Gun Project helps bring peace to Boston's warring youth

By Lama Jarudi

Special to the Gazette

Rough-edged stacks of copy paper drift freely around David M. Kennedy's modest, white-walled office. Kennedy, the chief researcher behind one of Harvard's most successful criminal-justice programs, sits with poise in this academic battleground. On the phone he debates the implications of the sample size in a study on the Boston gun market.

The text around Kennedy, like the statistics he discusses on the phone, is a cold and impersonal account of Boston's youth violence problem. Numbers and theories charge out of his office -- not pictures or stories. But the concerns and consequences of Kennedy's paperwork are unmistakably human.

When the Boston Gun Project team began meeting in 1995, it marked the start of an innovative partnership that would both disrupt the illegal gun trade in Boston and deter the gang violence that drives youth homicide in the city. Kennedy is a senior researcher at the Kennedy School of Government and a leading member of the team that has brought together Harvard researchers and local, state, and federal agencies. "There is unmined gold in the experience and creativity of front-liners," Kennedy says.

The Gun Project, nicknamed ÒCeasefire,Ó has led to a 60 percent drop in homicide victims aged 24 and under, compared to the average since 1990. Those numbers are just a part of the changes, according to Kennedy, that have "made a real difference on Boston streets."

In the early 1990s, it wasn't unusual to hear, for example, that a 9-year-old was killed by gang cross-fire as he crossed a porch to trick-or-treat. The funeral service of a gang member was sometimes answered with shots outside the church.

In fact, just seven years ago Boston made national headlines. Activists were calling for the National Guard to patrol city streets. The crack-cocaine culture led to deadly gang wars that ordinary police intervention couldn't stop.

Today, Boston is making national headlines again. In the past 12 months, both Attorney General Janet Reno and President Bill Clinton made stops in the city to applaud its lowest crime rates in 30 years.

The changes started in 1996, when the Gun ProjectÕs Ceasefire intervention was put in place. The numbers are not coincidental, nor merely a matter of changing demographics. Now the federal government is using Boston as a model for a 17-city experiment.

Academia Ventures Out

The success of the Gun Project is attributed entirely to its working group: academics and public officials who shared a concern for Boston's youth. Harvard members included Kennedy, Assistant Professor Anne Piehl, and Research Associate Anthony Braga. The team did not bully outside practitioners into testing their classroom theories. Nor did they merely evaluate what someone else had done.

"This was not your usual arms-length academic relationship," Kennedy says. "We moved in with the Police Department, we worked intimately with them. It was both personally and professionally rewarding."

For Kennedy, the Boston Ceasefire initiative confirms a longtime belief that "better policing Ñ not just the usual 'root causes' approach of correcting economics, fighting racism, or improving schools Ñ can make a big difference to people."

In his early work at Harvard, Kennedy was excited by research that drew on real-life case studies and extensive fieldwork. Thus, research for the Gun Project was never limited to the confines of a Harvard skyrise. It combined Kennedy's respect for field studies with his concern for wronged teenagers.

"As it happened, a new constituency and set of partners emerged during the project: gang youth themselves," he says. In his talks with them, he became convinced that adults had failed a moral responsibility: "These were great kids, interesting people, exposed to unspeakable problems." Kennedy's solution, what he calls "a sterling example of community policing," has validated his faith in progressive criminal-justice policy.

From Gun Supply to Gun Demand

The Harvard researchers' aim was to bring "problem solving policing" to bear on youth homicide in Boston. They worked throughout 1995 and early 1996 under a grant from the National Institute of Justice.

The challenge, Kennedy remembers, was to look beyond individual incidents and try to fashion a strategy. "It was terrifying sometimes," he says. "Until we began to find our way, it was never quite clear that there was anything you could do." In the end, two main themes emerged.

The group wanted to stop youths from buying guns. Running firearms traces and debriefing arrested teenagers, the team concluded that many of the guns that youths ended up with had been trafficked. Kennedy was soon able to name the hottest new and semiautomatic weapons on Boston streets.

The Ceasefire working group plotted an anti-trafficking plan to focus on the most popular firearms and high-risk, gang-involved youthful offenders. And since the crackdown did not trespass into the debate about legal gun ownership, the plan quickly won the acclaim of the National Rifle Association.

This supply-side approach was matched by a demand-style strategy: one, perhaps, even more promising than the supply-side possibilities on which the project began.

