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Get Me to the Gray, presented by COJA Services Inc., is a podcast about the conversations we’re told we shouldn’t have. Hosted by journalist and author Paula Lehman-Ewing, the show brings people with fundamentally different ways of seeing the world into honest dialogue—where we name what divides us and keep talking anyway.COJA Services Inc. works with mission-driven organizations and brands that are clear on their values but struggle to translate that clarity into public-facing language. We help teams align internal narratives, reduce confusion before it becomes mistrust, and translate complexity into public understanding without relying on scripts, rhetoric, or generic AI language that strips voice and judgment.
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GMG-Ep2-David Kennedy
Paula: [00:00:00] I'm Paula Leman Ewing, and this is Get Me To The Gray. This is a podcast that forces us to sit with tension, to question what we think we know and to talk about harm without immediately sorting ourselves into sides. Today's conversation is going to be about gun violence, race and responsibility about what it means to reduce harm in the real world, and how the language we use political, moral, or ideological can either clarify the problem or distort it.
We're gonna talk about data, about patterns and about strategies that have saved lives, but we're also going to stay grounded in the fact that behind every statistic is a person, someone shaped by systems, relationships, and choices made long before a crisis moment. This isn't a conversation about winning an argument.
It's about understanding the problem clearly enough to ask better questions. Because if we can't talk honestly about violence, responsibility, and care without losing sight of [00:01:00] the people inside the data, we don't get closer to solutions. We just get louder. This is getting to the gray.
Paula (Host): Today's guest is David M. Kennedy, a criminologist and professor at John J College of Criminal Justice, whose work has shaped modern approaches to violence prevention. He was a principal in the Boston Gun Project, which led to Operation Ceasefire, and the development of the focused deterrence framework now used in cities across the US and internationally.
He's a longtime executive director and now faculty chair of the National Network for Safe Communities, the founder of the Institute for Innovation and Prosecution, and the author of Don't Shoot One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner City America. Welcome, David.
David Kennedy: Hey Paula. Thanks.
Paula (Host): So you wrote an article back, in September in the New York Times about what the left and the right both get wrong when it comes to addressing [00:02:00] crime . so can you tell me a little bit about why you wrote that article and what you explained?
And how do we separate what we know to be true? Which is that like, we don't want violence, we don't want people killing each other versus the values that are instructed by rhetoric.
David Kennedy: That piece was a reaction to the president's deployment of the National Guard, , in Washington dc, which is horrific.
And, on top of being horrific, was and will be predictably ineffective. That was an extreme approach to violence prevention.
I am talking to you from Brooklyn, New York, where for 10 years or so. New York City told itself and the world that the way to address gun violence was to use [00:03:00] the 40,000 odd officers of the New York Police Department to saturate black and brown neighborhoods in New York City and put hands on and go through the clothes of as many young black men as possible.
And it had dramatic impact on those communities and the people in them. We know it was ineffective. We know that it was actually productive of crime and violence that in many instances it made things worse.
And we know that was, illegal and unconstitutional.
Much of the reaction on the left to the guard's deployment in Washington DC was to say, this is unnecessary. Because crime is down in Washington DC crime is not a problem. This is all a moral [00:04:00] panic.
It was right that violence had been coming down. It was coming down from an unconscionably high level where it had been forever and it had come down to what is or at least ought to be an unconscionably high level.
And the narrative and the analysis and the position that because things are getting better, they don't matter is appalling.
If we were talking to a hospital director or a surgeon in that hospital and they said, we are losing 10% fewer people this year than we were last year, so everything's fine and people dying in our hospital is not an issue. You would go to a different hospital. But there's this absolutely predictable set of forces in our policy and political conversation about these issues in which one side says [00:05:00] things are even worse than, they seem more, even worse than the facts will support.
And that means we should deploy state power in extreme ways. And on the other side in which people in, I think, understandable resistance to that narrative, say nothing to see here, let's move along . and, and both of those positions are unacceptable.
Paula (Host): Admittedly left fed algorithmic interpretation here, I'll call myself out and, and say when I just reading about focused deterrance and not actually talking to you about, and having you define it, I think I called it something like Broken Windows 2.0, which is completely different .
for our listeners, broken windows, the way it was implemented by NYPD is what David is talking about. This, this stop and frisk, this highly concentrated, targeting of certain neighborhoods. so, I wanna talk about focus [00:06:00] deterrence as that immediate intervention, and how it kind of avoids those blanket over-policing tactics .
