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Op-Ed Contributor

Black Activists Don’t Ignore Crime

Credit...Katherine Streeter

IT has become a standard conservative talking point: Black activists focus on police brutality but ignore violent crime in black neighborhoods. Last month Rudy Giuliani said on Fox News: “If they meant ‘Black Lives Matter,’ they would be doing something about the way in which the vast majority of blacks are killed in America, which is by other blacks.”

Claims like Mr. Giuliani’s aren’t just offensive or misplaced — they’re demonstrably wrong. While Black Lives Matter receives deserved attention, countless grass-roots organizations — many of which were founded by bereaved black women — are doing remarkable work to prevent and reduce crime. They protest violence, testify at city council hearings, press for gun-control reform and collaborate with politicians, faith-based organizations and, yes, even the police.

I spent 20 years studying anti-crime politics — observing community meetings, interviewing lawmakers and activists and analyzing city council hearings about crime. I found groups organizing on everything from “barking dogs to shootouts,” as one legislative aide told me. Their activism was impossible to miss.

But this local organizing goes largely unnoticed by politicians, scholars and the news media, all of which focus instead on large national groups with big budgets and expensive lobbyists.

In Philadelphia alone, there were at least 50 local organizations involved in anti-crime politics in the early 2000s. Mothers in Charge, for example, was started in 2003 by Dorothy Johnson-Speight after her son, Khaaliq Jabbar Johnson, 24, was killed in an argument over a parking spot. One of the organization’s main goals is for Congress to declare homicide a public health crisis.

“We continue to support any bills that can help take the guns off the street,” Ms. Johnson-Speight said at a 2004 City Council hearing on gun violence. “We are working very hard with all faith-based initiatives, with the community, churches, other organizations.”

Although Mothers in Charge is relatively small, it has hosted national conferences on the costs of violence; held rallies at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington; and has appeared frequently in local news media like The Philadelphia Inquirer. It has grown into a national organization, opening chapters in Los Angeles, St. Louis and other cities.

Philadelphia is not an outlier. In Newark, Nakisha Allen, 35, was killed in crossfire in July 2009 as she walked to a neighborhood store. Soon after her death, African Americans and Latinos from the city, along with clergy members, activists and local community groups, rallied at the intersection where she was shot, stopping traffic for hours. This was the first demonstration of what became the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition, which protested against homicide for almost three years afterward.

Such activism rarely makes national headlines. And when it does, the coverage is short-lived. Last summer, several news outlets reported on Mothers Against Senseless Killings, a Chicago anti-violence group. After a random shooting left 34-year-old Lucille Barnes dead, the members camped out on a corner in South Side Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, patrolling the area and connecting with kids.

“It’s not just about the kids putting down the guns,” the group’s founder, Tamar Manasseh, said to The Huffington Post. “It’s about the kids never picking them up to begin with.”

But such attention doesn’t last long, which contributes to the false impression that such actions are rare. The reality is that these organizations are just the visible edges of an enormous anti-crime activist network in black communities.

Another reason they draw so little attention is that communities that protest violence generally don’t have the economic and political resources necessary to engage with elite news media or hire lobbyists in state capitals or Washington. They typically have access only to the mayor’s staff, city council members, district attorneys and other city officials.

But prosecutors and police groups do have such resources. I found that criminal justice agencies represent a large plurality of witnesses at state and national hearings on crime issues. The voices of people living in high-crime communities, however, were largely absent. The result is policies that prioritize the needs of police and prosecutors.

This skewed representation makes it harder for us to see the common interests of anti-violence groups. They share at least one main political message: Efforts to keep young people away from violence would be made more effective by addressing shoddy schools, the lack of good jobs, the easy access to guns and the neglect of urban communities. State and national politicians and groups — not local organizers — simplify this complex advocacy on crime and criminal justice into pro- or anti-police narratives.

In fact, anti-violence activists understand best that the crime problem is much more than a policing problem. Though police in many communities have made great strides in preventive work, their priorities are primarily reactive. This work is crucial, but it’s not the same as long-term crime prevention. Nonetheless, over the past 40 years, state governments and Congress have funneled huge sums of money to law enforcement, while underinvesting in education, employment and empowerment, all of which is needed for serious crime prevention.

Black activists know that all Americans — not just middle-class or wealthy whites — deserve protection by the police, as well as from the police. There is nothing contradictory about worrying that friends or family members might be killed by someone in the neighborhood, and also being concerned that they might get killed by the police.

Grass-roots organizations in black communities lead the efforts to make their streets safe. We need to get rid of the offensive falsehood that black people don’t care about crime, and help create the reforms they’ve long demanded.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Black Activists Don’t Ignore Crime. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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