Development of Neighborhood Policing
Community policing in Boston, known as neighborhood policing, developed from a high level of community dissatisfaction with the policing strategies and tactics engaged in by the Boston Police Department. Like many American cities during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the city of Boston suffered an epidemic of youth violence that had its roots in the rapid spread of street-level crack-cocaine markets (Kennedy, Piehl, and Braga 1996). Gangs became involved in the crack trade and increasingly turned to firearms to protect their turf and financial interests and to maintain the respect of their rivals. Disrespect was a trigger for gang violence. Gang violence involved ongoing conflicts between particular groups that were very personal and vendetta-like. Cycles of violence among Boston’s gangs remained after the street crack market turf stabilized. In 1990, the city of Boston had a record-setting 152 homicides. The city seemed out of control and Boston residents demanded an end to the serious violence that plagued their neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, the Boston Police Department was ill equipped to deal with the sudden increase in serious violence. The Boston Police did not have an in-depth understanding of the nature of the gang violence problem and did not develop a strategy to deal with street gangs. The Boston Police relied on aggressive, riot-oriented tactics used to quell civil unrest in the 1960s. In 1988, the citywide Anti-Crime Unit (ACU) was permanently assigned to Boston’s most violent inner-city neighborhoods. The attitude among ACU officers was that they were expected to ”go in, kick butts, and crack heads” and this mentality produced highly aggressive and reportedly indiscriminate police tactics (Winship and Berrien 1999, 55). A series of well-publicized scandals emanating from an indiscriminate policy of stopping and frisking of all black males in high-crime areas outraged Boston’s black community. The community backlash was bolstered by the Boston press reporting on a series of mishandled investigations and abuses of authority by the Boston Police. Subsequent newspaper stories detailed how the department’s Internal Affairs Division failed to identify and discipline officers who acted too aggressively or were alleged to be corrupt. In 1991, the negative press exposure eventually led to the appointment of the St. Clair Commission, which was assigned the task of thoroughly reviewing Boston Police Department policies and practices (Winship and Berrien 1999).
In response to the negative publicity, the Boston Police Department began to overhaul the department’s activities. In 1991, the ACU was disbanded and replaced with the Anti-Gang Violence Unit (AGVU), which was charged with disrupting ongoing gang conflicts rather than mounting an aggressive campaign to arrest as many offenders as possible. In 1992, the St. Clair Commission released its report and cited extensive corruption and incompetent management of the Boston Police Department. Commissioner Mickey Roache was replaced with William Bratton, a former Boston Police officer who was the chief of the New York City Transit Police. Commissioner Bratton immediately replaced the old command staff with new officers who were known to be innovative and hardworking, made investments in developing the department’s technology to understand crime problems, developed a neighborhood policing plan, and commenced training of beat-level officers in the methods of community and problem-oriented policing (Bratton 1998). In 1993, Bratton left the Boston Police Department to become the commissioner of the New York Police Department. Paul Evans, a career Boston Police officer, became the new leader of the Boston Police. Commissioner Evans expanded the initial groundwork laid by Bratton to institute a formal neighborhood policing plan and led the department in its efforts to prevent youth violence and to repair the department’s badly damaged relationship with the community.
A cornerstone of Commissioner Evans’ neighborhood policing strategy was the Same Cop Same Neighborhood (SC/SN) plan to deliver public safety services to every neighborhood in Boston (http://www.cityofboston.gov/police). Under SC/ SN, the same officers were assigned to a neighborhood beat and required to spend no less than 60% of their shift in that designated beat. SC/SN beat officers were encouraged to form working relationships with community members and engage in problem-oriented policing strategies to deal with crime and disorder problems in their neighborhood. Beat officers developed relationships with community members by participating in community meetings and attending neighborhood activities and events, many of which are sponsored by the city of Boston. An important idea underlying the SC/SN plan was to increase ownership and accountability for problems in specific neighborhoods by beat officers and, through this sense of responsibility, to promote increased coordination among the various units within the Boston Police Department as well as with the community.
