Report describes missteps on gangs

Report describes missteps on gangs
Police, ministers missed signs of brewing violence
Globe Staff / June 30, 2008

Boston police largely missed brewing gang conflicts and paid scant attention to the steady increase in gang killings between 2000 and 2006, failures that damaged law enforcement's ability to deal with the violence that erupted earlier this decade and contributed to the crumbling of the so-called Boston Miracle, according to a recent study by researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Infighting in the department, police cuts, and fallout from scandals - such as the accidental killing by police of college student Victoria Snelgrove in 2004 - also hampered the ability of police officials to respond to the rising gang violence, says the 24-page report, which was finished last month and is expected to be published in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law.

The Police Department was not the only institution that missed the signs of rising violence. The report describes missteps and shifting priorities by the Boston TenPoint Coalition, a group of ministers whose cooperation with law enforcement in the mid-1990s was crucial to a dramatic reduction in homicides later that decade.

"Surprisingly, the Boston Police Department and the TenPoint Coalition were ill-prepared to deal with a new cycle of gang violence," the paper states. "In contrast to the 1990s, both suffered from highly dysfunctional relationships within their respective organizations and a lack of strategic focus on disrupting conflicts among high-risk youth."

The study delves into the causes behind the stunning disintegration of an urban success story that was known across the country as the Boston Miracle.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Boston suffered huge spikes in the number of homicides, especially among people 24 years and younger. In 1990, 73 people in that age group were slain in the city, according to the study.

In 1996, police started Operation Ceasefire, which focused on identifying members of gangs, offering them ways out, and threatening them with federal sentences in prisons far away from their families if they continued to be violent. Clergy from the Boston TenPoint Coalition helped by offering services to gang members, such as job and education opportunities, to steer them from trouble.

By 1999, the number of homicides had plummeted to 31 - from a record of 152 in 1990 - and the city received national praise for the decrease. By 2000, Operation Ceasefire had begun to fade away as key police officials were transferred to other units and as the department began to focus on other problems, such as the large number of ex-convicts returning to the city, according to the report.

"The city generally thought they had solved the youth violence problem," said Christopher Winship, one of the study's three authors and a professor of sociology at Harvard. "But you need to contain it before you ever solve it. It's not like a disease that you get cured of."

In the following years, police largely failed to notice that while the overall number of homicides remained low, the number of gang killings was steadily increasing every year, according to the report.

Soon, the overall homicide rate began to climb, and by 2005 the number of slayings had reached a 10-year high of 75.

The study shows, Winship said, that "even when your numbers get great, this is not time to decide that you're going to work on other issues."

Boston police declined to comment on the report. Mayor Thomas M. Menino has not seen the study, said his spokeswoman Dorothy Joyce.

"He's working on reducing crime through community-based policing methods that were very successful in the early '90s," she said. "We always look back to past practices to see what works and what doesn't work to move the Police Department and all the departments forward."

The Rev. Ray Hammond, cofounder of the TenPoint Coalition, said that he agrees with much of the study, but rejected the notion that his organization and the department changed their priorities because they believed the problem was solved. The shift was in many ways forced upon them, he said, by the decline in federal funding that helped pay for the jobs and the programs that ministers offered gang members. Law enforcement, meanwhile, was under pressure to dedicate more resources to homeland security, he said.

"What I don't think any of us thought a lot about was, how do we make this continue if the economy trends down?" Hammond said. "That's not something any of us really planned for or planned on."

The study praises recent changes by both organizations. It notes that the department began implementing Operation Ceasefire again in the spring of 2006 in a small number of neighborhoods and TenPoint clergy members began helping police negotiate truces between gangs.

Under Commissioner Edward F. Davis, who was sworn in during December 2006, Ceasefire has expanded citywide and once again become a crucial strategy for breaking up gangs, according to the study.

Since then, the city has seen fewer homicides and a sharp decline in nonfatal shootings, said one of the authors, Anthony Braga, a senior research associate at the Kennedy School and paid policy adviser at the Police Department. "The city, the Police Department, community members, need to remain very focused on these groups and disrupting these ongoing conflicts among these groups, which they are doing," said Braga.

The other two authors, Winship and David Hureau, have no affiliation with the Police Department; the study was conducted independently for the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.

Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com.

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