I think what I went through in terms of when I was reading about it versus when I talked to you about it, and taking into account what you wrote, in September, there does seem to be not just a personal, misunderstanding, but kind of a systemic misunderstanding of any sort of intervention that includes law enforcement.
David Kennedy: These approaches were and are a response to the fact, in considerable part that the way we do this work does not work. The original focus deterrence intervention emerged in the midst of the crack epidemic.
And 10 years into that wave of mostly gun violence, mostly killing and wounding and, paralyzing young black men , the prescriptions that we normally deal with, which absolutely fall into these right and left camps, had [00:07:00] not had any impact on that violence at all. The original focus deterrence intervention was built on a set of facts on the ground that have turned out to be foundational, not just about gun violence, but about most, and maybe all of these most serious public safety issues. And that is that they are driven by very small numbers of exceptional people.
So, the facts on the ground in Boston where we did this work in the mid 1990s. led by frontline police and prosecutors and probation officers and community people and gang outreach folks who taught us that this epidemic of violence, which was tearing the city apart, was almost completely contained within a world of maybe 1500 people, which was about two tenths of a percent of the city's population. [00:08:00] And overwhelmingly, it was driven not by the drug trade or money issues or turf issues or such. It was driven by the violence itself. That being in this world was so extraordinarily dangerous that one in seven people in it would die by gunshot.
Almost everybody, statistically was shot or stabbed or otherwise wounded. The responsibility of government and law enforcement and social services and communities, first and foremost is to keep people safe.
And we were not doing it
and the response of the people in this world was to take care of themselves. Which meant finding people to watch your back, getting and carrying and using weapons, being preemptively violent.
So the, the people doing this work put together a working partnership that included law enforcement, community people, and service providers. [00:09:00] And it began to have face-to-face conversations.
The partnership collectively said, we know that you are at enormous risk and we're going to fix that. Your community, so people that you respect, need you to understand the violence is tearing apart the neighborhoods you live in, people that you care about, people that care about you, and that this is not okay and it has to stop. Service providers said, we will help you in any way that we can. We will help you with work and education and recovery and housing and food on your table and any, anything that we can do for you if we can, we will do it.
Law enforcement said, we need you to understand that we are doing things differently from now on. Going forward, our response to the violence will be a [00:10:00] group response.
We will take advantage of all your law breaking if your group is the next group in the city that kills somebody. And we will also be looking at every homicide and the group that is responsible for the highest level of violence over time, we'll also get this special attention.
We are telling you so that we don't have to do it. And everybody went home. There were two of those meetings in Boston and the extraordinary decline in homicide and gun violence in Boston began after those two meetings and continued as long as the city did this work
Paula (Host): so, I wanna slow down for a second. When we're talking about the people that we're talking about, you were very specific and then the statistics back this up that when you look at the data, [00:11:00] it's a small segment, but it's always the same small segment, right?
It's always young black males. And I'm wondering how do you distinguish between a group that's driving violence and a group that's already most visible by the system? Why is it all the same group? Because we don't define other groups that way. If we look at US mass shootings, that group is overwhelmingly white, young males.
David Kennedy: The narrative about what we ought to think of more as active shooters or spree shooters rather than mass event shooters.
You know, the, the narrative on that is largely , that those actors are produced by broad social and mental health dynamics. They have untreated mental health issues. They are living in a splintered society. They are exposed to [00:12:00] toxic social media dynamics and they have ready access to firearms.
And those are the same kind of broad dynamics that produce the same kind of outcomes in the same, essentially the same population.
So, I care deeply about sexual violence.
And there's a very, very powerful and coherent, and I think very reasonable account of sexual violence that says it is driven by patriarchy, by misogyny, by deep social forces, by, by rape culture. and at the same time, where we have the best research on this is on college campuses because they're more researchable environments.
And that research says that. Over 90% of all sexual assault is produced by 4% of students. [00:13:00] And that 4% of students comprise men who are comprehensively misbehaving. They are not just doing repeated sexual assault, they're doing all kinds of other crimes.
