By Doug Linkhart
Although public perception doesn’t always reflect it, national crime rates have fallen considerably since at least 1990, and in some cities, there have been particularly large drops. While the national trend has helped, local community engagement has propelled larger-than-average reductions in cities like Newark, New Jersey; Reading, Pennsylvania; Richmond, Virginia; and El Paso, Texas. Newark, in particular, stands out for its sustained improvements in public safety and strong community partnerships.
Police departments generally agree that they can’t eliminate crime without community involvement. As Newark’s Public Safety Director, Emanuel Miranda, says, “we can’t arrest our way out of this.” At the same time, traditional forms of community involvement, like neighborhood watch, “coffee with a cop,” and community policing meetings with residents, do not by themselves bring about long-term results. While productive, these kinds of programs seldom have sufficient influence to enhance public safety over time, leaving cities at the mercy of national trends and local shifts in demographics.
Newark’s approach to community engagement has been impactful for several reasons. First, the city has relied on the capacity of nonprofit organizations and non-police city agencies to channel the knowledge and interests of residents, analyzing crime trends and implementing tactics to address particular needs. Second, this capacity has been coupled with resources, in the form of funding set aside from the police budget. Third, the police and community are implementing a focus on violence as a public health matter, which has brought new partners to the effort to reduce crime.
Data and the Evolution of Community Policing
Nationally, crime rates have dropped steadily since 1990, with a small uptick during the beginning of the pandemic that has now eased. Since 1990, violent crime has declined from 730 crimes per 100,000 residents in 1990 to 374 by 2023. Property crime has followed suit, declining from 5,073 incidents per 100,000 to 1,917 in 2023 after a small jump in 2021, for an overall drop of 60.5 percent during those 33 years.1
The early part of this period, the 1990s, were marked by many “tough on crime” measures, like stop and frisk techniques for “suspicious” individuals, institutional reforms like longer sentences, and political movements like the “war on drugs” that started in the 1980’s under President Ronald Reagan and heavily criminalized drug possession, locking people up for years for small, nonviolent offenses. Mass incarceration stemming from these policies has led the U.S. to have over a million people behind bars today, a higher rate than any other nation.2
At the same time, this period was characterized by widespread adoption of targeted intervention programs like the 1985 Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) and community crime prevention programs funded by the Safe and Drug-Free Communities Act and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which made available billions of dollars to hire 100,000 police officers and provide training and support for community policing.
Unfortunately, the funding for the extra police officers lasted only 6-8 years, and many police departments did not continue the community policing approach, particularly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. With the additional emphasis on preventing terrorism that came with 9/11, some departments returned to their old ways, focusing on arresting criminals, rather than preventing crime through community policing.3 Many cities continued to support community programs, but most were either short-lived or more symbolic than impactful.
Crime-fighting efforts across the country have blended with social, demographic and economic trends to result in a fairly consistent reduction in crime rates since 1990. It’s difficult, however, to find cities with steady declines, other than cities whose demographics have changed. Newark is an exception, showing steady improvements over the past 30+ years. Compared to the national decline of 44.5 percent between 2000 and 2023, the reduction in overall crime rates in Newark during this period was 62.3 percent, with the decline in violent crime even greater, 26.1 percent nationally and 67.3 percent in Newark.4
Source: Crime Data Tool and FBI’s Crime Data Explorer
This data is not meant to imply that Newark has become the safest place in the nation or made the biggest reduction, but for a medium-sized city, it has done unusually well.5 As stated by the FBI, comparing crime rates of different cities can often be misleading, since reporting and local conditions vary, so it’s difficult to say how Newark ranks among cities.6
Nevertheless, FBI data shows that Newark has reduced its overall crime from a rate that was three times as high as the national average in 2020 to a rate that is only slightly higher than the national average in 2023. And while some correlate high crime rates with high poverty levels, Newark’s poverty rate in 2023 was 24.7 percent, much more than the national average of 12.5 percent. Newark is also quite diverse, with a population in 2023 that was 16.5 percent White, 46.7 percent Black, 0.8 percent American Indian and Alaska Native, 1.9 percent Asian, and 0.0 percent Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander. Additionally, 37.2 percent of the population identifies as Hispanic or Latino.7
Newark’s success in crime reduction began in the 1990’s, after being listed in the top ten most violent cities for decades,8 with the implementation of a data analysis program called Comstat, a variation of the national Compstat program, in 1996 and the beginning of data-driven policing. Compstat, a program that started in New York City in the 1990s and which is short for “computer-generated statistics,” generates detailed and area-specific crime data that police officers use in their discussions with community groups, business owners, and residents to identify high crime areas or patterns.
