the past, judges discretion was quite broad. Currently, that discretion is now constrained by plea bargains, by mandatory sentencing statutes, and by sentencing guidelines. The impact of these constraints on individual sentences varies widely from one state to the next and for different offenses

Within each of these parts of the justice system, it is useful to distinguish two kinds of racial bias, both present to some degree. One is overt discrimination: people or institutions treating similarly situated black and white people differently. The second is covert discrimination: the willingness to craft and implement harsh policies because of the knowledge that, even if applied in a color-blind fashion, they will apply principally to black Americans.

Overt discrimination plays on the availability of discretion. Police, prosecutors, and judges exercise varying amounts of discretion in the system, and bias can be introduced at any stage. As Judge Theodore McKee–recently appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and formerly a state court trial judge in Philadelphia–has explained with regard to this kind of bias among judges:

"I think it is very easy for that very subtle, subliminal racism to creep in, and when the defendant comes into court you just disregard him and dehumanize him. The subliminal racism-–and it is subliminal–that kind of racism is there when the judge thinks of the black defendant as part of the stereotype of this dangerous mass out there waiting to take over our schools and our streets and break into our homes … Bias [also] creeps into the system at less obvious levels, at the level where an individual’s discretion determines who gets arrested, who gets prosecuted, how the guilty are sentenced, and who gets the mandatories."

This is the kind of bias that was revealed in a recent study of jail and prison sentences in New York State. The research compared sentences of white and black defendants convicted of felony charges throughout New York State between 1990 and 1992, and it found that when the crime and the defendant’s prior record were the same, the black defendants were sentenced to jail and prison more frequently than white defendants. To make this point most starkly, the report from New York State’s Division of Criminal Justice explained that its results showed that between 1990 and 1992 approximately 578 black offenders had been sentenced to prison in New York who would not have been sentenced to prison had they been white, and 8,174 black offenders had been sentenced to jail who would not have been sentenced to jail had they been white.

Critics of the criminal justice system see the rising numbers and proportions of black Americans in prison as resulting, in part, from this kind of overt bias. While the number of people in state and federal prisons has topped 1 million, rising from only about 100,000 seventy years ago, the proportion of black people among those entering prison each year has grown from 21 percent in 1926, to more than 55 percent today. The bias that drives these numbers, critics like Jerome Miller claim, does not appear at the sentencing hearing, but is built up as well through the accumulation of arrests and minor sentences to which black Americans are subject from a young age for conduct that would not lead to an arrest of a white adolescent.

Judge McKee knows that this kind of overt racism occurs with black judges, like himself, as well as with white judges.

"If I’m walking down a street in center City Philadelphia at two in the morning and I hear some footsteps behind me, and I turn around, and there is a couple of young white dudes behind me, I am probably not going to get very uptight. I’m probably not going to have the same reaction if I turn around and there is the proverbial black urban youth behind me."

Yet Judge McKee believes this kind of overt racism is less of a problem with black officials. "I think it still happens with black judges," he says, "but I hope it doesn’t happen to the same degree." If he is right, this kind of bias should be diminishing, at least in the federal courts, for Judge McKee was one of a record number of black judges appointed to the bench by President Clinton in the first half of his term. In most urban police departments as well, the number of black officers is rising, and we can hope that their growing presence will change the behavior of their fellow officers.

Covert bias is more problematic. Over the last 30 years, politicians in legislatures and executive mansions across the country have been raising maximum, minimum, and mandatory prison sentences at the same time that black people have become the majority of people receiving those sentences. And where politicians hold back, voters have enacted new sentencing laws through ballot initiatives despite evidence that the laws will bankrupt their states. Drug crimes have given this kind of bias an easy opportunity in recent years, as drug arrests have become increasingly concentrated in Black America. (See Figure 4) In the face of these kinds of arrest numbers, increasing penalties for drug offenses will have the predictable effect of increasing the punishment of black Americans in particular, even if the penalties are imposed on offenders in a neutral manner.

It would be one thing if those harsher penalties had been shown to deter or prevent crime; but no such evidence is offered. Instead, the harsher sentences reflect a chilling eagerness to exclude offenders for life from civil society, even in early adolescence, despite its enormous financial cost. Would these same policies be pursued if the people being incarcerated were overwhelmingly white? No one knows. But the question haunts black politicians and officials in federal and state governments across the country, even as they support the latest bills to increase prison sentences, to increase the power of the police, and to raise the level of pain inflicted within our society’s penal system.

