The Boston Strategy > Story

	Preface
	Introduction
	The Situation in 1990
	Changing Perceptions
	Alliances
	Actions
	Impact
	Boston Strategy
	Timeline
	References
	Interview List

Actions

Building on the alliances formed in 1992 among police, probation, Streetworkers, and clergy, the people working on the front lines to stop the killing in Boston’s neighborhoods developed an approach based on four principles: 1) identify the incorrigibly violent youth and deal with them; 2) enforce the law; 3) offer alternatives and opportunities; 4) follow through on both threats and promises. By the end of 1994, the alliances had expanded to embrace important new players, and the players had begun to enact their principles in an array of initiatives.

Crackdowns

In 1994, the YVSF raised its approach to violence prevention to a new level with targeted crackdowns on problem groups, aimed specifically at getting them to change their behavior. This idea built on the unit’s initial focus on prosecuting outstanding warrants. John Melia, the Boston Housing Police officer attached to the YVSF wanted the unit to help him deal with a serious problem of gang members coming into the Mission Hill housing project to deal and do drugs, terrorizing the residents and making it one of the most violent neighborhoods. After six weeks of careful preparation, including full consultation with Mission Hill management, the unit began issuing warrants for trespassing. Since trespassing is a relatively minor charge, said Paul Joyce, "the reply would usually be to tear it up and throw it away or put it in a pocket." But, in September just as school opened, the YVSF led a warrant sweep: over 120 officers representing twelve different agencies spent three days in Mission Hill making 135 arrests for trespassing, helping to clean up some of the damage in the neighborhood, and escorting children to school.

The Mission Hill warrant sweep was a major milestone for the YVSF. It was an aggressive police action in the neighborhood most alienated by the BPD’s handling of the Carol Stuart murder case in 1989. Yet it produced not a single citizen complaint against the police. This outcome was attributable in large part to the preparation that went into the sweep, including extensive consultation with the management of the Mission Hill project. The warrant sweep also had the community’s support because it rid the neighborhood of a criminal element that had created a miserable situation for residents, epitomized by a young mother who carried a can of ammonia spray just to walk her children outside in the morning past the junkies lying in her hallway. After the initial sweep, the YVSF did six weeks of follow-up checks for trespassers, since repeat violations could bring a couple of years of jail time.

Subsequently, the YVSF conducted similar warrant sweeps in numerous other housing developments, and they became known collectively as Operation Clean Sweep. Even though trespassing was a minor charge for serious offenders, it worked to move them out of the neighborhoods. The collaboration among law enforcement agencies was also a key factor. "I think the message that got out was we were really exposing people," said the YVSF’s Paul Joyce. "Because to see Richie Skinner and Bobby Merner, a kid would look [and] he’d think twice. He’d say ‘Okay, I’m on probation with Skinner, Merner knows me from the street, I don’t like this.’ Because now we were starting to get to know everything about them. Throw in all of the other agencies—and they’d see ten different agencies coming on a sweep—they’re feeling kind of suffocated. There’s really nowhere to go."

A second initiative, Operation Scrap Iron, originated in a focus on the supply and use of guns in the Uphams Corner neighborhood of Dorchester. Four police officers in the YVSF—Joyce, Merner, Frattalia, and Waggett—began to pay close attention to a sharp rise in shooting incidents in this usually quiet section of the city. Through a tip from probation officer Rich Skinner and intensive interviewing of kids picked up on drug charges, they learned that a neighborhood youth going to school in Mississippi was illegally purchasing guns there and had shipped something like 250 weapons to his friends in Dorchester. The gangs based in Uphams Corner had formerly been relatively weak; now they were asserting themselves with guns. With the help of ATF, the YVSF traced confiscated guns back to the dealers in Mississippi. They studied all of the police reports on shooting incidents and mapped them, trying to understand the dynamics of the gang conflicts that provoked them. Finally, the YVSF presented its findings to Police Commissioner Evans and then to U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Don Stern and Suffolk County District Attorney Ralph Martin—making the case for a broader initiative to investigate the sources of guns in the city.

That a couple of detectives and a sergeant could get a hearing at the highest levels demonstrated the extent to which the BPD had succeeded in becoming less rigidly hierarchical. It also reflected respect for the approach to gang problems emerging from the YVSF, as demonstrated in the Mission Hill warrant sweep. Finally, it reflected the pressure everyone felt to take action against the continuing, horrific, street warfare—34 firearm homicides of Boston youth aged 24 and under from mid-1993 through mid-1994. Robert Merner recalled what it felt like watching the reports on TV: "You’d have some distraught parent or aunt or someone saying, ‘Where did the guns come from? We don’t make them here in Roxbury.’ And we decided, well, maybe someone should answer that question. Where do the guns come from?"

