Hi. I'm Volkan Topalli. I'm a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, where I study street criminals, offending behavior, and violence. Today, I'll be speaking about how violence spreads like a disease, and how, what we can do to stop it. Most of my research on street criminals comes from my own experiences, interviewing them, on the streets themselves, in St. Louis, Atlanta, and New Orleans. From these interviews, I know a few things about criminals. The criminals that we're going to be talking about today are particularly violent and, interesting in that they are a responsible for a great deal of the violence that occurs in most of the urban neighborhoods in the United States. So what do we know about this criminals? They're highly mobile, which means they don't live in one place at one time. They have very fatalistic attitudes, which means that they think that they're going to be dying young. They tend to be a jack of all street trades, and a master of none. Which means that they tend to do a little bit of drug dealing, a little bit of robbery, a little bit of burglary. At any one given moment, they're pretty much an expert in that particular crime that they're interested in. They have a great deal of antipathy towards formal systems of social control and support. Which means that they obviously don't like the police, but they also don't like the gas man, the electrician. They don't like people who work in hospitals or in pharmacies. They also are obsessed with their reputations. Which means they're very, very sensitive to any sort of slight or insult that may come their way. A lot of the reason for this is that they need their reputations in order to survive out on the streets. One thing tat we know about these offenders is that the more hardcore they are, the fewer of them exist, but the more trouble they create for the rest of us. So as an example, on most streets in the cities of the United States, only .3% of the population is responsible for over 75% of serious arrests. So, how do we deal with these offenders? Why are they responsible for the spread of violence? One thing we know about violence is that it does spread from neighborhood to another neighborhood. From one individual to another individual. And we've always had a difficult time understanding why that is. What we found through our interviews with offenders in Saint Louis, in Atlanta, in New Orleans is that much of the spread of violence is perpetrated through retaliation between criminals who tend to prey on each other for things like drugs and money. They also prey on, citizens, but those individuals aren't really, responsible for the spread of violence itself. So, how is it that, violence spreads? Well, one of the things that we know is that it spreads through certain kinds of cycles. Cycles of violence. And that these are predicated on certain conditions. We have three kinds of conditions that we're going to be talking about today. We're going to be talking about antecedent conditions, instigating conditions and encapsulating conditions. So let's talk about the first one. The first one is antecedent conditions. And these are the background risk factors that many people think are involved with crime. When people ask, why is it that there's so much violence? Why is it that there's so much crime? Most people list these sorts of things. They are social problems like poverty, poor education, single parent families, underemployment, high crime. There are also things like infrastructural problems. In other words, poor municipal services decrepit abandoned buildings, graffiti, things like that. We know that these conditions don't actually cause people to become violent or they don't cause people go become criminals. What they do is they make those people who live in these kinds of neighborhoods more susceptible to engaging in certain types of behaviors and activities that then lead to being more criminal. So poverty doesn't cause crime, but it makes you more vulnerable to becoming a criminal. What happens is, the background risk factors that we just listed end up allowing some people to become ensconced in a sort of a life that we've referred to as Streetlife. And Streetlife is an instigating condition. What is Streetlife? Streetlife is people skipping school, taking drugs, drinking alcohol, not staying in their parents' home. Mostly young people not engaging in the kind of pro-social mainstream behaviors that lead to success later on in life. These aren't necessarily totally illegal behaviors, but they're certainly deviant, and they certainly put people on a track for not being successful. The antecedent conditions lead to the instigating conditions. And so a larger group of people then becomes the smaller group of people. That smaller group of people then there's a small group of them that becomes susceptible to a certain kind of intense form of streetlife. Where they're pursuing illicit action and where they're engaging in a lot of conspicuous consumption. And this type of street life is far more extensive than the street life that we just discussed. It's a kind of a life that really relies on people engaging in crime and criminality in order to keep it going. And it's a cycle that people can't get out of. So what happens is people will start pursuing this sort of life, where they're engaging in serious alcohol abuse, drug abuse. They're partying all night long. They're not working. They're engaging in sort of petty crimes, that sort of thing. And you need a lot of money and you need a lot of resources to engage in this kind of behavior. So what do you do? You use up all of your resources and you become financially desperate. Once you've become financially desperate, you can't turn around and immediately go back to partying because you don't have any money. And you certainly won't have a job living the kind of lifestyle that you have. So, what most of these people do is they engage in predatory behavior and crime. That predatory behavior and crime produces something that they really need, which is cash. Cash is really critical because it's the only transactional medium that people can use to buy illegal services, like prostitutes and drugs and alcohol. So, once you have a lot of cash, suddenly you're flushed with money again and you can go back to pursuing all these illegal behaviors that you were engaged in before. The problem, of course, is that you quickly run out of resources to conti, to keep the party going, and the cycle continues on and on again. So, the anteceding conditions, to recap, address a larger group of people, a smaller group of them, and end up getting trapped up in these instigating conditions, and then a smaller group of them end up getting trapped in this ideological cycle of street crime. Let's talk about that ideological cycle for a moment, and really focus on this predatory behavior. Because the predatory behavior is actually what's creating a lot of the problems that we see, when we're out on the streets. What's going on here is that offenders are typically offending against other kinds of offenders. And I've put up on the screen, a number of triangles that represent what criminals are, are, are like. They basically prey on one another. The problem, of course, is that it's not a