What To Know Today

NEW from THE TRACE: Baltimore’s crime plan is missing a key component: community buy-in. Focused deterrence aims to reduce violent crimes by offering those closest to the front lines a choice: Stop the violence and accept assistance with housing, employment, addiction and counseling, or face severe legal consequences. The model, predicated on the notion that the bulk of violence in any city is driven by small groups of people, has found success in places like Boston and Oakland. But two previous iterations have fallen flat in Baltimore, as past mayors nixed or grew impatient with a program that advocates say needs years of committed effort from all levels of local government. Current Mayor Brandon Scott has fully committed to the model with the help of federal stimulus money. And one of the criminologists who devised focused deterrence is advising the city on its rollout. But the challenge now is to earn the trust and support of community members, who are crucial to the model’s success but fatigued by previous attempts at combating violence. “People here in the city are tired,” one resident told J. Brian Charles in a new article about the plan. “They don’t have the confidence level that things are going to change.” 

Young people are more likely to die from gun violence in places where poverty is more highly concentrated. That’s the takeaway of a new study published in JAMA Pediatrics that looked at nearly 68,000 gun-related deaths of people between the ages of 5 and 24 between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2016. Mapping gun violence onto county-level poverty levels, the researchers found that more than half of all gun-related deaths and two-thirds of firearm homicides affected victims who lived where a larger percentage of the population was living below the federal poverty line. The authors determined that 34,292 fewer people would have died if all counties had the lowest poverty concentration recorded.

Warnings unheeded: Classmates of Poway synagogue shooter raised concerns. In September, the 19-year-old perpetrator was sentenced to life in prison for the April 2019 hate crime that left one person dead and three others wounded. Court filings obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune show for the first time that the shooter’s nursing school students brought concerns about his behavior to officials at Cal State San Marcos after he allegedly shared white supremacist materials with them. That prompted a campus police investigation in the weeks before the shooting, but officials ultimately declined to arrest the would-be shooter or pull him from school, presumably because he hadn’t made specific threats or acted violently. 

Event watch: Transforming narratives of gun violence. On Thursday, Emerson College’s Engagement Lab, the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, and the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Massachusetts General Hospital are launching a three-year, Boston-based collaboration to look at solutions to gun violence by focusing on media and the arts. The project seeks “to understand how current narratives surrounding gun violence affect those most impacted and explore narrative interventions to the crisis of gun violence experienced locally.” You can register for the December 2 event here.

Data Point

2 — the number of shootings on high school campuses in Aurora, Colorado, in the last two weeks, which left a total of nine students injured. A third shooting in the city injured five other young people on Sunday. [Axios]