Paula (Host): Well, but why doesn't, and and maybe it does, and I'm just, not hearing it, but like what you just described in describing that small group.
You didn't mention race at all. And so I wanna get a clear understanding, because you talked about the study on campus, right? And that had to do with young men. But it seems like when we move into whether it's on the right or the left, and it seems to be on both, is that when we move into narratives about violence, it is highly racialized.
It maps closely to race not just in the narrative, but in the data. But when you give an example of something like what's happening on college campuses, there's no relation to race at all. So that's why I'm trying to figure out like where are [00:14:00] the guardrails, where do we, as people who are trying to avoid a misinformed public, how do we talk about concentration not as causation, especially when the maps so closely align with race.
David Kennedy: so I, I think, I think this is an interesting conversation.
The move that you're concerned about
I think is one of moving from a fact to an. Unsupported and in fact, deeply problematic, causal connection.
So the, the narrative that homicide and gun violence in the United States is concentrated in black and brown communities among men, that's not a narrative.
[00:15:00] That's a fact.
What really drives a lot of, not just our discourse and our politics about this and similar issues and then ends up driving our policy, is the elicit movement from that fact to causal stories
or cultural stories.
Paula (Host): Now I think this is really where the conversation gets genuinely difficult, is that we move into systems, and that's where I wanted to talk about your hospital example and sort of this, this need to intervene.
David Kennedy: Let's just dwell with that for a minute.
And I think you and I, and lots of, if not most of the people who end up listening to this will be familiar with what I'm about to describe.
So Chicago has, for the longest time been a profoundly violent city and homicide and gun [00:16:00] violence victimization in Chicago. So we don't always know who did the shooting, but we pretty much always know who got shot. And the victimization in Chicago is enormously concentrated in black and brown neighborhoods and among black and brown men.
at which point, one side of the discourse says there is something or a range of something that is profoundly wrong with these communities. They have a culture of violence. There are absent fathers. These are bad communities, full of bad people, and that's not true.
Right? We go, we go back to the concentration question.
Because we know Chicago's no different than anywhere else in the neighborhoods that they are talking about. Almost every person in those communities is not involved in the violence.
They don't like the violence, they don't want the violence. [00:17:00] The research says they care about their neighbors. They want people to be safe. They want good and respectful relationships with the police. They don't have it, but they want it.
And, if we take as a given for the moment.
There are lots of absent father families in those neighborhoods having an absent father family is no predictor whatsoever of being violent because almost none of those families, and almost none of the men in them are violent. Right? But you know, my friends on the left will say about exactly those same communities we have to get to the boys before they're 12, because after that it's too late and they are making a
case for massive government intervention in these communities and in the lives of their children and families. On, on the belief, which is in its way no different than the belief on the right, that these are lost places full of lost [00:18:00] people and without state intervention, the kids in them, the, the boys in them will grow up to be thugs.
Both of those positions are empirically absolutely incorrect.
And there's no justification on either side from moving from the fact that we begin with, which is violence is concentrated in these places and it's concentrated among men to either one of these causal accounts. We import the causal accounts from our apriori convictions.
And one of the things that that does is keep us from actually going to the ground and looking at what's going on, at which point we discover that there are small groups locked in vendetta and being driven primarily by objective and realistic fear because the violence is really high and the fact that the state isn't doing anything to [00:19:00] fix it.
Paula (Host): Right. Well, and I think that both of those narratives, like what infuriates me about progressive narratives around this issue is that they expect a, like you said, intrusive government intervention when the same causes that they're arguing these so-called cultural traits stemmed from government policies that like locked fathers away or like that it feels like.
There's a narrative to blame state violence and fix state violence when state violence might be one of the causes. Do you know what I'm saying? If violence, begets violence, some of that violence comes from these roundups in the 1980s, these aggressive tactics in New York, or, even going back before the crack epidemic to the heroin epidemic, these sort of jump out squads and the reaction, whether these people are in a group that is battling another group or whether it's a government intervention to prevent , the immediate bleeding, which of course we're [00:20:00] going to do.
There's Always a threat of immediate violence and a seemingly necessary influx of state power.
David Kennedy: That's, again, that's one side. And, and the left is really, really good at critiquing. those positions and that impulse on the right,
it's not so good at recognizing that the policies that it advocates for have also been tremendous failures.
