Tag: community

Cash is not always the answer

They say some things you can’t buy. Or maybe some things are more conducive to pecuniary transactions than others. Take the Violence Interrupters. By the summer of 2020, the community wanted to try a new angle on crime prevention, as an article from September explains.

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — The city of Minneapolis is sending members of the community into the streets to prevent violence that is plaguing the city.

They are called the Violence Interrupters, and they’re tasked with stopping shootings by mediating conflicts in the community, and following up with individuals to decrease retaliatory violence.

Jamil Jackson and his group of interrupters are on the move.

“Our mantra is engage, relationships, resources,” Jackson said. “We’re teachers, we’re business owners, we’re city employees, we’re park employees, we’re just individuals who came to the call and had a desire to come out here and change.”

Their bright-orange shirts stand out, so they can walk in and use their relationships within the community to stop the shootings before they happen

The idea was that if responsible people in the neighborhood could step in on demand when they saw an event unfolding, interacting with police would be avoided entirely. Neighbors helping neighbors have the advantage of, in many cases, a clearer view of the issues at hand.

Others have written about this very thing, extolling the benefits of an active community busy engaging with each other across the sidewalks and parks of a neighborhood. Here’s what Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

The first thing to understand is that the public peace the sidewalk and street peace-of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.

With good intentions, an office of violence prevention was created and funding was carved into the city budget to pay people in the neighborhood to step in and prevent an incident from escalating. So what happened? Fast-forward to this week in 2025.

Some Minneapolis City Council members say the city’s Neighborhood Safety Department (NSD) has been too riddled with mismanagement to continue overseeing violence intervention programs. On Thursday, three council members proposed that more than $1.1 million be allocated to Hennepin County to temporarily take over two intervention programs. 

For more than a year, council members have routinely flagged concerns over the department that administers violence interruption programs. Several violence interruption groups reported contracts that had lapsed or gone unpaid last year, which council members say shrunk safety services in parts of the city. A 2023 lawsuit also alleged the department arbitrarily awarded millions of dollars in contracts without adequate oversight. 

Things have gotten so bad that the council people, who are most vocal against professional police, no longer want to be responsible for this new form of neighborhood quieting. But why didn’t it work? It has the right components.

It’s the money.

The eyes-on-the-street people, who help keep the peace, are many and are often never called on to intervene in any way. To meter out the job to an individual is resource misallocation as it takes a large group, a whole neighborhood, of people to monitor and, through small actions, or phone calls, or gestures, alter the course of events. There isn’t enough of a job for just one person.

When resources don’t have a direct draw against them, they become ripe for fraud. Those in charge of the money have to put it somewhere. Opportunists realize this and create a demand where none exists.

Community policing is a group thing. It does not jive with the division of labor or hourly wages. Whoever is available when the car crashes into a pole and is set on fire, whoever happens to be passing by and has the will and capacity to help, are those who step up voluntarily in times of need. For that they receive an award.

Lisa Bernstein explains Private Ordering

Example of private ordering described by Anthony Downs.

The purpose of shifting services to the neighborhood level is not just to improve quality but also to encourage self-development of local residents and enhancement of their personal values. Neighborhood self-development usually occurs most effectively through spontaneous, unplanned local efforts often led by charismatic individuals. In city after city the most effective such efforts have emerged from the dramatic leadership of one or a few unique individuals who took it upon themselves to “do something” about local conditions and galvanized others into : action. Inevitably, their efforts reflect their own unique combinations of talents and are therefore difficult to replicate elsewhere.

Neighborhoods and Urban Development

How many homes in a Neighborhood?

As we say here at Home Economic, context is important. Recently I heard the figure of twenty homes as a sweeping number with respect to an impact on a neighborhood. In order to evaluate an impact, it is necessary to know how many homes total constitute a typical neighborhood.

A standard city block with a sidewalk out front and an alley to the back generally has twelve to fourteen homes per city block. So if you were to think that your neighborhood was your block and two to the north, two to the east, two to the south, and then two to the west – you would have about 230 homes in total. In this case, twenty homes is about ten percent. If all these homes were in poor repair, for instance, this could be noticeable and have a negative effect on the outward appeal or from the street view.

Neighborhoods are quite a bit bigger than a cluster of two blocks to either side. Here’s a neighborhood map of Minneapolis, for example.

The USPS offers a useful tool for direct marketers which calculates the number of residential mail stops on mail carrier route (it’s called Every Door Direct Mail). We can use it here to help estimate the number of households by neighborhood. The first map is for the Armatage neighborhood. The number of homes comes in at 2620. Since the routes overlap into Fulton, let’s use a number of 2400. In this case twenty homes in the Armatage neighborhood makes up 0.83% of the total.

The Fowell neighborhood on the other side of town is know for having a larger share of corporate owned rental housing. Here, our USPS tool tells us that the neighborhood contains 2182 properties. Again rounding down is appropriate as the one route that runs on the west side of the cemetary is in the Victory neighborhood. Let’s use 2000 homes, in which case twenty porperties is 1% of the total.

It’s hard to see where one percent of a total number can have an effect on quality of life issues.

When a raw number gets tossed into a conversation as if it were a grenade ready to explode, always ask for context.