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Changing Perceptions Key changes came in two stages. First, adults working with the gang population began getting out into the streets, interacting directly with young people, and getting to know them better. In taking this approach, three core institutional players—police, probation, and black clergy—were all moving in the same direction. But they were still not collaborating. It was a time when they "were working as hard as they could but not getting anywhere," recalled Boston Police Director of Strategic Planning, Jim Jordan. The second stage of change came with some significant shifts in perception, through which people working on the front lines began to see how they could do their jobs better, in large part by joining forces. Out in the Streets Kimberly Harbour’s murder galvanized the Dorchester probation office to begin doing some things differently, and the Youthful Offender Unit (YO Group) came into being as a result. This consisted of three probation officers who focused exclusively on 17- to 24-year-olds, the age group most active in gang violence. They started by working with the court to stiffen the terms of probation, for example, by instituting a curfew and rules against congregating in groups larger than two or in areas identified as their gang’s turf. In addition, the YO Group began collecting information on gangs and their activities more systematically. Those were significant changes but not enough by themselves to have a large impact. That required enforcement of the new terms of probation, and enforcement was the role of the police, not probation officers. Said Billy Stewart, one of the officers in the YO Group, "We expected the police to supervise our terms. But the two agencies did not talk or share information so it just wasn’t going to happen." The probation officers remained frustrated. The police officers in the gang unit were in a similar situation. One unit member, John Daly, had begun to computerize information that police gathered from the street and to track gangs more systematically, for example creating lists of gang members, their associates, where they hung out, the cars they drove. They began to add notes from field interrogations, and they began to integrate information from intelligence reports on different areas of the city. Fred Waggett and a few others who joined the unit were good at getting out and talking to kids, and that contributed to the growing base of knowledge. "We progressed slowly," said Paul Joyce, "but we were progressing." Also getting out on the streets at that time was a new, small organization of social workers dedicated specifically to working with gangs—the Boston Streetworkers. Chartered by Mayor Ray Flynn in late 1990, the Streetworkers were young, mostly men, who worked out of Boston’s Community Centers to provide outreach services to gang members. Initially, the co-creators of the organization, Robert Lewis, Jr., and Charlie Rose, recruited young people not too far removed from gang life themselves, who often lived in the neighborhoods where they worked. The Streetworker’s job was to build relationships with at-risk kids, serve as mentors, connect them and their families to social services, and when possible defuse potentially violent situations. In many cases, they went with young offenders to court and argued on their behalf. Because of those relationships, and because they tended to look and talk like the kids they worked with, the Streetworkers were initially distrusted by, and distrustful of, the police and probation, even though they were all working with the same population of kids. At the same time, the black clergy was also becoming a presence on the streets. Like Eugene Rivers, Bruce Wall, pastor of the Dorchester Temple Baptist Church, acted as an advocate for gang-involved youth in the courts. A program he organized at the Chez Vous skating rink in Dorchester had become a gathering place where young people could relax and feel safe. In the summer of 1991, Wall and Rivers launched the Take Back the Street Crusade, a week-long initiative to reclaim a vacant lot that had been taken over by gangs and made into "a sort of open-end drug supermarket." The program got the clergy out on the corner at night and ultimately talking directly with gang members. "That was eye-opening," recalled Ray Hammond. "It became clear that you can be doing lots of good things, even lots of service involvement, and still not have a clue as to really what’s going on in the lives of the kids you’re passing every day." Hammond became part of a small group that coalesced around Wall and Rivers and began to work on getting to know more about gang members and the street environment. The ministers began to believe that, if they really wanted to address the problem of gang violence, they would have to keep their churches open and be out in the streets when young people were—at night. Only then could they begin to compete with the drug dealers and gangs for kids’ loyalty. Those realizations became the basis of a new ministry of outreach. Thus—separately—police, probation, Streetworkers, and clergy all began getting more directly involved with the young men who were active in gangs and the most prone to be involved in gun violence. "The more we worked with the kids," said Billy Stewart, "the more human they and we became. They were not just a file, because the file now had a soul." [1] At the same time, they began to identify the others who were getting involved in the same way. Streetworker Tracy Litthcut recalled, "There was always a consistent group of faces that were at the homicide scenes and a consistent group of faces who were working with the toughest of the tough gang members in the city—myself, Reverend Rivers, Reverend Hammond, Reverend Wall, and the guys from the police gang unit, Paul Joyce, Momentous Events Over the course of 1992, a number of forces and events came together to change the way key players viewed each other and their shared predicament. One event of tremendous long-term significance was the publication in January of the St. Clair Commission Report. Mayor Ray Flynn had created the eight-member Commission, led by Boston attorney James D. St. Clair, in 1991 amidst complaints of police brutality and mismanagement. Its charge was to undertake a "comprehensive management audit" of the BPD, and its report was scathing, in particular its criticism of