The focus on data-driven policing in Newark helped reduce crime rates significantly between 1990-2010, from a rate of 16,256 crimes per 100,000 population in 1990 to 7,188 in 2000 and 4,364 in 2010,9 though part of this drop was due to a decline in crime rates nationally during this time, by almost half.
A Turning Point and Growth of Community Leadership
Unfortunately, Newark’s crime reduction between 1990-2010 came at a cost to other community values. During many of these same years, the Newark Police Department was riddled with corruption and biased policing, as uncovered in an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. In July 2014, the DOJ announced the findings of a three-year investigation into the police department practices like improper searches and stops and excessive use of force.10
Source: N-CAP
The DOJ investigation came in response to a 2010 request from New Jersey’s chapter of the ACLU based on the group’s study of complaints and lawsuits filed against the police department over a two-and-a-half-year period. As part of its request, the ACLU cited hundreds of complaints of police harassment and excessive use of force stretching back to 2006. The DOJ agreed that there were significant issues of concern, which led to the negotiation of a consent decree with the city in March 2016 that required widespread changes to NPD policing to be overseen by a federal monitor.11
Public Safety Director Miranda, who started as a patrol officer in 2001, recalls that, while the use of strategic intervention programs like ViCAP enabled the police department to target gangs and problem spots, it wasn’t until 2014 and the election of Mayor Ras Baraka that crime reduction became an actual partnership with the community, resulting in fewer complaints against officers.
Baraka, who took office shortly before the release of the investigation and had been a vocal critic of the police department as a city councilman, welcomed the DOJ report and requirement for change, though he also recognized the challenge ahead. “We look at it as an opportunity,” Baraka, said in a news conference following the investigation. The work ahead, he added, “will get Newark to where it needs to be.”12
The consent decree negotiated between the DOJ and Baraka’s administration included requirements for cameras on officers and in police vehicles, increased training, revamped department policies on the use of force and search-and-seizure practices, and the creation of a civilian oversight committee, which the city did in March 2016.13 These and other measures, together with Mayor Baraka’s leadership, ushered in a new era of community collaboration that is more meaningful and productive than in years past.
Newark has a long history of grass roots activities related to public safety, many of which were focused on issues that especially impacted people of color, like police shootings and biased policing.14 Groups such as the ACLU, NAACP, and People’s Organization for Progress, which had worked on criminal justice reform for years, came together following the DOJ report to form Newark Communities for Accountable Policing (N-CAP), which continues to serve as a police watchdog and reform advocate.
Source: NPSC
The city used community policing strategies during the early years of crime reduction, said former Safety Director, Anthony Ambrose, but “back when I started (in 1986), we had no computers. Everything was done manually. We weren’t proactive. … We just reacted to crime.”
The community policing methods of the 80s and 90s involved the community in safety discussions, but “it was largely a feel-good approach with one-way communication,” said Alejandro Giménez Santana, Assistant Professor of Professional Practice, Rutgers School of Criminal Justice and Co-Executive Director of the Newark Public Safety Collaborative (NPSC). It wasn’t until recently that a true community partnership began to evolve, with much of the credit going to the mayor, Giménez Santana said.
Ras Baraka grew up in an activist household, the “son of the late poet Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones), for decades one of the country’s most controversial radical black activists.” Writer Stephen Adubato recently wrote that Baraka’s “communitarian progressivism is far from surprising. And while deviating from his father’s antagonistic methods, Baraka demonstrates the extent to which he has been schooled by the self-determinist leanings of the black-nationalist tradition, with its emphasis on grassroots solutions.”15
In 2009, when a young girl named Nakisha Allen was shot as an innocent bystander in a running gun battle in the city’s Weequahic section, Baraka, who had been elected to the city council, helped launch the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition as a way of unifying the city’s non-violence advocacy groups.
When he became mayor, Baraka pledged a more community-driven approach to public safety, with community groups playing a larger role, and a police force that better represents residents. “We had to have a police force that demographically reflected our community to help build trust at the neighborhood level,” Baraka said, “rather than the alienation that occurs when the police look like an invading army.”
When Baraka appointed Ambrose as Public Safety Director the use of Compstat and community policing expanded. “You need to use (Compstat) every day,” Ambrose said, not just when there is an issue. Referring to the larger role of community groups, he added that “success cannot be measured by the number of arrests or tickets. We can’t arrest our way out of this.”16
What Baraka and groups like NPSC brought to crime-fighting was an increase in community capacity that made positive outcomes possible. To supplement traditional community policing techniques, like meeting with residents in neighborhood crime meetings, Newark enhanced the capacity of its nonprofits and civilian city agencies to effectively channel the interests and knowledge of residents into an effort to reduce crime rates. This effort was then partly funded with a dedicated funding stream to support crime prevention services.
