Communities ?Fighting Back? to quash neighborhood crime

By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff

In an inner-city neighborhood of San Antonio, Texas, a group of concerned citizens recently gathered their own evidence about a local convenience store that sold alcohol to underage youths and dealt illegal drugs out the back door.

The neighbors tallied the store?s rates of liquor sales to minors and successfully petitioned the San Antonio Alcohol and Beverage Commission to shut down the store, or 'ice house,' as they?re often known in inner-city neighborhoods. Their efforts to curtail liquor sales have apparently paid off: The area?s crime rate has dropped 33 percent since the early 1990s.

At the same time that the ice house closed, residents in a public housing project a few blocks away lobbied the city to add speed bumps to their roads?they figured that if gunmen couldn?t peel away from the scene, they?d stop the shooting for fear of getting caught. They were right. Now that the bumps are in place, the neighborhood hasn?t had another shooting. Supported by community agencies and University of Texas researchers, both initiatives were born of Fighting Back, a community-based effort to reduce drug abuse and related crime. It?s a program that researchers repeatedly held up as a model for social science research at the May Public Health Conference in Atlanta.

The Fighting Back program epitomizes an overarching theme of the conference: The strength to combat social and health problems lies within people and their communities. And as APA President Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD, argued in his closing address, it?s the job of public and mental health professionals to 'amplify that strength.' Instead of viewing people and communities as thwarted by racial tensions, poverty and disease, 'we need a science of personal strength,' Seligman said. Conference attendees viewed Seligman?s proposition as a welcome replacement for community interventions that treat residents as passive victims and fail to involve them in tackling their own problems. Among the supporters was psychologist Anne Doucette-Gates, PhD, who evaluated the Fighting Back program for CDC.

'In the past you had university personnel trying to repair a community problem, then leaving after a year or two and nothing was changed,' said Gates. 'To make a lasting change, your effort should be ongoing and should involve community residents as equal participants. You?ve got to involve community members in gathering the data, sharing the work.'

Indeed, the Fighting Back program reflects a growing trend for private citizens to get personally involved in resolving crime and drug problems in their neighborhoods. In communities across the nation, from the housing projects of San Antonio to the Native American reservations of Iowa and the front porches of inner-city Detroit, residents are trying different prevention strategies?lobbying city authorities to close liquor stores, joining with public health researchers to fight drug abuse and banding with neighbors and police to squelch crime.

Fighting back

In fact, grassroots strength is the main weapon of the Fighting Back program, said David Rosenbloom, PhD, a Boston University public health professor whose office oversees the program. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the program assists communities in 14 cities. In Kansas City, for example, the program helps schools and courts refer more drug abusers for treatment. In Newark, N.J., it stopped an effort to extend the hours that taverns sell liquor. In Little Rock, Ark., it created a tax-funded health insurance program for schoolchildren who need drug abuse rehabilitation. And in Santa Barbara, Calif., the program organizes the annual drug- and alcohol-free 'I?m Free for the Weekend' project which provides free bands, bus rides and zoo visits to teen-agers.

Building trust

To make the most of grass-roots strength, however, researchers must first earn the trust of a community?s residents, said conference presenter Leslie Whitbeck, PhD, a sociologist at the Institute for Social and Behavioral Research at Iowa State University. He and his fellow researchers work with Native American families to conquer substance abuse on their reservations. And the key word is 'with,' said Whitbeck.

Before introducing their prevention programs on the reservation, the researchers seek an alliance with the reservation?s tribal leaders. Then they wait to be invited to the reservation?s tribal feasts. These occasions enable the researchers to pray, eat and talk with tribal residents, thus winning their trust, said Whitbeck. Next the researchers hold focus groups with tribal residents to pinpoint substance-abuse problems and the tribe?s preferred methods of intervening.

The researchers hire tribal members as fellow researchers and co-investigators, and they teach youngsters assertiveness and social skills to help them resist the lure of drugs. (Sitting and listening for long periods of time goes against tribal norms, said Whitbeck.) Throughout the research program, Whitbeck keeps a steady, highly visible presence on the reservation to sustain the tribe?s trust in him.

'Last year I spent 60 percent of my time riding in my truck to three different reservations,' said Whitbeck. 'They have to see you. It?s the only way to decrease their sense that you?re an outsider.'

Partnering within communities

Bonding between community residents is also key to curtailing drug abuse and crime, said conference presenter and social psychologist Sherman James, PhD, of the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

The East Side Project, a recent study by James and his colleague Barbara Israel, DrPH, underscores his point. The study assessed the quality of life of 700 women, of whom 95 percent were African American, on Detroit?s east side. Younger women, in their 20s and 30s, showed higher rates of substance abuse and depression than women in their 40s and older, the researchers found. Young women also considered their neighborhoods less safe than the older women did; they reported less support from neighbors, and they distrusted the police, considering them ineffectual at battling gangs, crime and drugs.

The young women?s disconnection from the community helps explain their malaise, said James. To help the women feel more bonded to their community, he and his research team have hired 30 local health workers to link the women with their neighborhood block clubs?groups that clean up neighborhoods and survey them for signs of crime.

Research on youth drug-abuse prevention reiterates the need for bonding among community agencies. For example, the well-known Midwestern Prevention Project, overseen by psychologist Mary Ann Pentz, PhD, of the University of Southern California School of Medicine, owes its success to its involvement of parents, community organizations and the mass media in addition to schools. Locally named Project Star or Project ISTAR, the program seeks to curtail cigarette, alcohol and other drug use among students at 107 middle schools in Kansas City and Indianapolis.

As sixth- and seventh-graders receive school-based training in assertiveness and decision-making skills to help them resist the temptations of drugs, parents and community leaders rally to remove billboard advertisements for liquor, television and radio stations run antidrug public service announcements and law enforcement officials limit public smoking and crack down on alcohol sales to minors. Over the past five years, the program has reduced drug abuse by up to 8 percent among a subsample of 2,400 students. This success Pentz attributed to the community agencies? committed alliances, with one another and with her research team. Indeed, such partnership is the very backbone of prevention, agrees James.

'We need to engage communities as an equal partner and voice in all decisions about research questions and methodology,' said James.

'It?s a sea change,' he says, 'in the way we do public health research in communities.'