Not too long ago, I took a tour of Rochester's JOSANA neighborhood, located in the city's troubled Crescent, with City Council member Carla Palumbo. One thing she has learned as an elected official, she said, is that there is no difference between perception and reality when it comes to crime. And that perception, she said, is formed very close to home. If a couple of cars get broken into overnight on a particular street, then to residents of that neighborhood, crime is surging and the whole city is going to hell.

I'm thinking of Palumbo's observation weeks later when I meet with Christopher Schreck, an associate professor of criminal justice at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Violent crime is rare, Schreck says, and most people have no experience with it as either offenders or victims. Their knowledge, he says, is based on media accounts, which often play up atrocity stories like the 16-year-old girl who was recently stabbed to death in Rochester, and "I have a friend who" stories.

So although it may seem that the whole world is hurtling irrevocably toward complete moral decay, the reality, Schreck says, is that violent crimes are at record lows nationally. And although crime is concentrated among juveniles, if you put it in the proper context, Schreck says, it's extraordinary for a child to be arrested for any reason.

Areas of concern do exist, of course, such as the narrowing of the gap between males and females in arrests and in victimization. Theories? Some experts blame the disproportionately high number of women living in poverty and women's entry into traditionally male-dominated areas of crime.

"For once we have equality, right?" Schreck says.

Schreck has a long and lean runner's body. The pair of sneakers askew on his cabinet is in case he gets to the gym, but he much prefers the country roads back home in Farmington. He resembles Conan O'Brien from the front and Ron Howard from the side, or maybe it's the other way around.

I met with Schreck to gain some insight into an area of burgeoning local concern: the fights that have been happening downtown near the Liberty Pole since January. The altercations have triggered a police crackdown and multiple arrests and have factored into the discussions about a downtown transit center.

But the meeting grew into a wide-ranging discussion about the nature and perception of violence, civility, poverty, and politics.

The following is an edited version of the interview.

CITY: Why is it perfectly acceptable to some young people to fight in the streets or, to take it to the extreme, to shoot someone for insulting their girlfriends or scuffing their shoes?

Schreck: There's some work that's looked at something called "the code of the street," where people have to be prepared to respond violently in order to earn respect and essentially be left alone. People who go to teachers, police are characterized as chumps. They're the ones who don't have respect and who essentially "earn" victimization.

From this perspective, what happens is that the way police and other authorities deal with severely disorganized areas of the city is that they tend to neglect them. And police, when they do show up, their interactions with residents tend to be highly coercive in nature.

And so for that reason, residents don't trust police to deal with disputes. If somebody, for instance, trashed your lawn, you could sue them in court. But these people are so poor, the courts really aren't an option because they cost money and time.

You can go up to them nicely and say, "Please knock it off." But really, the only thing you have left is to deal with it violently.

That's one explanation. Another one, which is similar, is the idea that people learn it that way; they learn to become violent from role models, peer groups.

Is society as a whole, and are youth in particular, becoming more violent?

No. Levels of violence, according to official crime data, are at record lows. That's one of the paradoxes.

Most people, I suppose because of the way the media presents violence on the news, seem to be continually under the impression that violence is at an all-time high and getting worse, and that we have increasingly new violence phenomena.

Ten, 20 years ago, there was the carjacking craze. In the 70's there was the Halloween sadist, where people were saying you had to have your candy inspected because of drugs, razor blades, and stuff like that. It was completely a legend. There's no evidence at all that took place.

Many forms of violence have been with us for a long period of time. It's just suddenly they draw attention.

In terms of the big picture, violence has been going down dramatically since 1993. It had been going up in the 1960's and 1970's, plateaued in the 80's at a very high level. But in 1993 it just plunged off a cliff. We don't really know why.

Why is the perception, then, that violence is growing in number and frequency of incidents, as well as in ferocity?

