The Safer Newark Council, convened by Mayor Ras Baraka in 2014, says data suggests a perception of Newark as having an out-of-control crime rate citywide is not consistent with the reality that policing and government strategies should reflect. Watch video
NEWARK -- A 26-year-old male gang member who used a gun against someone he had a personal dispute with in drug deal gone wrong in the South or West ward.
That's the typical homicide suspect in Newark, according to an initial report released Monday by a panel convened by Mayor Ras Baraka in October 2014, known as the Safer Newark Council, to get at the facts of violent crime in Newark, so that strategies to combat it would be based on reality, not politics or perceptions driven by headlines.
The report, titled, "A Call to Action," seeks to upend perceptions of Newark as having an out-of-control crime rate by offering data that, while comparing poorly to the United States overall, indicates less violent incidents per capita than than in the comparable cities of Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland and St. Louis. Among New Jersey's five biggest cities by population, Newark also compares favorably or is on par with Paterson, Camden and Trenton, though it generally lags behind Jersey City.
"An effective public safety strategy must be grounded in data, not hearsay," the report states. "Therefore, for the last 9 months, the SNC has investigated patters f crime in Newark going back to 2007. It turns out that large sections of Newark experience little or no crime."
The report found that 80 percent of Newark streets experienced no violent crime during the years studied, with a small minority of locations, or "hot spots," and individuals, often repeat or multiple offenders, accounting for outsize shares of the city's violence.
For example: 32 percent of robberies occur on just 4 percent of the city's streets; two-thirds of robberies are committed by youths under 24 years old, while murders tend to be committed by older men; and just 4 percent of the city's total population is involved in 62 percent of its crime.
"Newark is not a war zone," said Prof. Todd Clear of the Rutgers University School of Public Safety, during a presentation of the report on the Rutgers Newark campus on Monday. "Newark's pubic safety situation is no different from similar cities."
The council all includes Dr. Robert Johnson, dean of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.
"We need a strategy and that strategy has to be one that's grounded in reality," Johnson said. "When we react to headlines, we don't always have that strategy."
Baraka agreed.
"For example, we in the city would want to put police officers in a particular location in a particular ward, and it would invoke political connotations as opposed to the real connotations, that we have to be there because that's where the crime is," said Baraka, who joined Clear, Johnson and Newark Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose in presenting the report. "People automatically believe that we absolutely have to have a police officer on every corner, but according to the study, that is not the case."
Asked to provide an example of how police would deal with the typical homicide suspect described in the report, Ambrose said he didn't want to tip his hat to criminal elements. And other officials pointed out that the purpose of the report was to present the realities of Newark's violent crime, rather than recommend strategies for fighting it. However, Ambrose did later suggest that knowing who is most likely to commit crimes could help police monitor certain high-risk individuals.
He and others also stressed that strategies growing out of the report's findings would not involve law enforcement alone, but rather try to address social and economic challenges that are inextricably linked to crime.
"We can't arrest our way out of this," Ambrose said.
Even so, officials acknowledged that Newark does have an acute murder and robbery problem -- the city had the nation's third highest murder rate in 2014, according to the FBI. So, officials said murder and robbery would be targeted by the panel and city officials would work out specific policing strategies and public policies to address those particular crimes and their causes.
Noting that personal disputes were the number one motive for homicides, Baraka cited a conflict resolution program already in effect in Newark as just one of many existing initiatives that could be preserved or augmented.
Now that the panel has compiled and released its initial report, Baraka said a series of public forums will be held for residents, business owners and others with an interest in reducing perceptions of violent crime and crime itself in Newark.
Beyond that, panelists and officials will begin working out specific strategies, some of them dovetailing with or simply bolstering initiatives that have already proven effective. Baraka would not put a time frame on the panel's work. In terms of when its work would actually begin to produce a reduction in crime, Johnson cautioned that was likely to take, "a very long time."
Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook.