American Anthropological Association

This week’s New Yorker features a story about how professor of Anthropology David Kennedy helped the Cincinnati police department reduce gang violence.

After the city experienced a series of shootings in 2006 and the “zero-tolerance” crackdown which followed failed to reduce the murder rate, Kennedy came to Cincinnati to pitch his “Ceasefire” program, which had previously been successful in reducing drug-related violence in Boston. 

One of the the program’s more unorthodox angles was that the city would make life coaching and job counseling available to gang members who wanted out. Although initially police were skeptical (“Social people hug thugs. We kick their butts”) the program in Cincinnati was eventually so successful that it was exported to deter crime in troubled inner-cities across the country. 

Kennedy took an unconventional path to academia (as Director of John Jay College’s Center for Crime Prevention and Control, he has no PhD), but offers inspiration for the use of applied ethnographic and anthropological methods.

You can read an abstract of the New Yorker article online (subscribers can sign-in to access the whole thing), or check out an op/ed piece by Kennedy from the Washington Post a few years ago.

Filed under: Anthro in the Media