“We can’t get to the point where we think this level of violence is normal and just grow to accept it. We have to continue to try to push down the numbers.”
“We can’t get to the point where we think this level of violence is normal and just grow to accept it. We have to continue to try to push down the numbers.”
Many criminologists blame the pandemic and its societal and economic disruptions for the spike in homicides over the past couple of years. “It’s not that the whole society fell apart,” says Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It’s just that there are enough people who were already living on the edge, and this pushed them off of it.”
Jeffrey Butts participated in a panel hosted by the Bureau of Governmental Research in New Orleans, discussing the potential of community-based violence prevention strategies.
If done properly, restorative justice can foster “the most natural human response to crime — to try to talk things through and resolve the conflict,” said Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
Professor Jeffrey Butts, the director of John Jay College’s Research and Evaluation Center, said that in some respects conservatives and liberals are on the same page with gun control. “The far left and the far right are actually pitching the same story,” he said.
“If we start to define public safety though, in terms of how much money we spend on policing, that’s the wrong approach.”