The Boston Strategy > Players > Police

	Mayor
	Police Commissioner Paul Evans Supt. in Chief, Ret. Faherty Supt. Paul Joyce Lt. Det. Gary French Sgt. Robert Merner Det. Tito Whittington Ptl. Mark Buchanan Ptl. Greg Brown
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Supt. Paul Joyce
Boston Police Department

Everybody began to focus on preventing the next bad thing from happening. That made all these unlikely partnerships come together.

We charted it out and we looked at the problem. We developed a thoughtful plan and then we went at it. The idea was that we would talk to kids, and to their parents. We would give them a clear warning: the offending stops or the consequences will be swift.

It was about 1988 when we saw the arrival of crack cocaine and organized street gangs in the City of Boston. Police - community relations were extremely poor. We didn't have a grip on the problem, we didn't understand the larger picture of what we were dealing with, or know how to handle it. We didn't work with other agencies. And still the concept was to go out and make arrests and that way you would fix the problem. And looking back on it, that was part of the puzzle. But it wasn't solving the problem. We were making hundreds of arrests, but they didn't really matter.

By far the most important factor in the change to a new style of business was the people who were involved. Their commitment was key; how they began to compare notes and see the problem in more dimensions; how they worked with others. Traditionally, the multi-agency approach didn't work that well, because there were always turf issues. But in this case we were able to get people who were really on the same page from the start. I cannot emphasize enough that it was working because of the people who were involved. The best group of people that I've ever been associated with. And there weren't that many of us. There were probably about 15. You do not need an army. You need commitment to a common cause.

We were being fair. That was the approach we took. On one occasion a kid knocked at the front door of the police station and handed a bag over to one of the people who answered the door. That bag contained a number of guns. It was unheard of. There were no bodies on the guns and the kid walked home because that's what we told him would happen if he turned those guns in.

Operation Night Light started with very small numbers and then snowballed. And that's the way it should start. One police officer, one probation officer. If it's a good relationship they'll take that back to other police officers and to other probation officers and the idea gains respect and credibility. That's why when we got Night Light really organized, we'd go out five nights a week with five different courts. And that evolved from two police officers and two probation officers. So you have to take your time at the beginning. If you don't prep for those types of things, if you don't take your time and really think them out, then you're probably going to fail.

We started to computerize some of the information that we were receiving from the street, and started to track the gangs systematically. Our people created lists of gang members and their associates. We tracked everything from where they hung out to the motor vehicles they drove. We captured information from field interrogation reports to display the associations among the various groups and individuals. We added all the intelligence reports from the impacted areas to monitor what was going on and to mount targeted interventions. The development of that data base, and the use of the information to develop effective interventions, was a major step. So we progressed slowly but we were progressing, and learning new lessons at each step.

The next step was to develop a very focused approach to dealing with gang violence. I picked the brains of some of the people that I had been with over the years to see what they thought. We wanted to use their knowledge and expertise to develop strategies that would make us effective. I had tremendous talent to work with. We had recruited some of the best from different agencies: state police, ATF, Boston housing police, Brookline police, MBTA, parole, probation and the Department of Youth Services. You just wanted people who approached a situation in a fair manner, had good people skills, were aggressive and were looking to do the right thing out there. And we were very lucky to get almost all of those kinds of people as representative agencies.

We sat down with everybody from the head of DYS to the area supervisor to the workers. We told them what we could offer them. And we got their support. That's how we approached every agency that we worked with. We wanted to meet with everybody within that agency. We emphasized the commonality of our goals. We would tell them, 'We want to work on your behalf. You have 20 kids who you want arrested out of Dorchester Court for violent crimes. We'll go after those kids. All we ask is this: are these the impact kids out on the street? If we take them off will we be making a difference?' We talked to Brookline police whether they had warrants in the city. We made the same offer to the state police. Are you looking for people and how can we help you apprehend them? We did special outreach to representatives of the Boston public housing administration, because they were impacted so heavily by the violence. We simply asked them to bring their work, and their good ideas, to the table. So that was how we started. And we became pretty good at it. We cleared something on the order of 1,500 to 1,800 warrants in our first year.

If I went to any number of probation officers out there who we built up a relationship with, I could tell them, 'If this kid hangs on this corner there's a good chance he's going to get killed or he's going to kill someone.' And I didn't do it because I liked somebody or I didn't like somebody. I could provide the documentation to back it up. And they could put an area restriction on him, saying he couldn't hang there, or a curfew where they could check on him. That has an immediate impact on a kid.