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Supt. in Chief, Ret. Robert Faherty Boston Police Department   Well, at our first roll call as the new Gang Unit, I said, "If we can save one life, we've done our job." I've seen too many kids out in the street dead. We've had officers that tell you, you look into a kid's eye and you see him die right in front of you, you see the fog go and you know what that's going to do to a parent, their friends and relatives. The first thing we had to get was intelligence, to get information about different gangs. So we started off with basically a new concept, 'how were we going to fight this?' Intelligence was our biggest thing, to know who the players were, who the gang members were, and who they were affiliated with. So at roll call every night, each officer had to speak about what he had learned the night before. And we'd go around the room, to each officer, and they explain to the others what they had learned: who might be carrying a gun, who was dangerous, what gang was after another gang, and things to look for–and we incorporated that into our computer. We reached out to everyone. We reached out to the state, we reached out to our federal partners, city workers, the ministers, the business community–anyone that could help us because we needed help. It wasn't something that the Boston Police alone could do. You have to try things. We reached out to everyone and anyone. All these people had something to give and to help us with. There's one thing I learned in 40 years, that you can't do it alone, you need help. The community is a great source of information–they're the people that are caught in the middle of all this, between the police and the gangbangers. And we reached out to them through community meetings, to find out how they could help us, and how we could help them. We started off with a couple of Crimewatch groups, and today we have over a thousand of them throughout the city of Boston. Something else we never did before was going to the business community and to the schools and saying, "Can you help us with some of these kids that we can save, who are on the fringe, who could go either way?" Because in the gangs, there's a lot of hanger-ons, or wannabes that are not hard-core, and they just go with the flow of the gang. But given a chance, they'll go back to school, or they'll get a job.
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Supt. in Chief, Ret. Faherty