one way direction. One criminal preys on another criminal. That criminal responds by either retaliating against the first criminal or going out and, finding another criminal to victimize. What are they looking for when they victimize other criminals? They're looking for the things that will help them keep the party going, which is drugs, alcohol and cash. What does that look like? Well, let's take a look at this one particular graphic here. What we have here is one offender, Offender number one. Offender number one victimizes Offender number two, maybe stealing his drugs and cash and money. Offender number two then is highly motivated to retaliate against offender one, as you can imagine. What happens when offender one is retaliated against? Well, he decides to counter-retaliate, because he has to defend his reputation as well. And what you end up with is a cycle, where these two offenders are locked into a constant struggle with one another, constantly going back and forth over and over and over again. The reason why we say that this is an encapsulating condition is because they're trapped in this cycle by two systems. The first system is an informal system. It's a sub-cultural value system that most of these offenders live in in these urban neighborhoods. These sub-cultural values dictate the way that they respond to affronts and insults and victimization. It says, you don't go to the police. You don't, you don't go to the authorities when something bad happens to you. What you have to do is you have to take care of your own business. You have to man up essentially. On the other side, there's a main stream legal system that's not available to offenders. If you're an offender who's had your drugs stolen for example, you can't go to the police and say, I'd like to file a report because my drugs were stolen and I'd like to get them back. You're essentially trapped in this cycle, where you have to take care of this on your own. If you don't, you'll be labelled as weak, and you'll be victimized over and over again. Now, a lot of people think that this is okay. It's just, after all two drug dealers, or two violent people who're going at it with each other and let them, sort of, take each other out. The problem with this, of course, is that when they bring other people into this cycle with them. Okay? And that can take a number of different forms. Sometimes, victimized defenders draw in third parties. So for example, I was robbed for my drugs. What I do then is I go out and I get a bunch of my friends together and we kind of pony up and go chasing after the guy who got us. We retaliate against that person. He then turns around and gets some of his guys together and then retaliates against us. So what ends up happening is you now have instead of two individuals going at it with each other, you have two groups of people going at it with each other. And all of those people in those individual groups can sort of develop their own kinds of problems with one another and it spreads from that. Another thing that can happen is that criminals can target other people. Someone robbed me, I have to get my money and my drugs back. So what I'll do is I'll turn around and I'll rob some, some third party. Now that party has been aggrieved. And they've gotta turn around and retaliate. Or maybe they've gotta go out and rob somebody to get their money back. So, what it looks like is this. Take a look at the first, two groups of, two individuals that we, we discussed before. Offender one and Offender two, locked in this encapsulated form of retaliation and counter retaliation. Remember Offender two isn't just out there being, victimized. He's also out there victimizing other people. Sometimes it's in response to what Offender 1 did to him. Sometimes it's because he just needs to go out there and get some money of his own. Offender three, same thing. And so on and so forth. What happens is, the initial affront, Offender one to Offender two can actually trigger multiple other affronts against multiple other offenders. Causing cycles of retaliation, and counter-retaliation, that spread from the initial event. We've looked at a number of these kinds of incidences. We've actually tracked them from one initial incidence, say, a robbery. And found that these retaliation, counter retaliation cycles, can sometimes last for years and end up costing multiple deaths and injuries. So the question is, how do you stop this? Well, most criminologists don't think this way, but we do. We've decided to take a public health approach. And the way we think about this is, looking at violence as a disease where it's infecting others through retaliation. And if you look at disease prevention models that most, public health people are interested in. They're really interested in looking at primary prevention and secondary prevention. Primary prevention means that you stop the violence before it ever occurs. And secondary prevention means that you stop it on the back end after it's occurred. But prevent it from, flowing any further downstream. And that's what this looks like. This is a uni, unified model of what the entire cycle looks like. And I've, included here some some pictures of police officers, so that you can see where law enforcement can have its sort of effect. One place it can have its effect is identifying the individual who starts everything off. And we usually refer to that in public health fear, sphere as patient zero. So if you can identify people at a very young age, and sort of intercede with them before they become trapped in the cycle itself, you've now prevented all of the offenses and violence that they're going to potentially, engage in later on in life. Another thing that you can do is, you could allow offenders to actually access justice. In other words, if I'm a drug dealer who's been robbed, normally I wouldn't go to the police. But if we change the laws and allow police to actually investigate these crimes, and say that, you know, what we'll do is we will investigate the crime, we will arrest the person who, who robbed you. We won't get your drugs back, but we will do those things for you so you won't have to take the law into your hands and engage in violence. That actually has been systematized in some countries in Northern Europe, and it seem to work very well. The third option, is the actually remove cash from the system. Cash is a very liquid, transactional medium. It's very untraceable, and for that reason, lots of offenders like to use it to buy illegal things. They obviously don't, don't want to or can't use credit cards to purchase a lot of things. If we remove cash from the system, then what we're doing is removing the ability of people to buy these illegal items in the first place. We slowed down that cycle and we put a brake on it. The world is becoming ever more digitized. We're using credit cards a lot more. We've now converted most welfare payment schemes into digital payment schemes and actually this is already starting to happen. We have recent research for example that shows that when we remove cash from the streets, when we increasingly digitize transactions, what happens is crime actually goes away and drops. And what that does is it prevents the spread of violence beyond that initial event.