And that if, if nothing, nothing else. When we say, and when we en enlist social programming and allocate, you know, public, public resources
to intervene with all the boys before they're 12 in the name of preventing them from becoming thugs, not only do we not have to do that because they're not gonna become thugs, but we are being [00:21:00] enormously self-indulgent.
In thinking that is a worthy use of our resources, which is informed purely by our own conviction of our own virtue. And that we're not doing anything meaningful to reach the very small number of folks who are actually enmeshed in the violence dynamics.
Paula (Host): Yeah. I think that's fair. And I also think that the approach to intervene, like. It, it, it almost reinforces to those under 12 that they are destined to be thugs and that that is their path unless they do something else, versus just being a regular kid growing up . You know what I like about this emergency room hospital analogy is that that has worked, to your point, the primary care, whatever we're trying to do over here to address causation has [00:22:00] failed like at every turn.
But what I'm trying to see is what do we risk if the only thing that's working is intervention? If it's a matter of providing resources, why are we only successful at providing those resources at the intervention instead of providing it beforehand and lowering the kind of interventions that we have to have.
I mean, like you were saying, if you're a doctor in that hospital and you're losing 10%, and that's great because, because it's less than you lost last year. But if you're a doctor in that hospital and everyone that comes into the hospital is of the same demographic, don't you worry about what's going on in primary care?
David Kennedy: Of course you do. Which is why in medicine, I mean, it's more complicated than this, but just to hit the polarity, there's public health, which is about the social determinants of health and, and overwhelmingly about primary prevention, and we've [00:23:00] also got emergency rooms. What we know in medicine is no matter how good a job we do of prevention, it is never perfect.
And there will be things that need very immediate and particular attention. And what you said a minute ago is something that gets said all the time when we talk about these issues.
So we are talking about community gun violence and somebody says, we're not doing any investment on the front end. Why don't we move our investment to the front end? Well, the, the front end is what government does. The root cause story is that in order to prevent these bad outcomes, we should have good education, good healthcare, good transportation, good economic opportunity, you know, [00:24:00] all of that portfolio of incredibly important dimensions.
And that's right, we ought to, but that's what government does. It's not true that we're not doing anything on the front end. What's true is that what we're doing on the front end isn't working well enough to prevent some of these bad outcomes.
Paula (Host): Right. And, and I just wanna be clear, because we're talking about two different approaches, right?
We're talking about the failed approaches of the left and we're talking about government intervention. And it seems like the interventions, whether it's, because there's always been a, we need to stop the bleeding now. It was like that in the crack era. It was like that in the heroin era.
There's, there's always been a, we get it, we have to address root causes at some point, but there are people dying in the streets and we need to address that. And so these interventions made a lot of sense, but it seems like they're the only thing that makes sense [00:25:00] now and that people on the left are asking for relief from a government that really just at this point specializes in interventions.
I mean, it almost, in many ways feels structured to preserve the conditions producing emergency.
David Kennedy: Yeah. But you're not arguing with me anymore.
Paula (Host): I don't think we were ever arguing. I think, I think these are just difficult issues that I, I'm trying to understand and like you said from the beginning, it's really hard to take the left right narrative out of it.
and so I think that what I'm trying to really get to is, how do we present this? Where is responsibility and I guess my big question would be are we at the point where it's just going, where we're going to have to rely on these interventions versus, finding some wise advocacy group or politician to sort of bail us out of the [00:26:00] causation?
David Kennedy: let me go back to the status quo. That is not just literally the status quo, but it's basically the situation that we've been in forever on these issues.
Which is, at least from, from one vantage, there are persistent, extremely serious public safety issues in the United States. We have been trying to address them forever, fundamentally into two ways.
So one, one is by, just to be really gross about the whole thing. one is by fixing the world so that we don't have these problems, and one is by deploying state authority against the problems to make them stop.
The record on both of those things is that they have consistently. Not worked in [00:27:00] anything remotely, like the way that we want.
There's real virtue in both of them, right?
And people really believe in those things and they're committed to them for very good reasons. I think. They haven't worked in the way that they have supposed to. Right? They have not changed things so that we don't have unacceptable levels of homicide, of gun violence, of domestic violence, of sexual assault, of, drug trafficking, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
the, the two step that I hear you being particularly concerned about, when that preventive approach is seen to be failing and we say it's not working. We have these problems right now. We have to do something right now, what we do is punch people.