In relation to specific problem in Uphams Corner, the YVSF used its gun trafficking information to pinpoint a particularly violent gang, and then applied the coordinated approach that had been so successful in the warrant sweep. A YVSF team met with gang members in a parking lot and announced there would be a crackdown. Their message, said Merner, was the following: "You people want to keep shooting, don’t light up a joint. You people want to keep shooting, don’t drive with an expired inspection sticker. You people want to keep shooting, don’t open up a cold beer after a basketball game. That’s the way it’s going to be. Shooting stops, the noise stops, we stop bothering you for mundane stuff." Because these were chronic offenders, their lives could be disrupted in many ways: warrants could be served; probation strictly enforced; drug markets disrupted; kids under DYS supervision pulled off the streets. To drive home this message, representatives from the police, the probation department, and the district attorney’s office were all in attendance. The Streetworkers were also present, to deliver the message that there were alternatives to gang involvement and violence.

Like the warrant sweeps, this crackdown had the effect of changing the behavior of a particular group in a targeted neighborhood. Clean Sweep and Scrap Iron represented a significant breakthrough for Boston—the development of an approach to violence prevention centered on collective action and focused deterrence aimed at chronic offenders.

Alternatives

Another, equally critical, breakthrough in 1994 was the intensification and coordination of efforts to provide kids at risk for gang involvement and violence with alternatives to life on the streets. One striking feature of this development was the extent to which it was driven by the law enforcement officers of the YVSF. This was an unanticipated outcome from the alliances that had formed on the streets, as officer Merner explained: "When we were doing some of this stuff with probation and the clergy, the kids would look us in the face and say, ‘Okay, Bob, I want out. I don’t want to sell drugs; I don’t want to be in the gang any more; what is there for me? What can I do? Where can I go?’" So it was that, when personages such as Commissioner Evans or Senator Kennedy asked YVSF members what resources they needed to build on the good work of Clean Sweep and Scrap Iron, they requested jobs and job training, mentoring programs, special schools, and after-school programs. And, when John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company asked Evans how it could contribute in a significant way, he sent members of the YVSF to speak for themselves—five officers in tee shirts and jeans on the 48th floor of the Hancock Building. "We knew that we were out of place," recalled Merner. "But it was amazing, how much [the business community] wanted to help us. When they saw that it was cops looking to help kids in a different way, everybody jumped on board."

The Summer of Opportunity was an extraordinary collaboration. John Hancock funded it, representatives from Hancock, the BPD, and Northeastern University designed and ran it, and agencies across the city supported it by recommending young people as participants—not just gang members, but kids at risk for suicide, drugs, alcohol, anything life threatening. In the first year, the program provided 40 young men and women, aged 15 to 17, with four weeks of workshops—on work-related skills and values, conflict resolution, time management, computer skills, life skills, and team building—and four weeks of an internship at Hancock or Northeastern. It also provided each participant with a mentor and a weekly stipend. Over the next two years, the Summer of Opportunity expanded to become a year-round program, with a six-week summer workshop and 10-hour-per-week internships the rest of the year, at Hancock, Northeastern, the BPD, and a variety of public agencies and local businesses. It was a bold move for John Hancock, noted Mayor Menino: "Some companies would have been afraid to bring [these kids] into their buildings because [they] are kids who are on the edge." It was also an important milestone in the continuing development of key alliances, suggested Paul Evans. "When cops were saying, ‘The solution is jobs,’ as opposed to locking them up, all of a sudden the clergy looks and says, ‘You know what? We’ve been saying that for years.’ It was a big step for this whole comprehensive approach." Paul Joyce, concurred: "our referral agencies [for the summer program] became the same agencies that we were working with on our law enforcement initiatives and then that's where, I think, you have a comprehensive approach."

The summer of 1994 was also Boston Freedom Summer—a commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the civil-rights Freedom Summer in Mississippi. A collaboration among the TenPoint Coalition, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, this program brought students of all ages into the two most violent Boston precincts to work on programs for math and science literacy, court advocacy and alternative sentencing, street ministry, voter education and registration, health and healing, and project documentation and evaluation.[2] It was "an example of people coming together to change the urban reality in the same way that workers came together to change the reality of segregation in the South," said the TenPoint’s Ray Hammond. Like the Summer of Opportunity, this became a multi-year program.

