An earlier version of this story was originally published by the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University.
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PABLO URIBE MPA 2022 thought he was finished with fighting crime. That had been his job as the deputy security director of his hometown of Cali, Colombia. He’d had success with reducing the murder rate there but was feeling burned out by the work. So when he left to get a master’s at Harvard Kennedy School, he was ready to find a new purpose in public service.
That plan took a turn as he approached graduation. Uribe landed a Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellowship, which placed him in Syracuse, New York, for two years to work on one of Mayor Ben Walsh’s top priorities. The priority, it turned out, was reducing gun violence.
Despite some early misgivings, Uribe now calls his fellowship “the best job of my life.” As a fellow, Uribe not only got to use the leadership and innovation skills he’d learned at Harvard; he also joined a cohort of like-minded young leaders who convened regularly for workshops with Harvard faculty and staffers to learn from one another’s experiences working in city halls across the United States. Uribe likens the expertise-deepening aspects of his fellowship journey to a medical residency for public management. “Two years of applying these things you learn from your master’s degree and the convenings makes you a better public manager,” he says.
In Syracuse, Uribe started working with Lateef Johnson-Kinsey, a pastor and school administrator who just months earlier had been named the first director of Mayor Walsh’s new Office to Reduce Gun Violence. Uribe embraced the challenge of working in a city where homicides had been trending upward for a decade. He started out by gaining a deep understanding of the problem by speaking with police officers, government officials, and community leaders; scouring public safety data; and reading every report on crime in the area.
As a newcomer to Syracuse, Uribe brought a fresh perspective. He wrote up his observations in a 65-page assessment, which the city published in December of 2022. The paper reverberated across the city and cleared the way to try new things. One of Uribe’s key findings was that the Syracuse Police Department had settled into a reactive pattern of responding to violent crime after it happened; it needed to shift to a more proactive stance. Rather than tell the police how to do that, Uribe held a series of workshops with patrol officers, lieutenants, and captains from across the department—using a problem-solving framework he had learned at the Kennedy School—to get their ideas. They then put together three-month implementation plans around the most promising solutions.
One focus area: Police officers were spending five times as many working hours handling domestic disputes as gun-violence cases. It’s not that those domestic calls weren’t important, Uribe says, but they typically could not advance the city’s goal of reducing gun violence. Syracuse changed its response protocol to send social workers rather than police officers to many of those cases. “That liberated a whole lot of time for those patrols to go to crime hot spots in the city and monitor those places,” Uribe says.
The police also asked for more data to do their jobs better. They came up with the idea of supporting teams on patrol with data analysts back at headquarters. Those analysts continually push intelligence out into the field, giving patrol teams everything from information on recent crimes where they are working to real-time updates from closed-circuit TV cameras. “They’re constantly being fed data so that they can take proactive actions,” Uribe says.
These and other changes had a profound and immediate impact. By the time Uribe’s fellowship ended, the number of shootings causing injury or death in Syracuse had dropped by 56%. “We reversed a decade of growth in gun violence in just two years,” Uribe says. “The fact that I left and the city continues to deliver results on gun-violence reduction—that is the best thing.”
Reflecting on his time in Syracuse, Uribe says he learned a lot about leadership and how city halls can be places for public leaders to catalyze real change that saves lives. “I didn’t invent anything with the police—it was all their ideas,” he says. “I built a holding environment in which they could face the problem and come up with solutions. That is something I learned at the Kennedy School: When you are addressing a thorny public problem, the only way you can solve it is to give the work back to the people who are part of it.”
“It’s a redemption story, because I didn’t want to go back into public safety,” Uribe says. “I thought I didn’t have it in me anymore.” But in fact, following his fellowship, Uribe returned to Colombia when the governor of Valle del Cauca, the state where Cali is located, hired him as deputy secretary for public safety management. The area, a hub for narco-trafficking and home to many criminal groups, had seen a spike in violence. There, too, Uribe’s work had an immediate impact, helping to slow and stabilize the murder rate. His data-focused approach is now being given wider rein: The governor has invited Uribe to advise her on a broader number of issues.
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Photographs courtesy of Pablo Uribe