Dissertation uses author’s neighborhood to take on NOLA’s murder rate
22nd February 2016 · 0 Comments
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer
For over 16 years, Kevin Brown was a significant voice of Hollygrove. As the head of Trinity Christian Community, he not only served as a bridge between the residents of the predominantly African-American neighborhood and the city at large, but Brown was often the pastor to whom the people of Hollygrove turned when their children were killed.
Upon his retirement from Trinity, Brown spent two years researching what caused the tragic violence of his neighborhood. Now a professor at the Baptist Theological Seminary, Brown told The Louisiana Weekly, “New Orleans’ murder rate has led the nation’s for most of the past 25 years. While there are many theories regarding this phenomenon and several important quantitatively-oriented studies dedicated to its understanding, few have asked those most affected by neighborhood homicide for their views on the topic.”
His soon-to-be published dissertation sought to bridge that gap by using focus groups, individual interviews, and participant observation to understand what happens at the neighborhood level that drives homicide. As he explained, “After 16 years as a community organizer and community developer in the Hollygrove neighborhood, I parlayed my relationships from the Mayor’s Office to neighborhood residents to uncover the conditions that give rise to high homicide rates in high-homicide communities like Hollygrove. Special attention is given to the great work of Hollygrove residents to reduce the number of murders in their community between 2012 and 2015.”
With 41 interviews and 16 years of observations, Brown “uses the voices of those impacted by homicide to tell the story.”
“My study was an ethnographic (describes a bounded people group) look at homicide in a single neighborhood. Rather than comparing NOLA to other communities, I wanted to understand what happens inside a single neighborhood that gives rise to conditions of either higher or lower homicide. I chose Hollygrove for two reasons: first, it had the reputation of being a high-homicide community, something that was certainly true in 2012. On the other hand, Hollygrove had done some innovative things that resulted in fewer homicides between 2013 and 2015, a marked reduction. This, coupled with my longtime work in the community, made it an ideal location to study homicide.”
“That said, Hollygrove is similar to other high-violence neighborhoods in New Orleans from a demographic and socioeconomic perspective. The most salient feature is the high percentage of African Americans who live there. For years they have experienced marginalization and alienation from the power brokers who decide their future. This has been especially true in their relationship with the NOPD. One police official in the study described the NOPD’s relationship with Hollygrove as ‘an occupying force.’”
“A subculture arose that embraced countercultural values in reaction to this marginalization. Residents in Hollygrove called it ‘Keeping It Real’ and described a complex sub-society with rules, values, status, hierarchy and penalties for breaking the codes. While most people still privately adhere to the values of dominant society, younger residents often find their place in the subculture and must negotiate the two worlds of the ‘hood and the city as a whole. It’s akin to being bilingual or bicultural. Adherence to the subculture limits their ability to thrive beyond the borders of the neighborhood, limiting many to the place. Rather than acting out their disenfranchisement beyond the borders of the community, these limiting factors assure they act out their anger and pain inside the community.
“A second challenge faced by the community was the loss of livable wage jobs available to those without an advanced degree. Globalization and deindustrialization impacted neighborhoods like Hollygrove in devastating fashion. An illicit economy emerged to fill the gap. The subculture and the illicit economy are deeply intertwined. Residents understood these two realities to be the underlying cause of much neighborhood homicide.”
For Brown, his dissertation was more than a sociological study. He attempted to figure out what had happened to his home. As he noted to this newspaper, “I grew up in Hollygrove. My father was a pastor and a civil rights activist. We moved there during the heart of the white flight away from the city, and we moved there intentionally. I am a social worker by training, and returned in 1998, after 19 years in Chicago, to become active in community organization and community development in the Hollygrove neighborhood.”
“In January of 2011 I read the TP’s annual recap of the murders in the city and realized I had become numb and saw the numbers as statistics. Yet I knew some of the people who were killed. As a social worker I am supposed to have a social conscience and be troubled by these things. As a Christian such massive loss of life should have broken my heart. I woke up the next day in tears as I realized that I was not alone. Many had become hardened to the reality of homicide in New Orleans.
The statistics, though, ignore the real lives of people dealing with tragic violence..
