The Boston Gun Project

Abstract

This paper discusses the studies and research found on the Boston Gun Project, also referred to as Operation Ceasefire, which started its operation in early 1996. It discusses why the program was started and what its main focuses were. It also discusses its findings while the program was being conducted and after the completion of the program. In addition to the aforementioned, this paper also compares the Boston Gun Project to a similar program that Los Angeles, California conducted while the city was experiencing problems with violent crimes, gang crimes, and gun crimes during the 1990s. The program that Los Angeles conducted was an adaptation of the Boston Gun Project and had many similar characteristics.

The Boston Gun Project

The Boston Gun Project, also referred to as Operation Ceasefire, was a youth gun intervention strategy that was implemented in Boston in early 1996. The project focused on specific places that were “hot spots” for crime and also focused on the two elements of gun violence – gun trafficking and gang violence. Hot spots for crime and violence were primarily found in the poor, inner-city, Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl&Waring, 2001). By 1990, Boston’s homicide rate rose by half, resulting in 152 homicides that year with a previous homicide rate of 100. During that year, Lt.Det. Gary French made the comment, “We were responding to six, seven shootings a night. You just ran from crime scene to crime scene” (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl&Waring, 2001).Boston found itself experiencing an outbreak of homicides during the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Homicide among persons ages 24 and under increased by 230% - from 22 victims in 1987 to 73 victims in 1900 – and remained high well after the peak of the epidemic (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl&Waring, 2001). Boston experienced an average of 44 youth homicides per year between 1991 and 1995 (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl, &Waring, 2001). During 1996, this number decreased to 26 youth homicides per year and in 1997, youth homicides decreased even further to 15 homicides per year. Although the Boston Gun Project was viewed to be unlikely able to be transportable, it did contain elements that could be easily applied to other similar programs. Since these elements were easy to apply, Los Angeles, California decided to do its own adaptation of the gun project which began meeting in 1999.

The Boston Gun Project was a problem-oriented policing initiative expressly aimed at taking on a serious, large-scale crime problem: homicide victimization among youths (Kennedy,Braga, Piehl&Waring, 2001). Problem-oriented policing means that there was a problem that was identified (youth homicide victimization), analysis (research done on youth homicide victimization), response (what was found during the research of youth homicide victimization and how can it be positively changed), evaluation (if positive changes are made, what can be the expected outcome), and an adjustment of the response (if the positive changes effected the rates of youth homicide victimization IE. causing them to decrease, how can the rates be kept down).

Another problem found in Boston during the Boston Gun Project was illegal firearms trafficking and gang violence. Illegal firearms trafficking is the movement of firearms from the legal to illegal marketplace through an illicit method for an unlawful purpose, usually to obtain profit, power, or prestige or to supply firearms to criminals or juveniles (Greco, 1998). It was assumed that some of the guns obtained by the youths were being illegally trafficked to and by youths from either directly retail outlets or less directly through the illegal sale of stolen guns and the illegal sale and bartering of guns among youths themselves. Surprisingly, both federal and local authorities had ignored the issue of gun trafficking (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl&Waring, 2001).

In 1994, there was a large outbreak of gun violence in and around Wendover Street in Dorchester. Richard Skinner, a Dorchester probation officer, was tipped off by a probationer, who owed him debt, that there was a boy living on Wendover Street and was selling guns. Skinner took this information, and, over the next few months with the help of the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms), built a case against a Cape Verdean by the name of Jose Andrade who attended college in Mississippi. Andrade turned out to be using a network of straw purchasers to buy guns while he was at school, and he would bring the guns back to Boston during school vacations to sell to the loose street crew in which he associated (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl&Waring, 2001). Eventually, Andrade was arrested and the authorities had him and his “crew” hand over all of their guns, which then resulted in the outbreak of shootings stop.

While firearms trafficking was a main component of the cause of violence in Boston, another cause was gang violence. The group working on the project came up with the “pulling levers” strategy - a strategy that involved deterring the violent behavior or chronic gang members (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl&Waring, 2001). They deterred the gang members by: targeting gang members engaged in violent behavior, reaching out directly to members of the targeted gangs, delivered a message that violence would not be tolerated, and backing up the message by “pulling every lever” legally available (IE. applying appropriate sanctions from a varied menu of possible law enforcement actions) when violence occurred (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl&Waring, 2001).

Homicide victimization rates tripled for young black males and doubled for young white males; juvenile handgun homicides increased 418% between the years of 1984 and 1994 (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl&Waring, 2001). The cause of this drastic increase could be because of the introduction of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s. Although crack cocaine trafficking had almost surely sparked the wave of youth violence in Boston and elsewhere, there was evidence that the problem was now being driven by the fear of many young people that they were at high risks of exposure of violence and were consequently getting and using guns, ostensibly for self-protection (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl&Waring, 2001).

The first meeting, or forum, with gang members was held on May 15, 1996 with a second major crackdown occurring in late August of 1996 (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl&Waring, 2001). Within two years of the meeting, the number of youth homicides dropped to 10. Later however,the number of homicides climbed to 37 in 2005 and had a peak of 52 in 2010 (Kennedy, Braga, Piehl&Waring, 2001).