the department’s failure to implement community policing. The report added to the sense of crisis around the continuing high rate of youth homicides and to the desire, both inside and outside the BPD, to improve relationships between the police and the community. Bill Bratton, who came to the BPD as superintendent-in-chief in 1992 and became commissioner in 1993, and Paul Evans, his next-in-command, took the St. Clair report as a mandate to make community policing a reality. Organizationally, that meant significant change throughout the police department. This began with the promotion of a large contingent of new captains, who received intensive training aimed at helping them begin to see themselves, not as police officers in the traditional mold, but as executives and leaders of change. In a major departure for the BPD, Bratton went outside the Police Academy for this training, to the Boston Management Consortium, a non-profit agency funded by local businesses that brokered largely pro-bono services of business people and consultants, to provide management expertise and training to city government agencies. It was the beginning of a long-term partnership between the BPD and the Consortium in a sustained program of organizational development and change. Those ongoing changes—which made the BPD less tradition bound and less rigidly hierarchical within, and more open to collaboration without—were an essential part of the context within which the Boston Strategy emerged. Another momentous event, in May 1992, brought about a significant shift in attitude within Boston’s religious community. In Morningstar Baptist Church, at the funeral of a young man shot in the head at a party, some gang members in attendance spotted a member of a rival gang. Enraged by his presence, they chased him around the church, shot at him, caught him, and stabbed him repeatedly, while the congregation of mourners stampeded for the door in fear. The Morningstar incident drove home the idea that had been forming in the small group around Eugene Rivers, that the church needed to take its message to the street—or else the street would bring its message into the church. In the aftermath, approached by a small group of Streetworkers and gang members, a few ministers met directly with the young men responsible and began to talk about the feelings of remorse, grief, guilt, anger, and fear connected with Morningstar and all the violence. "The scriptures say that if somebody offends you, you have to go to them," said Ray Hammond. "This made it clear to us that we really have to live out our own gospel—not just preach it, not just say it, not even memorize it, but really live it out." Morningstar gave the impetus to the formation of the TenPoint Coalition, an alliance of African-American Christian clergy and lay people that coalesced around a ten-point plan developed by Rivers. The plan suggested ten concrete steps for churches to take to mobilize resources and reach out to young people most at risk for drug abuse and violence, for example, by adopting a gang, by working to develop economic alternatives to drug dealing, by sending mediators into situations of potential conflict, by developing partnerships with other institutions offering services to at-risk youth. It also galvanized a small group of ministers to begin meeting at Rivers' home on Friday nights and walking the streets of the Four Corners neighborhood, to meet gang members on their own turf, and to provide counseling, mediation, connections to social services, and simply an adult presence on the streets. This became a regular street ministry that ultimately involved over 30 ministers and lay people, working in Dorchester and—through Jeff Brown, minister of the Union Baptist Church—in Cambridge. Participants met Fridays, and some other nights, for prayer and work on the streets until 2:00 AM. During the day they met with police and probation officers, Streetworkers, judges, and each other. Many of them also maintained one-on-one relationships with one or more at-risk kids in their neighborhoods. Amid the shocked reaction to the Morningstar attack, the broader religious community also began to focus more on the problem of gang violence in Boston and to take note of the efforts of TenPoint clergy to address it. Most notably, Cardinal Bernard Law became a vocal supporter and convened a series of meetings to discuss the TenPoint Coalition’s plan of action. "[He] played a decisive role, given his spiritual and cultural influence over an overwhelmingly Irish Catholic police department," said Rivers, "and he was a major source of institutional support for the black clergy." As they began to receive more recognition and support, the ministers of the TenPoint Coalition also began to realize how much they needed to look outside of their circle for resources. They started to think about forming partnerships with others working on the violence problem—not just the Streetworkers, but schools, probation, and even the police. "One of the things we began to appreciate," recalled Hammond, "was that we make a mistake in thinking of institutions as monoliths. So, we talk about The Police Department, when there are a lot of different elements in the police department. Part of the question became, ‘How do you begin to identify people who really want to do community policing and work with them and try to strengthen their hand in the department?’ We wanted to make sure kids understood, and we wanted to make sure the police understood, that we would not be silent about brutality or abuse of police power, but that we also understood that a lot of them were trying to do a hard job and many of them were doing it well." Origins of Operation Night Light In fact, for the police and probation officers dealing with gang-involved youth, the continued high homicide rate made it hard to feel they were doing the job as well as it could be done, and they were struggling to do it better. Said Paul Joyce, of the gang unit: "We were locking up the worst of the bad guys, and things weren’t getting any better. So we would literally sit down and say ‘What can we do different?’" In 1992, unit As a result, said Robert Merner, he and his partner, Bob Frattalia, began paying a lot more attention to what they could learn from non-police sources, especially probation officers, whom they were seeing every day in court dealing with the same kids. For example, one probation officer, Tom