That's not the only option. [00:28:00] And the, the work that I've been part of is about right now. But it's different than punching people.
Paula (Host): Right. And this is where I want the conversation to end up, because what you're describing in terms of causality is a very black and white approach.
You either have a massive amount of government intervention and overwhelming state force, or you have a, like, it's getting better. We're not like, we could do it on our own sort of social community oriented approach. . And I feel like rather than addressing these, 'cause it, 'cause clearly it looks like the interventions, at least what you're working on specifically and focuses deterrance is working.
And these things that have a more binary approach are not. So what I'm trying to say, and I guess what you could leave loose nose with is where is that gray? How can we shift that mentality from it has to [00:29:00] be all in or all out to stopping the flow of the same people in every crisis in the ER.
David Kennedy: Well, that's, that's exactly what we've tried, been trying to figure out for the last 30 years.
Yeah. And with respect to a number of the worst substantive public safety issues, we've been able to answer that question. Again and again, you know, repeating myself, but it, is foundational.
They are over and over and over and over again, driven by very small numbers of exceptional and identifiable people. And those folks and the dynamics that they're enmeshed in have turned out repeatedly to be extremely responsive to the kind of interventions that we've been talking about.
And that's good news, right? That we didn't, we didn't know that 30 years ago.
[00:30:00] There's, there's work going on in Brazil right now in the south of Brazil.
Which was one of the most violent places in the world. And folks without lots of money or lots of power, took this set of ideas they reorganized themselves and they said to these criminal organizations we are telling you that there will be a seven step escalating intervention.
It will begin with interfering with your economic activities on the ground. And it will end by going to your gang leadership in prison who are running their organizations from state prisons as happens all over the place, we will interfere with your prison conditions in ways that are absolutely legal and that you will not like.
And in a year, violence in the region went down almost 50%.
Paula (Host): Right. But I'd also don't wanna [00:31:00] lose the aspect of the program that isn't just a threat of, if you act up, we're gonna do this. because I don't think people can walk away from that kind of conversation and be like, okay, better figure out a better strategy.
David Kennedy: I beg to differ.
Paula (Host): Okay.
David Kennedy: And a a, and again, we make crime policy based on apriori ideas and not on the actual job of work that we need to do. There is absolutely no point in going to a mature and murderous gang leader and saying to him, we would like to help you. What you say to that person is, stop it.
And that's an absolutely appropriate thing to say to that person.
Sure.
And we should be really clear about this kind of thing. Yeah. [00:32:00] The one of, one of the things that's driven this work is that it doesn't begin with politics or precepts. It begins by looking at what is going on in the world and then figuring out what an appropriate response is.
And you're right that response should be driven very powerfully by norms.
But the way you approach one situation can be very different than the way you approach another.
Paula (Host): Well you've been very generous with your time with me, David. Do you have any more, articles coming out, books, anything that you'd like the audience to refer to when they are looking you up after this episode?
David Kennedy: I would encourage them to go to the website for my organization, the National Network for Safe Community.
So we are at John Jay College in New York City. And they will find way more than they want about all these.
Paula (Host): All right, great. Thank you so much for joining me. I weirdly enjoyed our conversation.[00:33:00]
David Kennedy: Good, Paula. Me too. Thanks a lot.
Paula (Host): Alright, thanks.
Paula: After we stopped recording, David asked me what I was taking away from our conversation. What stayed with me the most was the role of social intervention inside focused deterrence because I know people, people I care about who've been incarcerated for violent crimes, and I know that fear or pressure alone wouldn't have been enough to change their lives.
What made change possible was having a real path out, support relationships, and help imagining a different way. That's why the social support side of focus deterrence matters to me. It recognizes people as more than the worst thing they've done at the same time, I keep wondering what it would look like if we could offer that kind of support earlier before people even reach the emergency room phase of public safety.
So far, no one has figured out how to do that at scale, and that's where the gray lives. For me, [00:34:00] holding the truth that focus deterrence can reduce real harm now while still asking what it would take to build systems that offer people a way out before violence becomes their language.