The working group understood that the law enforcement agencies generally do not have the capacity to completely “eliminate” all gangs or powerfully respond to all gang-offending in gang-troubled jurisdictions (Kennedy, Braga, Piehal&Waring, 2001). It also understood that the program was designed to suit Boston and not necessarily the other sites of the United States. However, they did implement elements that could be easily transferrable from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Los Angeles, California had a problem that was similar to the one in Boston; however, it was also different in many ways. In Los Angeles, the gangs were much larger than the gangs in Boston. Boston gangs were predominantly African American, while the gangs in Los Angeles were predominantly Latino. Also, Los Angeles covered a much larger surface area than what Boston did. In the years ranging from 1995-1998, Los Angeles experienced a rate of 200 homicides in the Hollenbeck area of the city.

On November 11, 2000, the Cuatro Flats gang armed themselves with handguns and at least one high powered semiautomatic assault weapon and traveled to the Hollenbeck area of the city in a van. They opened fire on a group of rival TMCs (The Mob Crew) gang members. Their attack on this gang resulted in two deaths. The death of a TMC and the death of a 10 year old girl who was caught in the crossfire while riding her scooter (Tita, Riley, Ridgeway & Greenwood, 2005).

The city decided it would try a retailing intervention, meaning that it would forewarn gang members that violent crime would have consequences and the city would offer services as an incentive to turning away from crime (services included: job training and development, tattoo removal, and substance abuse treatment). After deciding on what services would be provided to the gang members who turn away from crime, the city introduced retailing to Boyle Heights, an area of Los Angeles where the Curato Flats gang and TMC gang were most active. Upon introducing retailing to the community, it was found that all three types of crime – violent, gang and gun – declined (Tita, Riley, Ridgeway & Greenwood, 2005). The area of Hollenbeck received no retailing intervention and there were no significant changes in violent, gang or gun crimes.

The working group came up with three different phases to find out when exactly the intervention reduced the three categories of offenses – violent crime, gang crime, and gun crime – and whether it took place during the intervention (the suppression phase) or after (the deterrence phase) (Tita, Riley, Ridgeway & Greenwood, 2005). The three different phases were referred to as the prevention phase, suppression phase, and the deterrence phase. Upon conducting their studies, it was found that violent crime decreased during the suppression phase and the decline of violent crimes was even stronger during the deterrence phase.

The positive side of the program done in Los Angeles is that it served as a forum that let agencies exchange ideas and focus on a manageable problem. It proved that diverse criminal justice organizations can work together effectively because each agency had a unique resource that made it more effective that it would have been working alone. Also, it helped build community support. It built community support because it focused on the criminal activity that was at hand and not just the gang members, also, it was not directed towards young people’s affiliation with a gang, but more towards the reduction of violent crime, gang crime, and gun crime (Tita, Riley, Ridgeway & Greenwood, 2005).

Like other studies, no matter how good the outcome may be, there is always a negative side. The negative side of the Los Angeles program is that it focused mainly on the Cuatro Flats gang and the TMC gang, resulting in other shootings involving gangs being overlooked and not obtaining the same attention. There were changes in political leadership which affected the support that the project needed from city officials. Also, there was no sense of ownership of the project. The working group thought that it was just a research project and not something that would transform into new possible operation procedures for other cities. (Tita, Riley, Ridgeway & Greenwood, 2005)

In conclusion, the Boston Gun Project helped the city of Boston decrease its youth homicide victimization.A simple comparison of time-series data conducted by Braga and colleagues (2001) found a statistically significant decrease in the monthly number of youth homicides in Boston, Mass., following implementation of Operation Ceasefire. There was a 63 percent reduction in the average monthly number of youth homicide victims, going from a pretest mean of 3.5 youth homicides per month to a posttest mean of 1.3 youth homicides per month. When control variables (such as Boston’s employment rate, and changes in citywide trends in violence) were added to the data analysis models to test whether other factors may have influenced or caused the reductions, the significant decrease in youth homicides associated with the Ceasefire intervention did not substantively change (OJP, 2011).Although Los Angeles’ study concluded that there was a reduction in violent, gang, and gun crimes, I think that the study should have put equal emphasis on the gangs in the surrounding are, not just two particular gangs. However, the city had a good outcome of putting a decline in violent, gang, and gun crimes.

References

Greco, P. U.S Department of Justice , Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1998).Pattern crimes: firearms trafficking enforcement techniques. Retrieved from website: http://guncite.com/gun_control_guntraffi.html

Kennedy, D. M., Braga, A. A., Piehl, A. M., &Waring, E. J. (2001). Reducing gun violence: the boston gun project's operation ceasefire.National institute of justice,188741, Retrieved from www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/188741.pdf

OJP.Office of Justice Programs, (2011).Operation ceasefire (boston, mass.)(207). Retrieved from website: http://www.crimesolutions.gov/ProgramDetails.aspx?ID=207

Winship, C. (2006).Operation ceasefire/boston gun project. Unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Retrieved from http://www.hks.harvard.edu/criminaljustice-backup/research/bgp.htm

Tita, G. E., Riley, K. J., Ridgeway, G., & Greenwood, P. W. (2005). Reducing gun violence: operation ceasefire in los angeles.National institute of justice,192378, Retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/192378.pdf