Another major collaborative effort was the Street Smarts Initiative, which combined a number of existing and new programs, coordinated by the Boston Management Consortium. Anchoring this "holistic approach to violence prevention"[3] was the Gun BuyBack/Amnesty Program, a collaboration among the civic group Citizens for Safety, the BPD, the Suffolk County District Attorney, and the City of Boston. In its first year, 1993, the buyback program purchased 1,300 guns, mostly revolvers and semi-automatic pistols. On the alternatives side, Street Smarts included the Peace League, a competitive basketball program organized by Streetworkers and some gang members and operating under a negotiated set of cardinal rules—no weapons, no spectators, no disrespect. The December 1993 murder of Louis D. Brown, an innocent high-school student who was shot while walking to a Teens Against Gun Violence meeting, sparked an initiative in the Boston Public Schools to mobilize students through a poster art, rap music, and essay contest on the theme "We Can Stop the Violence." All of these programs came under the umbrella of Street Smarts in 1994. With the support of local businesses, Street Smarts expanded in subsequent years, providing career counseling and training to Peace League participants, and launching an initiative to train Streetworkers and police officers in conflict resolution and mediation, to be better able to assist gang youth in settling disputes nonviolently.

The Boston Gun Project Working Group

For all the promise of the many outreach programs, and despite the effectiveness of new deterrence tools—warrant sweeps and crackdowns—there remained at the end of 1994 a feeling of despair among the people working on the problem of gang violence. The number of youth homicides went up and down but remained intolerably high. Recalled street worker Tracy Litthcut, "We were all working hard, but we said to each other, ‘Damn, we’re always at homicide scenes together, always in court, it’s always negative.’ We didn’t know what to do except to continue what we were doing." As long as the killing continued, the city remained in a state of crisis. That was the situation when the Boston Gun Project Working Group began meeting in early 1995.

In late 1994, Police Commissioner Evans launched yet another unlikely alliance by agreeing to BPD participation in the Boston Gun Project. This was a research and action initiative funded by the National Institute of Justice, to be conducted by the Criminal Justice Policy and Management Program of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In fact, as noted by David Kennedy, the lead researcher from Harvard, the police played a central role in shaping the project. The Harvard team had been looking at gun traffickers as the critical leverage point against gang violence. "We had our own ideas about what was probably going on in the street that made us think that gangs were not the right way to think about this," said Kennedy. "We didn’t want to use a gang framework. And the Commissioner’s Office listened politely to us and said, ‘Right, please go work with the gang unit.’" That, according to Kennedy, "turned out to be a simply extraordinary opportunity, because we found what was, to my mind, an unparalleled constellation of front-line folks that had been gathered around the gang unit."

The Working Group of the Boston Gun Project began meeting formally in early 1995. It included the Harvard research team, representatives of the law enforcement agencies participating in the YVSF, Streetworkers, and some additional "heavy hitters" in federal law enforcement, for example, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. To make the collaboration work, as virtually all the participants agree, a lot of people had to "leave their egos at the door"—both individual egos and institutional egos. One factor that made this possible was that the group was confined to people working directly with the problem of violence. They shared a common purpose. Each organization represented had a unique role to play. And all were indispensable. Kennedy and his research team created a neutral environment of collective inquiry that encouraged people to set aside institutional rivalries and focus on problem solving.
The front-line "practitioners" confirmed much of what the researchers expected, for example, that the availability of guns was an important factor in the violence. "But," said Kennedy, "we also heard from these practitioners something that we had never heard before, which was that there were not very many kids who were truly involved in this dynamic; that mostly what was happening was that these chronically-offending, gang-involved kids were hurting one another; and that the primary dynamic was one of back-and-forth vendettas among the gangs." Subsequently, the Harvard team confirmed that experience-based analysis with what Kennedy called "a large volume of back-breaking but fairly elementary analysis" of police data. The truly difficult work began with the effort to devise an effective response to that situation.

The challenge was to improve on what was already being done by the YVSF in its crackdowns. "They had been trying to focus on chronic offenders and on defusing gang conflicts," said Kennedy. "They were way ahead of everybody else in the sophistication of what they were doing, and they left us, as a group, more than a little lost. Part of the story of the gun project is the willingness of the whole team to spend what turned out to be nine months hammering away at this problem." Tracy Litthcut recalled being skeptical of the process at first: "I don’t think any of us really believed—even though we were educated—that academics could help us." But the research did help, for example in providing hard data on patterns of violence, as well as on gun trafficking, and in getting the practitioners to develop a detailed street map of gang turfs and activities that became a valuable tool for responding to and anticipating conflicts.

