New York City's Crime 'Disease'

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is turning to Chicago for lessons in how to combat Gotham’s rising gun violence—Chicago, where black teens kill each other atfour times the rate as they do in New York. De Blasio and the city council will spend nearly $13 millionon an initiative that treats gun violence primarily as a public-health problem, rather than a law-enforcement one, a concept championed by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin and implemented most famously in the Windy City. The new “Gun Violence Crisis Management System” will send former gang members and social workers into areas that have experienced recent shootings. The “crisis-management” teams contact feuding gang members and try to discourage retaliatory shootings. Equally central to the public-health concept, the teams refer gang members to case-management and other social programs, such as job-training, mental-health, and legal services—precisely the type of efforts that made up the city’s default response to crime before 1994, when the New York Police Department began seriously enforcing the law.

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