Here’s an interesting story about crime in Memphis, Tennessee, and how it’s been changing over the past few years. Richard Janikowski is a criminologist with the University of Memphis, and he’s been working closely with the Memphis Police to figure out what was happening.

The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city […] and along one in the southeast. Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.

Why was crime happening in random spots around town, in the areas farther out, not in the inner city area?

Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis […] Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government’s most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section8″ rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community […] Over time, she and Janikowski realized that they were doing their fieldwork in the same neighborhoods.

Which is to say, crime was happening where all the Section8 residents were living. It was not the kind of thing anyone wanted to talk about.

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed-and deflated-to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected.

It’s a typical story of how the good intentions of government programs lead to whole worlds of consequence.

Operation Armor All, an Orlando prayer movement, is spreading. Led by Orlando police chaplain Andrew Wade, over 70 Orlando congregations are praying for city crime rates to decline. Jim Ardis, mayor of Peoria, heard about Operation Armor All and decided to organize something similar in his own town. Because of a recent conflict at two Peoria schools, Ardis decided to focus on the racial conflicts dividing the community.

“This is a way to appeal to the entire faith-based community to come together, help us improve communications between the whole community, and hopefully prevent these things in the future or see a significant decrease,” Ardis said.

Ardis, who has served as mayor for two and a half years, said he is using the holidays to focus on gratitude and hope for the New Year. The event begins this week and will culminate on the Sunday before Christmas. Community churches will host prayer meetings over the 40-day period.

Wade said it is “fantastic” that Operation Armor All is inspiring others, and he hopes this could become a national trend. He compared it to the story of Jonah, when God used Jonah to call the city of Nineveh to repent and pray. Seeing their humility, God changed his mind about destroying Nineveh. “If you approach God in prayer with the right attitude, you will be broken and you will repent for the sins of your city, your nation, your world,” Wade said.

Wade said Operation Armor All continues to flourish, as he has had to double and even triple book churches to lead the daily worship rallies. They will continue into the New Year, hoping to duplicate the movement in other parts of their own county and region.

In earlier times, public shaming was an accepted — and effective — deterrent for unsociable behavior. People caught stealing or in adultery, for example, were clapped in stocks in the public square.

Recently, I read where a Texas judge is sentencing convicted criminals to stand on street corners holding signs confessing their crimes. Now, in El Cajon, Calif., the police department is posting on its website the names, photographs, and case details of women arrested for prostitution. (more…)

Vigilante justice in Alabama.  Another good reason to have a gun in the home.

Orlando is fighting crime with prayer. Last Wednesday, police chaplain Andrew Wade launched Operation Armor All – 40 days of prayer for a drop in crime. Over a hundred people attended, including the mayor, the chief of police, two city commissioners, a circuit judge and members from 37 local churches.

“There is a fight in the supernatural that is affecting us here in the physical world,” Wade told WoW.“Let’s ask God to change the hearts and minds of men.”



The event began in the Parramore neighborhood, one of the city’s 25 crime “hot spots” and the first African-American neighborhood. “It’s a neighborhood that has bred crime,” Wade said. They chose Parramore Heritage Park to gather each night because it’s “a new landmark, and it represents new life and change.”

Wade hopes to host 25 events total, one in each of the city’s crime hot spots. He started a similar event in the Carver Court area four years ago and saw results: “One church went for a whole year. (Now) they tore down the projects, and drug trafficking is almost all dried up.”

While that event included evangelism, Operation Armor All focuses entirely on intercessory prayer and worship. Churches across denominational lines are participating.

Some people oppose the efforts because they believe the police department is wasting resources. One woman called to say they should be in Washington working on changing laws instead of praying.

Wade, however, is unfazed: “Everything’s going to have opposition, but that’s not our concern and not our focus. . . Tragedy is not ordained by God but permitted by him to call us to the place where we first knew him — and that is on our knees.”

A Portland, Ore., couple needed a minister whose credentials they could trust to marry them, so they turned to Craigslist and found a preacher who specialized in “last-minute” weddings. After the ceremony, the couple, who were expecting a wedding-gift bounty of Home Depot gift cards to help them remodel their kitchen, were puzzled when they found only three cards left in a basket set out to collect them. Were their friends cheapskates, or had someone swiped them? The couple suspected the Rev. Shey-Rima Silveira, since she had been alone in the house at the beginning of the ceremony and had left abruptly. Portland police, using store surveillance tapes, later nabbed Silveira using the cards and charged her with second-degree theft. “If you can’t trust someone to officiate over your wedding, who can you trust in this world?” said detective Willie Halliburton.