Todd, was keeping track of who bailed whom out. "Now that is not information that police are usually interested in," said Merner. "But when you're looking at gangs and associations that stuff becomes very, very interesting. So, Bobby and I would be up at court, and instead of sitting around for our cases to be called, we would be meeting with the probation officers, and we would be taking notes." The information they gained, they took back to the police gang meetings. At the same time, Bill Stewart and Rich Skinner in the Dorchester probation YO group were also looking for ways to do their job better. Not long before the Morningstar church incident, Stewart recalled, he attended the funeral of one of his probation cases, a 17-year-old boy called Peanut who had been shot to death at a bus stop near the courthouse at 3:00 in the afternoon. "As I went through the line at the funeral," said Stewart, "I offered my condolences to his mother and she slapped me and said, ‘You let them kill my baby.’ I’m thinking, ‘No I didn’t, I tried everything I could do, I told him not to be there, I told him not to get in the mix.’ Obviously it didn’t work. But then I thought, ‘Maybe I didn’t do all I could do. Maybe we could do more. Maybe we could step up to the plate a little bit more.’" That line of thought led him to research the law on the powers of probation officers. He found that, in fact, they had more power than police officers in dealing with an individual on probation. In particular they could search or arrest that person without a warrant, based on reasonable suspicion that he was violating the terms of probation. "Bottom line is that when one is sentenced to probation" said Stewart, "he chooses to do his time in the community with limited freedom under the supervision of a probation officer, and the PO has certain rights to ensure full compliance with the terms of probation." With that information, Stewart and Skinner became more aggressive in dealing with their clients. For example, they educated themselves to the signs of alcohol and drug abuse and used the threat of going back to jail to push kids to fight their addictions. [1] Police officers in the gang unit began to hear that kids on the street took the YO group, and their threats, seriously. At the same time, the information that Merner and Frattalia brought into the gang meetings from probation was clearly valuable. There was still no thought of working together, however. Said Stewart, "Probation officers were seen by police as fuzzy-wuzzy social worker types. We were just 8:30 to 4:30 desk guys." That all changed abruptly in the fall of 1992, when at Faherty’s invitation Stewart, Skinner, Todd, and Fitzgerald from the Dorchester court all began attending the bi-weekly gang meetings. That was the beginning of a more active collaboration. "At one of the meetings," recalled Stewart, "an officer related how a group of kids, known to be on probation, were seen out and in a place that they were not supposed to be after curfew. I advised the group that if a probation officer had been there, the kids could have been put under arrest for violation of probation. This was a startling bit of information for the group to digest."[1] After that meeting, Stewart, Skinner, Frattalia, and Merner decided to try riding together at night and working together to enforce the terms of probation. Faherty and Fitzgerald supported the experiment, and Operation Night Light was born. The first joint police and probation curfew patrol took place on November 12, 1992. Since there were no precedents to follow, the four officers involved agreed to make up procedure as they went along. There were just a few basic rules. When they went into kids’ homes, the role of the police would be strictly to ensure the safety of the probation officers. "We were very careful to avoid being seen as pawns of the police," noted Billy Stewart. "That was one of the earliest and loudest criticisms of the program." At the same time, the probation officers agreed to train in how to avoid situations that jeopardized the team’s safety; and they all agreed to act like visitors and treat people respectfully, "as we would expect someone to act in our own homes." [1] Within just a few minutes of starting out that first night, they were called to a shooting scene, where one of Rich Skinner’s "clients," Augusto ("Tito") Blanco, lay with a fatal gunshot wound. While Skinner comforted Tito as best he could, Stewart walked through the crowd at the scene and bumped into six kids on probation who were not supposed to be there. Altogether that night they caught thirty young people in violation of their curfews. Probation was not playing by the old rules, under which probation officers had remained behind their desks and left the responsibility for enforcement to the police. The kids were outraged, noted Stewart. "To me," he said, "that was the endorsement the program needed." [1] Night Light began to take effect immediately—they never found as many kids out in the streets at night again. And it began to build trust between police and probation. With information gathered by Skinner and Stewart, the police were able to solve Tito’s murder quickly. "From that moment, I think the police saw the value to partnering with the probation officers," said Bernie Fitzgerald. Robert Merner noted another insight gained from Night Light: "We’d make a list of some of the worst kids and some of maybe the second tier kids who were on probation," recalled Merner. "And I'd be saying to the probation officers, ‘Be careful. This guy’s a shooter. He’s a bad guy.’ But when we walked into the house, we’d see a 17- or 18- or maybe even a 16-year-old kid putting food on the table for his siblings. Who was maybe the head of the household outside of maybe a maternal grandmother, or his mother, who’s working one or two jobs. He’s dressing kids for school. He’s putting food on the table. He’s doing any number of things. And then he’s going out on the corner at night selling crack and protecting his drug business with a hand gun. But this was not a side of him that I ever saw." For the police to begin to see gang members as struggling kids, not just criminals, was a critical shift, without which the Boston Strategy could not have evolved as it did.
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© Copyright Robert Wood Johnson 2001. All Rights Reserved. |
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