The solution to the problem emerged through identification of two key elements of the successful Uphams Corner crackdown. First, the police and others had communicated directly with the gang members involved that the crackdown was aimed specifically at violence and would continue until the violence stopped. Second, the enforcement agencies had taken advantage of the vulnerability of chronic offenders, "pulling every lever" available to ensure severely unpleasant consequences for continuing violence. Those insights became the basis of the "pulling levers" approach that formed the basis for the initiative that emerged in 1996 as Operation Cease Fire.[4]

Operation Cease Fire

Operation Cease Fire, built on the YVSF’s approach in a number of ways. Instead of localized and episodic crackdowns made in reaction to outbreaks of violence, it was a systematic, city-wide operation with the clear purpose of continuing until the killing stopped. By utilizing the full repertoire of both state and federal powers to "touch" those gang members who persisted in using violence, it augmented the pulling levers strategy by greatly expanding the range and severity of potential consequences. The plan for Cease Fire also included a focused law-enforcement attack on illegal gun traffic in Boston, to run in parallel with the direct intervention strategy and support it by limiting the availability of guns. This effort—the Boston Gun Project—became the model for a broader gun interdiction initiative, launched by the ATF in 17 U.S. cities in 1996.[4]

Operation Cease Fire began in March, 1996, with action against the Vamp Hill Kings, a gang based on Bowdoin Street in Dorchester. A dispute within the gang had produced three homicides in a short period of time, triggering the intervention. Police gang and drug-control units, ATF, probation and parole officers, DYS, the U.S. Attorney, the Suffolk County D.A., and the Boston school police all participated, disrupting the gang’s activities in numerous ways, including arrests and expedited prosecutions on both state and federal charges. By mid-May, the violence within the Vamp Hill Kings had quieted down, and the Gun Project Working Group held a "forum" to explain to gang members what had happened to them. Representatives of each participating agency spoke briefly, describing the agency’s powers and how they would be used in response to further outbreaks of violence.

"The forum was dramatic," recalled David Kennedy. "In essence, the authorities’ message to the gang members was: we know who you are; we know what you’re doing; we cannot stop all your offending all the time, which you know and we know, but it’s a new day where violence is concerned; violence will simply not be tolerated in Boston any longer; we’re doing this in large part to protect you; here’s how we’re going to do business from now on; what happens subsequently is up to you; and go home and tell your friends." The gang members were visibly shaken, Kennedy noted. Tracy Litthcut, whom many of them knew, concluded with an emotional speech: "‘We’ll give you any help you want, but I’ve been to too many funerals. The violence stops now.’" The kids left the forum with copies of flyers about the Bowdoin Street operation and about Freddy Cardoza, who was arrested for possession of a single bullet and sentenced to nearly twenty years in federal prison with no possibility of parole. [see flyer] Though not officially part of Cease Fire, the Cardoza case helped to demonstrate the severity of punishment awaiting hard-core violent offenders.[4]

Over the summer, police, Streetworkers, and probation officers continued to talk, both to gang members and to the community about the new policies on violence. Those gangs who seemed on the verge of violent conflict received clear warnings of what the consequences would be. This coordinated communications campaign was another central element of the Cease Fire strategy. It was an approach that "turned the law enforcement concept on its head," noted Joy Fallon, assistant to U.S. Attorney Don Stern. "Normally, we think our power is in knowing what we're going to do and not telling anybody, and making sure they, the defendants, don't know what we are doing. This was a very different notion that was based on the premise that people can change, and that people may make decisions based on the consequences, if they understand them."

Though not directly involved in the planning or execution of Operation Cease Fire, the clergy of the TenPoint Coalition played a key supporting role. Their solid backing helped to bring the community on board. "We created the political context for tougher police action," said Eugene Rivers.[5] Just as important, while they opened their churches’ doors and offered services to gang members who wanted to make a change, they also made it clear that they would not defend those who continued to use violence. For those young people there would be a "prison ministry."

On August 29, 1996, the Boston Gun Project Working Group partners mounted a second full-scale Cease Fire intervention, against the Intervale Posse—a gang that had been warned explicitly but had remained one of the most violent groups in the city. The operation took place just before the opening of school, a time when violence often flared up as gang members came into contact in school. In early morning raids, the DEA arrested fifteen of the gang’s leaders on federal drug charges, eight others on state charges. The case was in the papers for weeks, and the Working Group made sure that flyers circulated to gang members so that they would get the message of the action against the Intervale Posse: "GANG VIOLENCE WILL BE STOPPED." [see flyer]

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