The white police officer who resides in the suburbs and comes to work to patrol an inner city black neighborhood–disconnected from the community, maintaining control through intimidation rather than respect–is a familiar image that could describe the plight of the entire criminal justice system from the police through prosecution and the courts, to prison, probation, and parole. While part of the solution is to integrate the police departments and the other agencies making discretionary decisions, another part is to change the way they all, black and white, are really expected to do their job.

All Americans are taught that justice consists of fairness and equality, but black Americans generally know the importance of a third element as well: respect. The criminal law and its justice system can try to command obedience through intimidation; but to be worthy of the name, justice needs to command respect as well, and it can only do so by showing respect fore those whose allegiance it seeks.

This is the ambitious promise of community policing. To skeptical police departments, community policing is sold as a way to get more information from a community in order to pursue the same job: arresting the bad guys. But to skeptical communities, the officer on the beat, talking with residents and trying to solve local problems, is sold as a new service: a respectful, helpful, even deferential approach to police work. Despite the fact that the federal government has enshrined the term in legislation and is funding community policing across the country, what it means in practice varies from one community to the next.

In Chicago, where some of the most thorough research on community policing is now under way, it means engaging local residents in councils to set priorities in police work and establish long-term plans; it means deploying officers on small beats to handle problems they encounter than can lead to crime, with less distraction from 911 calls; and it means developing tools within the police department in addition to arrest for coping with the crime problems in communities. It is not easy, and many problems experienced in Chicago are repeating themselves in cities elsewhere: police-resident councils are not often good at crafting long-range goals or the plans to reach them; police commanders are often skeptical that this new approach can improve their relations with residents; and freeing officers from the need to respond to 911 calls and take on other assignments is bureaucratically complicated at best.

That the enthusiasm for community policing is spreading to prosecutors, public defenders, the judiciary, and penal administrators is not evidence of its demonstrated success. It is evidence that it has struck a chord in people outside the criminal justice system that until now has only been struck by tougher prison sentences. So prosecutors in Washington, D.C. are now walking around black neighborhoods, trying to help residents arrange the removal of abandoned cars; judges and prosecutors in Brooklyn, N.Y. are trying to open a community court in the Red Hook public housing development that will provide sentences requested by local residents as it dispenses justice. If community policing remains only vaguely understood, community prosecution and community courts are still only slogans in search of a definition. But that they are generating interest and activity at all is important.

The falling crime rate in urban America has probably not been caused by community policing, but it has given community policing some time to develop: a rare privilege for any politically popular initiative. In the time available, local organizers and residents need to make common cause with community police initiatives.

Community policing aspires to a respectful, inclusive system of justice. That is why it is popular, and that it why we must make it succeed, whatever its early difficulties. But that is not the only example.

Hundreds of small efforts are under way across urban America to punish offenders for crimes while demonstrating a determination to include them within their communities. Community service programs, for example, are beginning to be taken more seriously as punishments in their own right. But inclusive justice does not have to operate as an alternative to prison sentences; it can follow prison sentences.

Among the largest and most ambitious of programs of this kind is New York City’s Center for Employment Opportunities, which provides job training and paid, transitional employment to young men and women returning to New York City from prison. What makes CEO particularly interesting is that it does not handpick its participants; it provides paid work to all of its participants at minimum wage as soon as they are released from prison, and it uses this paid work experience to help the ex-offenders find permanent, better-paid employment.

As CEO illustrates, inclusive justice need not be lenient, for these ex-offenders have been through some of the toughest prisons in New York State. But the message at the end is clear: you are returning to live with your neighbors, to work and participate in our society. It is the opposite of the message sent by the increasingly severe three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws which preach exclusion and raise the fear that bias is covertly at play.

For now we cannot fully escape the paradox with which we began: black Americans suffer from crime and injustice, yet the efforts to stop crime seem to fuel injustice. What the Rheedlen Center, the Neighborhood Defender Service, and the Center for Employment Opportunities, and community policing all illustrate, however, is that government-community partnerships can be crafted that avoid this paradox by working on problems of crime and injustice simultaneously. There are examples of such efforts in virtually every city in America.