"Our research showed that only 1,300 chronically offending youth in about 60 gangs were responsible for 60 percent or more of youth homicide in Boston," Kennedy says. The Ceasefire team already knew most of the violent youths who caused fear on Boston streets. Police officers recognized them by face, name, and sometimes even the clothes they wore.

The Gun Project benefited from the collaboration of many people: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents, Boston police, prosecutors, youth outreach workers, and probation, parole, and corrections officers. As Kennedy has suggested, the "unknown universe" of gangs was not at all foreign to these front-line practitioners.

He saw this expertise personally, in ride-alongs with probation officers through high-risk neighborhoods. There, far from his fourth-floor office at the Kennedy School, sidewalks were divided into gang turfs, and shifting territories recorded with the scuff marks of brand-name high-tops, the street's combat boots.

Kennedy's team adopted the Boston Police Department's subtle approach to gangs, one whereby dangerous Ñ but also frightened and insecure Ñ teenagers were treated both firmly and protectively.

The Ceasefire plan was based on an unusual attitude toward serial offenders who commit a wide variety of crimes, consistently use alcohol and drugs, and injure one another. The pattern is usually seen as bad news. But Kennedy turned it around in Boston. He made it an opportunity for plotting strong deterrence.

All the agencies that comprised Kennedy's working group had daily encounters with the chronic offenders. Thus they were able to set a special standard with them: violence in Boston is now strictly forbidden, and will be met with immediate, varied, and strong response.

Two early cases in Dorchester and Roxbury became examples of how the Youth Violence Strike Force could act. Violent gangs there were subjected to focused drug enforcement, probation attention, and even several federal prosecutions. But Kennedy emphasizes that this was different from the traditional ways that police signal warnings: "We actually sat individuals down and told them how the crackdowns would work."

"We told them," Kennedy says, "we can't stop everything you do all the time, but violence is unacceptable." The working group aimed existing criminal-justice machinery right at the center of its target: serious youth violence.

As he explained, "The earliest corrupt relationships with gangs were based on 'deals' with the police. Later methods were principled, but distant and ineffective, claiming to send signals through tough laws. It turns out there's a third option Ñ that's the one that's been struck here Ñ intimate but principled."

The Harvard researcher credits the open-mindedness of Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans for much of the cityÕs improvement. "He welcomed us in, gave us free access to people and information, and helped implement changes," Kennedy says.

"It is not the only thing Evans has done, though. He's been moving the department to community policing, creating a network of beat officers, and turning his team into one of the nation's leaders." Behind the Boston Gun Project is an army of genuine, committed servicemen.

A Theory With National Implications

Kennedy has turned his experience with the Boston Gun Project into a comprehensive theory in deterrence, something he calls "pulling levers." He suggests that law-enforcement officials stop putting bodies in cells for longer periods, and stop professing zero tolerance.

Police Commissioner Evans has long agreed: "Historically, people have been pretty big on the enforcement end. But now we know that solutions go beyond just locking kids up."

By pulling levers on many fronts, officials use all their interagency means to target and deter a destructive criminal activity. By focusing on a problem Ñ for instance, street drug markets Ñ and communicating directly with offenders about how to steer clear of the crackdown, itÕs possible to create a world, Kennedy predicts, "much like the one in which one started, minus one important problem." In theory, his formula can be repeated "until there are no longer meaningful concentrations of offending individuals, groups, and places."

Kennedy's plan, seen at its best in Ceasefire, was recognized by Attorney General Janet Reno in 1996. She singled it out as a blueprint for cities struggling to gain control of youth violence. The motion was seconded by President Clinton. During a February 1997 visit Clinton held a ceremony to highlight the Boston Police Department for its juvenile crime and youth gang initiatives.

Whether Boston's Ceasefire can be extended nationally is still to be seen, says Kennedy. But it has led to a large federal spin-off which reaches 17 cities. Called the Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative, that version has adopted the supply-side component of Ceasefire. The first progress report is due from Washington in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, other cities, such as Minneapolis, have independently adopted some of Boston's successful strategies. Chuck Wexler is director of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, an agency that awarded the Kennedy SchoolÕs Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management its Leadership Award in 1996.

Wexler now is working with a Minneapolis corporate and public partnership which, like Boston's Ceasefire, seeks to fight homicide. "We are in embryonic stages," says Wexler, "but biweekly meetings teaming probation and police have tried to create a synergy of interagency efforts." He cites Harvard's David Kennedy as an invaluable partner in Minneapolis' undertaking.