While this general strategy seems straightforward, it required fundamental changes in the way the Boston Police Department operates internally and delivers public safety services to citizens (http://www.cityofboston.gov/police). It also required changes in the attitude of every officer in the department from patrolman to the highest command levels. Work processes and reporting procedures were redesigned and new uses of technology were developed. For instance, local crime conditions in each of Boston’s eleven police districts were analyzed on a monthly basis at Crime Analysis Meetings (CAM). CAMs were similar to the New York Police Department’s COMPSTAT meetings. Boston police crime analysts used crime maps and trend analysis to uncover emergent crime and disorder problems. District commanders were held accountable for developing problem-oriented strategies to deal with changes in neighborhood conditions. These changes mandated shifts in the assignment and deployment of personnel. Some of the noteworthy changes included reconfiguring boundaries for police districts and sectors, training and education sessions with supervisory personnel, the identification of potential roadblocks and suggestions on how to avoid them by middle managers, and an ongoing dialogue about implementation issues across the varying ranks of the department.
The Boston Police Department credits their neighborhood policing strategy with improving their relationships with the community and positioning them to deal more effectively with crime problems when compared to their policing strategies and practices of the past. Between 1990 and 2000, the FBI index crime rate in Boston fell by nearly 50%, from 11,850 per 100,000 residents to 6,088 per 100,000 residents (http://bjsdata.ojp.usdoj.gov/dataonline/Search/Crime/Crime.cfm). While Boston is known for its serious commitment to community policing, it has been nationally recognized for its innovative approach to youth violence prevention and its unusually strong working relationship with black churches. These success stories flow from the department’s commitment to changing their ineffective practices of the past.
Preventing Youth Violence
Under the leadership of Commissioner Evans, the Boston Police Department focused its efforts on dealing with the upswing in youth violence that devastated Boston’s inner-city neighborhoods. During the early 1990s, the AGVU evolved into the Youth Violence Strike Force (YVSF) and its mandate was broadened beyond controlling outbreaks of gang violence to more general youth violence prevention. With a range of criminal justice and community-based partners, the YVSF developed many innovative programs including ”Operation Nightlight,” a police-probation partnership to ensure at-risk youth were abiding by the conditions of their release into the community; a partnership with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office to identify and apprehend illegal gun traffickers who were providing guns to violent gangs; and the ”Summer of Opportunity” program, which provides at-risk youth with job training and leadership skills that can be transferred to workplace, school, or home settings. Although these programs were certainly innovative and added to the Boston Police Department’s array of tools to prevent youth violence, in 1995, the city still suffered from high rates of youth homicide fueled by conflicts between street gangs.
The Boston Gun Project was a problem-oriented policing exercise expressly aimed at taking on a serious, large-scale crime problem: homicide victimization among young people in Boston. The Boston Gun Project proceeded by (1) assembling an interagency working group of largely line-level criminal justice and other practitioners; (2) applying quantitative and qualitative research techniques to create an assessment of the nature of, and dynamics driving, youth violence in Boston; (3) developing an intervention designed to have a substantial, near-term impact on youth homicide; (4) implementing and adapting the intervention; and (5) evaluating the intervention’s impact (Kennedy et al. 1996). The project began in early 1995 and implemented what is now known as the ”Operation Ceasefire” intervention, which began in the late spring of 1996.
The trajectory of the project and of Operation Ceasefire has been extensively documented (see, e.g., Kennedy, Braga, and Piehl 2001). Briefly, the working group of law enforcement personnel, youth workers, and researchers diagnosed the youth violence problem in Boston as one of patterned, largely vendetta-like (”beef”) hostility among a small population of chronically criminal offenders, and particularly among those involved in some sixty loose, informal, mostly neighborhood-based groups (these groups were called ”gangs” in Boston, but were not Chicago- or LA-style gangs). The Operation Ceasefire ”pulling levers” strategy was designed to deter gang violence by reaching out directly to gangs, saying explicitly that violence would no longer be tolerated, and backing up that message by ”pulling every lever” legally available when violence occurred (Kennedy 1997, 1998). These law enforcement levers included disrupting street-level drug markets, serving warrants, mounting federal prosecutions, and changing the conditions of community supervision for probationers and parolees in the targeted group. Simultaneously, youth workers, probation and parole officers, and later churches and other community groups offered gang members services and other kinds of help. If gang members wanted to step away from a violent lifestyle, the Operation Ceasefire working group focused on providing them with the services and opportunities necessary to make the transition.