Most people don't have any direct experience with violence, as victims or offenders. They only know what they pick up from the media, who've obviously got to sell newspapers and advertising. And people are fascinated by violence: it's kind of scary in some ways; people can easily see themselves as victims of violence, so they pay attention to the stories.

People don't objectively have an idea of what their risks are. It turns out that our risks of becoming victims of violence are miniscule. Now, it's higher for some groups of people than others, particularly African Americans. But for most of us, we're not all that exposed to it or particularly knowledgeable about it.

Crime is disproportionately concentrated among juveniles. It gives the impression that kids are committing all kinds of crime. But statistically speaking, a child has to very lucky to be arrested for any reason. And most of the arrests are for larceny.

So when it comes to juvenile crime, most of what kids are doing is an annoyance. Theft isn't something we should approve of, but the idea that violence characterizes the juvenile offender is wrong.

So what is going on at the Liberty Pole?

From what I understand, the issue seems to have arisen because of busing arrangements. The city school district, for whatever reason, uses city transportation. And the way city transportation's structured, it gives kids the opportunity to hang out in the downtown area.

Many of the kids are indicating that they're bored. So if their parents don't want them going home or all their friends are downtown, it makes sense to hang out there with their friends.

But the thing is, though, when people get together in groups, naturally there are going to be arguments and fighting. And I guess in a large crowd it's easier to be anonymous and get away with things, too.

One of the things that puzzled me as I was reading the news articles was that there didn't seem to be any serious discussion about changing the busing arrangements. Instead, they were saying that the area needs to have more entertainment options for kids or after-school programs.

Would having more entertainment options or after-school programs be a viable option to allay what we're seeing downtown?

The whole problem seems to be that you have a large group of kids assembling. What you want is to break them up. You want the people there to be of a manageable size, so if the kids are committing crime, available security can deal with it effectively.

In that respect, the after-school programs might be a benefit. Although I will say that kids who are delinquent, if they're in these after-care programs, they still offend, but not nearly as much as they would if they were completely unsupervised.

It may be a better solution to have multiples of these after-school programs emphasizing sports and entertainment, opportunities for kids to hang out in a smaller group of people. Staff would have an easier time controlling and supervising those, as opposed to one huge center where you might have hundreds of people there, where kids might take over the place.

It's really important that you have good, committed staff running the place. The better after-school programs are extremely selective in terms of staff. There seems to be less disorder associated with staff who are trained, qualified, credentialed, versus those places that were less selective in the people they hired.

Otherwise it's very easy for the place to fall into disorder and become a place of concentrated crime.

People are worried that once a downtown transit center is built, the fights will move from Main Street to indoors, since that's where the new transfer point will be. Security: what kind, how much, and who pays for it has been a major issue.

One of the things that makes it difficult to come up with an easy solution is that when you have visible security around, it has a way of driving people away. For instance, I try to fly as rarely as possible because it's just too much of a pain in the neck to go through all the layers of security in an airport.

Think about this: all the police officers who are descending on the downtown area, there are some people who are going to say that's a good thing. But the fact that the police have to go down there is going to alarm other people, potential customers and discourage them from coming downtown. They'll take their money elsewhere.

Presumably they expect the transit center to be used by people going about their legitimate business. If they have all this security, particularly if it's in-your-face type security, people may decide it's in their interest to use other arrangements. Then the whole thing is wasted, right?

But on the other hand, you can't have the kids taking over the place, either.

I was struck that, in one of the news articles on the downtown fights, a mother said she's aware her daughter is down there causing a disruption, but that the daughter has her own mind and is going to do what she wants to do. It seems so passive.

The mother recognizes the deviance, but she does not want to punish it. She understands that it's wrong, but she feels powerless to do anything about it.

Based on the research I've read, families seem to be pretty central to this. Families that produce kids who habitually consider long-term consequences, crime to that person is always disadvantageous. When the kid engages in this conduct, the parents discipline the kid.

