Uneasy Peace
The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence
Lavin Exclusive Speaker
Over the past 25 years, American cities have transformed. Violence has become less common in major urban centers, and citizens feel more connected to their communities than ever before. But crime still occurs, and the dated systems meant to apprehend it have been called into question. In carefully optimistic talks based on five years of field research, Patrick Sharkey introduces ideas that are necessary in understanding what shapes this shifting state of peace—and how we might change the equation moving forward.
Author, professor, and Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University, Patrick Sharkey spent five years gathering national data about the drop in crime, and how it changed the nature of urban inequality. In his new book, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, Sharkey shows, with rigorous evidence, that decline in crime has fundamentally changed the nature of urban poverty. But the approaches we have taken to confront that violence (like targeted instances of stop-and-frisk) have come at great cost to some of our most basic rights.
Sharkey’s research, while focused in the often harsh realities of violence and poverty, is informed by a realistic optimism. His talks present the facts of policing, surveillance, and urban threat—also framed in his much-shared articles in publications like The New York Times, Slate, and The Washington Post—with a lucid and balanced purview. Vitally, the crux of Sharkey’s talks are the incredible efforts that civilians in some of the “worst” environments have accomplished, joining together of their own accord to clean up and create safer territories for themselves. In effect, limiting the need for police and surveillance. Clean parks, safe corners, harmonious streets. These things, he tells us, can be nourished without fear of punitive measures.
Patrick Sharkey is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at NYU. His prior research considers the role of neighborhoods and cities in generating and maintaining inequality across multiple dimensions. His first book, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality, received the Mirra Komarovsky Award for the best book of the year from the Eastern Sociological Society, the Otis Dudley Duncan Award from the Population Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and The American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award in Sociology and Social Work.