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Sampson: I want to touch on one other theme before closing, and that is organizations.
So I’ve talked about disorder, I’ve talked about measuring what we can see, I’ve talked
about the importance of residents and their cultures and their ties and their perceptions,
but organizations, and of course law enforcement is an important organization, matter a
lot.
And we have looked at these things through two lens.
One is through what’s known as the Collective Civic Participation Study, looked at the
density of nonprofits; we’ve also looked at the cohesion of leadership networks, and I
just want to show you a bit.
In the Key Informant Study, we talked to educational leaders, business leaders, religious
leaders, law enforcement including district commanders, neighborhood relation sergeants,
community policing liaisons, political players, the aldermen, in community organizations.
And we can look at the networks among these organizations and among the individuals, and
various things come out of this.
So, for example, we can see how law enforcement is tied to other organizations.
This one is portrayed such that the width of the arrow is in proportion to the number of
contacts between those domains.
And I have a lot to say about this, but I’ll just note that there is some evidence that
despite a lot of the research saying that churches and religious collaborations are
important, that at least in Chicago, the connection between law and religion is relatively
low, almost nonexistent; same with education.
And this may be a problem, and we’re still working on this analysis, and even community
organizations.
So this gives us a different kind of information.
And also, our data tell us that communities vary tremendously, not just in the number of
organizations, but the cohesion of the ties among the residents.
So of those types of organizations I just listed, the ties look like this.
In some communities, you have a very dense web among leaders; not residents, leaders.
And others, you have a lot of cliques and isolates, and these vary a lot and they
actually predict the crime rate.
And finally, in terms of organizations, this is a picture I took in Roseland after a
student was shot at Fenger High School, and it made the national news, a beating.
And I was driving around doing some fieldwork and came across this protest, and it was
really interesting to me.
They were all black men protesting; I was talking with them.
It was part of the, it was linked to a ceasefire, but it’s an example of collective, not
individual, collective behavior; this is a poor community, disadvantaged community, high
crime.
And they were taking advantage of the ability to organize and try to reduce violence in
that community.
And this is part of our story.
Now, what drives this?
According to our data, a big piece of it has to do with the kinds of factors I just
talked about in terms of the organizational ties among leaders in the community, but also
the actual density.
I mean, numbers matter; nonprofit organizations, especially given the devolution at the
national level, nonprofit organizations are becoming increasingly important with regard to
government services and I think working with the police.