Even when deviance occurs, though, parents might not recognize it as such. Part of it is human nature, I guess. There's a natural tendency: "This is my kid. I raised my kid right." Even when it's reported to you that your kid might be doing these things, there's a resistance to it.

So the kid is not trained in thinking about long-term consequences and so goes on as an adult to behave that way.

Then there's always the issue of disciplining. What happens when you try to discipline your kid? Does she meekly accept it? There's resistance, and it's difficult for many parents because it takes effort to discipline consistently.

And based on the literature, you have to do it consistently in order to raise a well-socialized kid.

That's not to say that the kids going downtown are poorly socialized. It's only a small fraction causing the disruptions. Most of the kids are just hanging out. It may be an annoyance to people who don't want to see teenagers idling around.

Who does more damage then, social conservatives who would likely say that these kids are no good and need a firm hand, or the liberals who might say that any attempt to make parents and the kids themselves take responsibility is "blaming the victim?"

Both political philosophies miss the mark in some respects, because both emphasize the role of the state as being the way to deal with the crime problem.

Even though social conservatives are all about small government, really what they mean is small government when it comes to welfare, health care.... But they want big government when it comes to crime, defense, and that sort of thing.

The social conservative's philosophy is: "They have problems of moral character so therefore we need to put them in prison," which is expensive, and ineffective.

Liberals tend to say that society needs to correct the problems that individual families create. But in the act of trying to help, considerable pain and anguish and worse consequences can sometimes follow. After all, the parents don't see themselves as having failed, so you have to force help on them.

Two hundred years ago, just the thought that government could tell families how they should socialize their kids was inconceivable. Government just didn't have that right.

The conservative agenda comes across as inhuman, at least to liberals, because the idea of warehousing people and giving up on them just seems wrong. But when you look at the liberal side, it's very easy if these social policies aren't implemented very carefully for things to go wrong.

When you talk about the difference between the perception and reality of violence, does the same thing apply to civility? Most people would probably say that Americans are coarser and much quicker to lash out today than they ever were.

I don't think there's any data, like crime data, on civility. All we have is anecdotal. And so invariably what happens is people say that people in the past respected their elders; the worst thing they did was chew gum: "People back in my day were nothing like the kids today." There's a natural tendency to assume that people in the past were better in terms of manners than people today.

History is one of my hobbies, and I read what people wrote in the past, not necessarily the filtered stuff: diaries, police reports. One thing that's very clear is that people in the past were every bit as foul mouthed, rude, and inconsiderate as people today.

You realize it was a very complex time; things were not simpler. Life was a lot harder, if anything.

Philadelphia has been dealing with something similar to Rochester's situation downtown, albeit on a larger scale. A theory there goes that since many of the youth participating in these so-called "flash mobs" are from minority groups that these activities must be empowering. They feel oppressed, so they lash out.

Against their own people? If there's a notion of oppression, it would make sense for you to go after your oppressors, right? You riot against the police, for example.

Nobody wants crime. They don't want to live in an area that's decaying, full of violence. The question is, why does crime persist in these areas, and at such a high level?

The answer is the ability to work collectively to reduce crime. Why don't they? The reason is the residents in these areas calculate that it's not in their interests to work collectively, for several reasons.

One is poverty. If you are taking hours out of your day to clean up trash on the side of the road, for example, that's less time that you have to earn money to pay the rent, put food on the table.

Another thing is residential instability. You'll find in the Crescent that people move around, and it's hard to keep track of them all. Somebody moves into the apartment next to yours and you know they're going to move away in five weeks, are you going to get to know them? Do anything for them?

Then of course there's what they call racial-ethnic heterogeneity, where cultural and racial differences between residents act as barriers. They isolate themselves. Blacks only interact with blacks, Hispanics only interact with Hispanics....

Politicians respond not so much to individual voters but when they're compelled to by blocs of voters. So if a community's unable to organize, then they're not going to be able to persuade city officials to provide resources to them.