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Sampson: We can show that altruistic behavior, and this is a bit controversial because
scientists argue about where altruism comes from — I argue that it’s social in nature, it
varies.
And we can do this behaviorally, not just what people think.
And legal cynicism is another aspect of community; it’s almost a cultural aspect that’s
important, as is what we call legal cynicism.
People that have a corrosive attitude about the law — for example, we asked people, it’s
okay to get around the law if you can get away with it; we asked about police legitimacy,
police can be trusted, police are fair, police work with residents.
I think the chiefs will probably recognize that no matter what they do, that in certain
communities, there’s a distrust and this really is a challenge in terms of, it seems to
me, practice.
And what we found, I’m just going to tell you the results, is that in areas with high
legal cynicism, two things: One, those neighborhoods that are sort of flat and don’t
decrease or are persistently high violence, it’s not just collective efficacy and poverty;
a recent paper published by others shows that those sort of cycles of violence
neighborhoods are very high in legal cynicism.
There is something about the attitudes of the residents that’s implicated.
And in a paper with Jeff Morenoff and Steve Raudenbush, we also showed that legal
cynicism accounts for a significant share of the black-white gap in violence.