The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their French Ceinture Rouge from their Italian Red Belt.
This week we look, in our politics section, at a new initiative in Washington D.C., to tackle gun crime through early intervention. Why are targeted interventions of this kind controversial even when they work, and how can they be delivered ethically?
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, the part of the weekly where we get trigger happy with our memes and shoot from the hip with our psycho-babble. This week includes a look at whether the truth matters for voters faced with lying politicians.
We were fascinated by this recent piece of social policy in Washington D.C. It pairs a small number of individuals, considered to be at high risk of committing gun crime, with a specialised team who can link them to services and support.
The policy is based on research which found that “as few as 200 people are driving a majority of the city’s homicides and shootings at any one point in time.” It also noted that “Many shooters have been previously shot, and many of the suspected shooters and victims share risk factors and life circumstances.” The study itself can be found here, and has formed the basis for policies from the Washington D.C. Government which work directly with a specific sub-set of these residents.
This approach sits on an uneasy fault line, especially for those on the liberal left. At one level, approaches based on ‘early intervention’ are highly progressive, looking at vulnerabilities created by external circumstances and seeking to step in and provide support right from the outset. At another, they potentially create a stigma for groups who already feel marginalised – and potentially allow a foothold for regressive forms of profiling and targeting.
Initiatives like the Prevent Agenda, the Troubled Families programme or even the academisation of the poorest performing schools are good examples of these types of policies being deployed in the UK. Usually pioneered by centrists who point to impressive outcomes and emphasise that ‘what matters is what works’, such ideas come under intense criticism. They often achieve progressive ‘ends’ without using conventional left-wing ‘means’.
The fear, in particular, is that a minority of bad apples are siphoned out of the mainstream, in the interests of the wider majority. (Fans of the TV show The Wire may recall the episode based around ‘Hamsterdam’, in which a Baltimore slum district is turned into a permissive site where ‘anything goes’, to protect the rest of the city from vice). However, when the stakes are as high as they are with an issue like gun control, the counter-argument is that progressives cannot afford to be squeamish.
The question of how you tread the line here is useful to think about for anyone interested in social policy. We will be interested to follow the effectiveness of the policy in Washington D.C. – and the nature of the debate that surrounds it.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the permissive slum district at the end of our gleaming metropolis:
Promise these 11 things, to become a better manager of others.