There was one homicide in particular that triggered Brown’s quest. It involved a young man about to graduate high school who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. According to Brown, this young man had returned to “his old neighborhood, to visit friends.”
“He walked out of the corner store at Olive and General Ogden just as a drug deal went sour,” says Brown. He “was used as a human shield to absorb the bullets to the dealer (sic) could get away.”
The police, Brown says, suspected that people knew and could identify the killers, but their deep fear and mistrust of the police kept them from identifying anyone. “Again, marginalization and mistrust creates cynicism and fosters the conditions of high homicide.”
The former Hollygrove pastor has not given up hope, however.
“My research suggests that the way to reduce neighborhood homicide is to empower residents to improve their neighborhood. We spend a lot of time thinking about the individuals who commit the murders and too little thinking about the conditions that incubate them.
“Murder went down in Hollygrove when the citizenry emerged from their marginalize status and were able to work conjointly with the police, the city councilperson, outside service agencies, and universities. When empowered they were able to accomplish much. We have to identify the leaders, often neighborhood senior citizens with a lifetime of wisdom, equip and empower them, and then listen to their ideas. Otherwise we will be playing ‘pop-a-mole’ trying to fix the individuals while neglecting the milieu that is incubating them.”
When queried what three conclusions about violence in New Orleans his dissertation provided Brown, he said, First, “Values: While everyone (from the elderly, churchgoing grandmother to the hardened former drug dealer with several stints in Angola) expresses a personal identification with prosocial values, there is an undercurrent of countercultural values that emerge when a community is perpetually marginalized. While outsiders ‘blame the victims’ by suggesting their poor value systems are the root of neighborhood problems, I suggest that countercultural values emerge when those who don’t understand conditions inside the neighborhood marginalize such communities.”
“When communities have no power and feel hopeless to enact change, people give up. When those who adhere predominately to mainstream values stop trying to instill those values in the next generation, the countercultural values prevail. Whether a neighborhood is oriented toward prosocial or countercultural values determines whether they will work conjointly to reduce neighborhood violence.”
Second, he noted, a lack of hope leads to “Structural Marginalization. When a community is isolated and marginalized, there is mistrust of power and this is especially enacted against law enforcement. Powerlessness results in antipathy and anger.”
“On the other hand, when a community is provided with sufficient social capital so as to be able to engage power (politicians, police, schools, etc.), it can emerge from the legal cynicism and begin to work cooperatively toward its own betterment. Cooperation requires trust. This means that politicians and police must be willing to see residents as their equals rather than subordinate entities. When this happens the neighborhood is enabled to swing from cynicism to cooperation, and another condition of lower homicide neighborhoods becomes possible.”
Next comes “Neighborhood Boundaries. When a community embraces countercultural values and marginalization/ powerlessness, they tend to enact rigid boundaries. They fear anyone coming in and either damaging the community through bad behavior/violence or taking away the limited sphere of power they have. Such rigid boundaries have a negative side effect, however, as positive, beneficial resources cannot flow into the community. The same is true of good ideas, they are resisted.”
“Resistance breeds rigid boundaries. When there is cooperation with power, however, the boundaries become looser. This happens in part because the community is empowered to enact innovation and solutions for self-improvement rather than being acted upon from outside. When the ‘good guys’ are aligned, the ‘bad guys’ can be better controlled by the residents who are cooperating with agents of formal control.”
Lastly, with engagement, one can achieve what Brown called “Collective Efficacy.”
As he outlined, “When the three conditions above move in a prosocial direction (prosocial values, community empowerment, porous boundaries) then the community is able to realize something called collective efficacy. This is best defined as the ability to agree upon and act upon common goals. The corollary to efficacy is action. Unless there is the ability to agree (both internally among neighbors, but also externally with power brokers) there cannot be collective action.”
In other words, Brown concluded, “For too long neighborhoods like Hollygrove have been neglected. As long as the violence is contained in the community and doesn’t affect the city as a whole, there is a sort of apathy that emerges. We can label such communities as pathological and discount the amazing people that live there and hope for a better future.”
This article originally published in the February 22, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
