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Conclusion Civic Activism and the New Parochialism What is the relevance of the Beltway story to what we know about the control of crime and disorder in American society? Certainly, taken in isolation , it is a cautionary tale about a neighborhood where youth gangs had quietly taken root in a seemingly unlikely place. The events that culminated in the deaths of Melissa Harvey and Teresa Powell illustrate how easily order can be undone in a place that many would call a paragon of neighborhood stability. The response to the murders, which unfolded gradually and eventually cohered in the form of the BNP and problemsolving efforts, illustrates how difficult it can be for communities to restore order and control crime. The Beltway response took a great deal of time and effort, and it had to be jump-started by community organizers and police officers. Outside forces played a crucial role in stimulating the practice of informal social control internally in the neighborhood, which marked a departure in terms of community control of crime. The Beltway story thus illustrates the changes in what people do to keep their communities free from crime and disorder. Specifically, the Beltway case study makes it clear that control at the local level is no longer accomplished solely through traditional practices of collective supervision of neighborhood youth and intervention in disputes. Many of the Beltway residents I spoke with alluded to the fact that their neighbors don’t supervise or intervene any more because they are afraid or unwilling to get involved in that way. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that the problems that beset the neighborhood in the first place with respect to teens joining gangs were enabled by these changes in patterns of control. The traditional forms of local control have been supplanted in Beltway by variants of control that are more secure and that are coproduced by actors from the formal control sphere. The problem-solving initiative in Beltway, the neighborhood watch group formed from the initial problem-solving cadre, and the court 7 145 advocacy program all offer Beltway residents an outlet through which they can contribute to the collective goal of keeping their neighborhood safe and crimefree. However, the activism entailed by these commitments is specific, bounded, and secure. So, while the actions of Beltway residents are certainly deployed at the parochial or community level, they represent a new brand of parochialism that has implications for how we think and talk about what ordinary citizens do to control crime and disorder in their communities. The Beltway experience has wider applicability in terms of the manner in which informal social control is practiced and also with respect to the actual activities performed by residents. In the first place, the new parochialism seems to codify the external linkages that the criminologist Tim Hope argues are so crucial for successful community crime prevention .1 External linkages are “nonlocal centers of resources and expertise ,”2 and it is apparent in the Beltway example that access to such resources is crucial in helping initially structure the response to the crime problems in the neighborhood. So, too, thereafter, the links to outside resources continue to be important and instrumental in solving community problems. The case studies in chapter 3 demonstrate that the practice of residents tapping in to resources beyond the community is not new, but doing so routinely to help control crime and disorder is new. The new parochialism that emerges to deal with insurgent crime and disorder problems is brought about by a number of distinct but interrelated local, regional, and national trends. The increasing number of women who have joined the workforce, the peaks in juvenile violent crime in the early 1990s, the introduction of community policing initiatives in many municipalities , and the increasing diversity of many of America’s cities combine to create the conditions under which the new parochialism emerges. It remains to assess the relevance of Beltway for wider discussions about citizen activism and engagement and about community policing, and to articulate how the case studies described in this book provide hope for neighborhoods across America that are experiencing similar problems. What Can Communities Do? Evidence from Other Contexts The data from Beltway call to mind the great conundrum that is community -led action to control crime and disorder. As citizens have less time to devote to day-to-day informal social control work, much less to more 146 | Conclusion [3.133.131.168] Project...

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