Courtesy: Equal Justice USA. Credit: Ron Holtz Studio
This strengthening of community capacity was lauded by the Director of Equal Justice USA, Jamila Hodge, who credits Newark’s success to an “ecosystem of funded programs that reduce violence while also tackling issues of poverty, unemployment, lack of access to mental health services, and other issues—factors that feed the source of violence and criminalized behavior.” Equal Justice USA is a nonprofit dedicated to community-centered crime prevention that has worked with the Newark Community Street Team to host a biweekly public safety roundtable where community members convene with different arms of law enforcement to learn and express concerns.17
Targeting Services Based on Data and Community Needs
Many of Newark’s more successful community safety efforts began in the years following the 2016 consent decree, like the NPSC, which started in 2018 as a collaborative city-community project emanating from the Rutgers-Newark School of Criminal Justice Anchor Initiative. This collaborative effort has focused on analyzing crime data, particularly auto theft and violence, to develop strategic solutions.18
Strategic targeting and community involvement has had a “dramatic impact” on crime, said Director Miranda. “The days of jumping out at people from the shadows were over,” he said. Instead, the city is using data to address specific problems and deploying community-based ‘violence interrupters’—individuals who have been on the street and can help identify needs and connect people to community services like jobs and counseling.
As one of the central players in this strategic targeting, NPSC received a boost in recent years in the form of grants from the U.S. Department of Justice, which launched the Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative (CVI) in 2022, providing over $200 million to community programs in 76 cities, including Newark, for community-police collaboration to reduce crime. In announcing the 2023 grants, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said:
“This is not just a new way of doing business – this is a bold re-thinking of what safety and justice means in our society. And CVI is one of many ways that we can empower people to take ownership of safety in their communities, and to share some of the burden with law enforcement.”
Gupta also lauded Newark’s community-based crime intervention work, which had started in 2018 and received earlier federal support, saying that the DOJ grants for the city are “supporting an effort to test new community safety strategies that complement traditional enforcement measures. The mission is to put data and research into the hands of community stakeholders so they can be part of the design and development of community safety solutions.”19
With the formation of the Rutgers initiative, NPSC and federal funding, these statistics are also now used by community groups, with bimonthly data-sharing sessions that attract dozens of people to generate insights on underlying issues and ideas for addressing problems highlighted by the data. As codirector of NPSC, Giménez Santana sees their work and that of their partners as “a model of moving from community policing to coproduction of public safety. We try to laser focus them on how to use data for decision-making and we call that data-informed community engagement.
One example cited by Giménez Santana of applying data to crime prevention strategies is a public awareness campaign sponsored by the police department and community in response to the large increase in auto thefts during 2022-23. This increase corresponded with a big national rise in auto thefts that resulted partly from online posts showing how certain vehicles, like Kias and Hyundais, could be easily stolen.20 “By sharing information on how to protect vehicles, talking to youth, and other things,” Giménez Santana said, “we were able to reduce thefts by close to 80 percent in one of the neighborhoods.” Citywide, auto theft declined in 2024 by 37 percent compared to the same period, Jan-Nov., of 2023.
Involving other city agencies and groups such as NPSC in data analysis has helped focus crime-fighting and prevention techniques on particular crimes, like auto theft and violence, and areas of the city. Statistics at the time indicated that 80 percent of the crime in Newark was concentrated in 20 percent of the city, which led the city to allocate resources to hot spots for preventative and intervention services.21
Crime in the city has also had disproportionate effects on boys and young men of color. A community response to this problem was the formation in 2019 of the Newark Opportunity Youth Network (NOYN), which became the primary entity for My Brother’s Keeper Newark and worked toward policy and systems change efforts for boys and young men of color. NOYN has worked to “establish robust support systems, and create pathways for continuing education, job training, and employment,” earning the city national recognition as an MBK Model Community.
A Public Health Approach
One of the new approaches to crime reduction initiated by Mayor Baraka was treatment of criminal activity as a public health problem. “It’s like finding someone with the measles at an airport,” said Director Miranda. “We isolate problem individuals and turn them over to community partners” to provide services like trips to New York City and boxing programs. “If these programs weren’t there, you’d better believe they’d be back on the street,” said Miranda.
Newark Public Safety Director Emanuel Miranda, Sr. at 2024 Thanksgiving Community Turkey Giveaway
A key player in this public health approach, formed in 2018, is the Brick City Peace Collective (BCPC), a coalition of 16 public safety, public health, and community-based organizations that brought a public health approach to crime. Their focus is to pool resources, insights, and community connections to reduce violence. One success from this collaboration was persuading the city to reappropriate five percent of the Newark Police Department’s public safety budget to fund the creation of Newark’s Office of Violence Prevention & Trauma Recovery (OVPTR) in June 2020.22
The mission of the OVPTR is to improve the quality of life for all residents of Newark by reimagining public safety and public health as tools to address the underlying causes of violence, not only its consequences. Additionally, the OVPTR envisions a city where violence is approached from a public health perspective and where people are considered both individuals and a product of their environment.
In describing Newark’s public health approach, the Obama Foundation said that this involves treating violence “as a disease that can be prevented, interrupted, and ultimately eradicated through strategic interventions.” In adopting this approach, Newark emphasized the importance of a multi-sector collaboration involving education, law enforcement, social services, and healthcare to implement comprehensive prevention and intervention strategies. “This shift in approach allowed the organizations involved to understand the different root causes of violence, such as socioeconomic disparities, systemic inequality, and community trauma, which informed their evidence-based approaches to mitigating the violence.”23
One of the ingredients in this focus on crime as a public health issue was formation of the Newark Community Street Team (NCST), a community-based strategy that draws upon an evidence-based, trauma informed approach to violence reduction. NCST hires and trains residents to serve as outreach workers and “interventionists” in high-crime areas to assist people identified as being at greatest risk of becoming a victim or a perpetrator of violence, mediate disputes, create safer routes to schools and provide victim services.
Another example of applying a public health lens to crime was the community’s response to a corner store with a lot of violent incidents nearby. According to Giménez Santana, “the community got the utility company to improve lighting, worked with code enforcement to enforce requirements for the business, and initiated a conversation about food deserts. They discussed how the store could contribute to the well-being of the community rather than being a place for drug-dealing and other problems.”
Recent Outcomes
Newark’s police department and community programs have focused much of their crime reduction and prevention on violent crime, which led to a 55 percent decrease in homicides and 35 percent reduction in shooting victims in Newark between 2013 and 2022. Compared to many years in the 1990’s that saw more than 100 homicides,24 the city experienced only 35 in the first 11 months of 2024, according to data provided by NPSC.
Newark made it through the beginning of the pandemic relatively unscathed, with a continued drop in total crime from 3,490 incidents/100k in 2019 to a rate of 2,756/100k in 2021. In the following two years, however, the city followed a national increase, primarily in property crime, to rise to 3,867 incidents/100k, backsliding to a rate roughly equal to 2018. A big part of this increase was due to auto theft, which more than doubled during this period, accounting for 32 percent of total crime in 2023 and 56 percent of the increase from 2021-23 and is something on which NPSC and the police department are focused, as noted earlier.25
In a 2023 column for The Nation, Jamila Hodge credits Newark Mayor Baraka with driving much of the city’s improvement in public safety through his emphasis on prevention and community collaboration. The core of this new approach, Hodge says, “is the principle that the people closest to the problem—residents who experience the violence—are those best equipped to identify the needs of the community and build solutions to the violence.”26
The 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked widespread interest in a movement to defund the police nationally and a call for increased awareness/accountability of police brutality especially in poor, predominantly Black areas. Newark was not spared by protests, but opportunistic looting and property destruction were widely avoided.27 This is in part credited to police community engagement that has resulted in greater levels of trust. With the mayor himself joining protestors that marched in anger after the Floyd murder, residents and groups like the Newark Community Street Team helped protect buildings and the police from being attacked.28
Source: N-CAP
Mayor Baraka has recently highlighted the importance of community work to improve public safety in Newark. “The residents of this city have welcomed the responsibility of helping us keep their streets and neighborhoods safe,” he said. “Our crime reduction directly correlates to our increased community involvement.”
The City of Newark has created a strong model for addressing crime in a lasting way, with community capacity to help guide and implement change, a focus on violence as a public health issue, and dedicated budget resources. This combination of strategies reflects some of the larger ideas in democracy innovation: elevating civic engagement to involve the community in problem analysis and implementation of solutions, updating the internal functions and processes of local government to make room for this involvement, and providing the tools and resources needed to address root causes as well as symptoms.
As a result, the city has attained measurable outcomes for all to enjoy. “When I grew up crime was rampant and the city had a national reputation for robberies and murder, with over 100 homicides per year,” said Public Safety Director Miranda. “It’s definitely so much safer now.”
Doug Linkhart is President of the National Civic League.
