With 62 homicide victims aged 24 or younger, Boston in 1990 was awash in a rising tide of youth violence, part of a nationwide surge that began in the 1980s with the arrival on the streets of crack cocaine. In the largely poor, largely African-American and Latino neighborhoods of Roxbury, Mattapan, and Dorchester, where most of the victims and their killers lived, the young men active in gangs were locked in a pattern of violence and fatalism. No one expected to live to see his 30th birthday. The adults who dealt with gang-involved youth—no less than the communities in which they lived and died—felt equally hopeless about the possibility for change.


Gangs, Police, and the Community

With the appearance of crack cocaine in the late 1980s came an upsurge of gang activity and violence in Boston and in cities across the United States. As described by gang members themselves, the seduction of drug dealing was strong—there was so much money to be made. As young boys looking for ways to take care of themselves and their families, they had found most promising role models were gang members. "The guys that helped me out through the tough times were bad," said Hector, "[but] they were bad to a lot of other people, not to me." Kids started out on a small scale, perhaps selling marijuana, then graduated to more profitable products, often becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol in the process. When they started to earn more money, they began to worry about protecting themselves and their businesses. Gangs hung together in defense against other gangs. Guns were readily available, and every killing provoked at least one in retaliation. Once a young man entered that world—"the lion’s territory," Hector called it—it was hard to see a way out. "I saw no other alternative," recalled Dexter. "The money was there. There was no hope anywhere else. That was my way of life. Shoot-outs every day, waking up, going around the block, hustling. It was almost mechanical."

Gangs made their neighborhoods into a war zone, where people stayed inside after dark, boarded up their windows, and put their children to bed in bathtubs to protect them against stray bullets. In late 1989, the Carol Stuart murder case divided the city along racial lines and fueled concern across-the-board about escalating violence. Accepting uncritically the story told by Stuart’s husband of an attack by a black man in the Mission Hill section of Roxbury, the Boston Police Department (BPD) instituted a search-on-sight policy for all young men suspected of gang involvement. For a brief time the number of guns on the streets declined, and the community initially supported the policy. But, said one Boston policeman, Mark Buchanan, "when [parents] realized that their son was going to go down the street to get a loaf of bread or a container of milk and run the risk of being stopped in the street and having his pants and his underwear dropped in a search for weapons, then the community was up in arms." A Superior Court judge threw out a case of a gang member arrested in a search-on-sight action. Boston needed tough law enforcement but could not obtain it by violating individual civil rights.


Frustration and Blame

In the spring of 1990, the BPD formed the Anti-Gang Violence Unit (called the gang unit) with a charge to use community policing approaches, to develop intelligence about gangs, and to focus on intervention and deterrence. Unit chief Bob Faherty assigned two officers to each gang—to get to know the members and monitor their activities. The approach "was meant to look quite different," noted gang-unit member Paul Joyce, "but we were not doing much different. We were still focused on making arrests." The idea was to move beyond just responding to 911 calls. But, with shootings taking place virtually on a weekly basis, there was little more to do than respond. Said Buchanan, who became part of the new unit, "When the stop-and-search policy failed, we were kind of hopeless. We really didn’t know, as a police department, how to deal with the rash of violence that we saw."

Likewise, the probation officers who dealt with many of the gang members were reduced to a depressing routine of exhorting the young offenders whom they met with every week to "be careful," "do the right thing," and "keep out of trouble"—then attending the funerals of those who failed to follow that advice. As gangs brazenly made a show of force in the courtrooms and shot each other on the streets just outside, probation officers felt besieged. "I watched a gun fight at 8:15 in the morning outside my office window," recalled Dorchester chief probation officer Bernie Fitzgerald. "Two kids on the way to school on opposite sides of Washington Street firing at one another. Another time one of the probation officers jumped on to a bus that had stopped out front. There was a fight on the bus and when he got in there a kid had had his femoral artery slashed and had bled out and died in the bus at 3:00 in the afternoon." In that environment, most probation officers naturally wanted to meet kids in the relative safety of the courtroom or their offices, go home at 4:30 when the court closed, and try to forget about it. It was "fortress probation," said Fitzgerald.

The brutal gang rape and murder of Kimberly Ray Harbour, a crack addict and prostitute, on Halloween 1990, brought home just how ineffectual the existing programs to combat youth violence really were. "That was the murder that shook the city," said Dorchester probation officer Bill Stewart, "because of the [young] age of the defendants and what they had done to a fellow human being." Three of them had been probationers under his supervision and had had no prior record of violence—they simply had not been able to resist the pressure to go along with the gang. "Clearly," said Stewart, "the neighborhood was spinning out of control. The ‘gangs’ we had only begun to acknowledge had rooted on the streets and they controlled them. It was apparent that what we were doing with the offenders we were supervising was not working. They were not buying what we were trying to sell them." [1]

As frustrated as the police and probation officers were, the community was equally frustrated and angry with them. In the crisis, recalled Ray Hammond, pastor of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Mattapan, the sense of helplessness people felt was reinforced by a pattern of blame—"a willingness to blame somebody, anybody, for this mess." Community leaders, noted Hammond, tended to explain the epidemic of violence on larger social problems: the poverty of the neighborhoods; the lack of jobs available to young people, made worse by economic recession; national trends of expanding gang activity and rising crime rates; the invasion of crack cocaine. They blamed political leaders for failing to address those problems as well as the police for their heavy-handed and ineffectual efforts to stop the killing. Eugene Rivers, who lived and worked in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Dorchester, as founder and pastor of the Azusa Christian Community, concurred: "The black community [in those days], without much thought, deployed the race card to address any number of social problems. Everything was racism, and if you were smarter, it was racism and capitalism."

On the other side, the police blamed the gang-involved youth, whom they viewed as criminals. And they often blamed youth advocates like Rivers for protecting gang members indiscriminately. The kids also found something to blame: "the system," which provided no meaningful adult supervision or support. Nothing would change until that pattern of blame was broken and people began to look at their own roles and each other in new ways.

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