The Operation Ceasefire working group delivered their antiviolence message in formal meetings with gang members, through individual police and probation contacts with gang members, through meetings with inmates of secure juvenile facilities in the city, and through gang outreach workers. The deterrence message was not a deal with gang members to stop violence. Rather, it was a promise to gang members that violent behavior would evoke an immediate and intense response. If gangs committed other crimes but refrained from violence, the normal workings of police, prosecutors, and the rest of the criminal justice system dealt with these matters. But if gang members hurt people, the working group focused its enforcement actions on them.
A central hypothesis within the working group was the idea that a meaningful period of substantially reduced youth violence might serve as a ”firebreak” and result in a relatively long-lasting reduction in future youth violence (Kennedy et al. 1996). The idea was that youth violence in Boston had become a self-sustaining cycle among a relatively small number of youth, with objectively high levels of risk leading to nominally self-protective behavior such as gun acquisition and use, gang formation, tough ”street” behavior, and the like—behavior that then became an additional input into the cycle of violence (Kennedy et al. 1996). If this cycle could be interrupted, a new equilibrium at a lower level of risk and violence might be established, perhaps without the need for continued high levels of either deterrent or facilitative intervention. The larger hope was that a successful intervention to reduce gang violence in the short term would have a disproportionate, sustainable impact in the long term.
A large reduction in the yearly number of Boston youth homicides followed immediately after Operation Ceasefire was implemented in mid-1996. A formal evaluation of Operation Ceasefire revealed that the intervention was associated with a 63% decrease in the monthly number of Boston youth homicides, a 32% decrease in monthly number of shots-fired calls, a 25% decrease in monthly number of gun assaults, and, in one high-risk police district given special attention in the evaluation, a 44% decrease in monthly number of youth gun assault incidents (Braga et al. 2001b). The evaluation also suggested that Boston’s significant youth homicide reduction associated with Operation Ceasefire was distinct when compared to youth homicide trends in most major cities in New England and nationally.
Boston Cops and Black Churches
Operation Ceasefire benefited from strong community support emanating from a strong relationship with black churches in neighborhoods suffering from gang violence. In 1992, a key partnership developed between the Boston Police Department and members of the city’s black clergy. A loosely allied group of activist black clergy formed the Ten Point Coalition after a gang invasion of the Morningstar Baptist Church. During a memorial for a slain rival gang member, mourners were attacked with knives and guns (Kennedy et al. 2001; Winship and Berrien 1999). In the wake of that outrage, the Ten Point Coalition expanded their existing ministries to include all at-risk youth in the Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan sections of Boston. The ministers decided they should attempt to prevent the youth in their community from joining gangs, and also that they needed to send an antiviolence message to all youth, whether gang involved or not.
To do this, the clergy had to make two adjustments to their normal ministry. First, they had to define all youth as their responsibility regardless of the parish the youth lived in or the youth’s denominational affiliation. Previously, young people who did not participate in church activities were not viewed as part of the ministry’s mission; henceforth, the protection of these young people would be the primary mission of many churches. The second adjustment involved taking the ministry to the streets. It was clear that if the ministers wanted to get involved with the community’s youth they could not wait in their churches for the youth to come to them. They had to go ”where the kids were.” This meant that the clergy had to spend time on the streets at night, getting to know the kids they were attempting to protect. This was a very different and often frightening new approach to providing ministry services, but they found the Boston Streetworkers, city-employed gang outreach workers, were natural allies. Quickly the streetworkers and the Ten Point clergy came to work closely together to provide at-risk youth with alternatives to gang violence.
Working with the Boston Police Department, the Ten Point Coalition provided another important dimension to the development of Operation Ceasefire: credibility for the Boston Police Department with the communities of color in Boston, which in Boston, as in many other cities, had a lengthy history of tension with the police. Although the Ten Point Coalition had initially been very critical of the Boston Police Department, they eventually forged a strong working relationship with the YVSF (Winship and Berrien 1999). Ten Point clergy and others involved in the faith-based organization accompanied YVSF police officers on home visits to the families of troubled youth and also acted as advocates for youth in the criminal justice system. The presence of former adversaries working together toward a common goal dramatically enhanced the legitimacy of the entire effort.
