Boston Gun Project and Operation Ceasefire
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The Boston Gun Project was a problem-oriented policing enterprise
expressly aimed at taking on a serious, large-scale crime problem—homicide
victimization among young people in Boston. Like many large cities in
the United States, Boston experienced a large, sudden increase in youth
homicide between the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Boston Gun Project
proceeded by: (1) assembling an interagency working group of largely linelevel
criminal justice and other practitioners; (2) applying quantitative and
7Rosenfeld and Decker (1996) note that the officers involved in the program seized 402
firearms in 1996 and, during the first quarter of 1996, seized 104 firearms.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE INTERVENTIONS 237
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, short-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 late spring 1996. While the Boston Gun Project
initially focused on firearms and firearm-related violence, the focus evolved
as it found that gangs and violent gang offending were central to Boston’s
youth gun violence problem. To trigger intervention, any serious violent
offending by a gang (knives, blunt instrument beatings) was enough. In
practice, however, it was mostly gun offending. Because much of the youth
violence epidemic in the 1990s involved firearms and because the Boston
Gun Project is cited as a highly effective way to reduce youth firearmrelated
violence, we devote attention to it in this report.
The project has been extensively described and documented (Kennedy et
al., 1996; Kennedy et al., 1997; Kennedy, 1997). Briefly, a working group of
law enforcement personnel, youth workers, and researchers diagnosed the
youth violence problem in Boston as one of patterned, largely vendetta-like
hostilities(“beefs”) among a small population of chronic criminal offenders,
and particularly among those involved in some 60 loose, informal, mostly
neighborhood-based groups (these groups were called “gangs” in Boston, but
were not Chicago- or LA-style gangs, which are much larger and more formally
organized). As this diagnosis developed, the focus of the project shifted
from its initial framework of juvenile violence and firearm-related violence to
gang violence. A central hypothesis of the working group was 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.
The Operation Ceasefire “pulling-levers” strategy was designed to deter 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). Simultaneously, youth
workers, probation and parole officers, and later churches and other community
groups offered gang members services and other kinds of help. The Operation
Ceasefire working group delivered this 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 and activist black clergy. 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. As described below, Operation Ceasefire also
attempted to disrupt the illegal supply of firearms to youth by focusing enforcement
attention on firearms traffickers.
The evaluation of Operation Ceasefire used a basic one-group timeseries
design to measure the effects of the intervention on youth homicide
and other indicators of nonfatal serious violence in Boston. Braga et al.
(2001a, 2001b) found that the Operation Ceasefire intervention was associated
with a 63 percent decrease in monthly number of Boston youth
homicides, a 32 percent decrease in monthly number of shots-fired calls, a
25 percent decrease in the monthly number of firearm-related assaults, and,
in one high-risk police district given special attention in the evaluation, a 44
percent decrease in monthly number of youth firearm-related assault incidents.
These reductions associated with Operation Ceasefire persisted when
control variables, such as changes in Boston’s employment trends, youth
population, and citywide violence trends, were added to the regression
models. Furthermore, the basic qualitative results also remained when youth
homicide trends in Boston were compared with youth homicide trends in
other large U.S. cities. Boston’s significant youth homicide reduction was
distinct when compared with youth homicide trends in most major U.S. and
New England cities (Braga et al., 2001a, 2001b).8
The dramatic drop in the youth homicide rate in Boston and the associated
analysis of Braga et al. (2001a, 2001b) are compelling. Youth homicides
in Boston were reduced just after the adoption of Operation
Ceasefire.9 However, it is difficult to specify cause and effect. Braga and his
8Piehl et al. (1999) examined the youth homicide time series for exogenous structural
breaks; these analyses suggest that the maximal break in the series occurred in June 1996—
just after the Operation Ceasefire implementation date.
9Boston, like many other U.S. cities, experienced a sudden increase in firearm-related violence
in 2001. Reported crimes involving firearms increased by over 10 percent between
2000 and 2001 and decreased moderately in 2002 (http://www.ci.boston.ma.us/police/pdfs/
dec2003.pdf). McDevitt and his colleagues (2003) suggest that the Boston youth violence
problems are dynamic, and the interventions designed to deal with youth violence need to be
adjusted appropriately. Since 2001, Boston has been expanding Operation Ceasefire to deal
with a wider range of violence problems.
colleagues compare youth homicide before and after the intervention. This
type of methodology holds much appeal when an intervention is the only
notable event occurring in the time period under study. Observational data
from Boston, however, were not derived from an experimental evaluation.
To the contrary, during this period of dramatic declines in youth crime
throughout the country, there were potentially many levers being pulled in
Boston, some controlled by the Operation Ceasefire group and some controlled
by outside (and perhaps unobserved) forces. Furthermore, even if all
of the determinants of violence except Operation Ceasefire were time invariant,
the dynamics that connect enforcement to violence would be complex
(these same issues are discussed in National Research Council, 2001).
An activity undertaken at a specific place and time presumably does not
generate an instant response in violence. And, to the extent that there is a
response, it may merely reflect short-term acceleration in the rate of change
but not in the steady-state levels in youth crime.
The existing research provides some insight into these potential statistical
problems. Braga and his colleagues controlled for demographic shifts,
drug market changes, and employment. Moreover, the evaluation shows
that the Boston trend is very different from trends in other cities. Kennedy
et al. (2001) provide an anecdotal account of the Boston story and Braga et
al. (2001a, 2001b) survey the plausibility that other Boston interventions,
most notably public health interventions, were associated with the sudden
drop. Still, the primary evaluation does allow one to make direct links
between key components of the intervention and the subsequent behavior
of individuals subjected to the intervention. Many complex factors affect
the trajectory of youth violence problems, and, while the there is a strong
association between the youth homicide drop and the implementation of
Operation Ceasefire, it is very difficult to specify the exact role it played in
the reduction of youth homicide in Boston.
Supply-Side Programs
In addition to preventing gun violence amongst gangs, Boston’s Operation
Ceasefire interagency problem-solving group sought to disrupt the
illegal supply of firearms to youth by systematically (Braga et al., 2001a:
199):
• Expanding the focus of local, state, and federal authorities to include
intrastate trafficking in Massachusetts-sourced guns, in addition to
interstate trafficking;
• Focusing enforcement attention on traffickers of those makes and
calibers of guns most used by gang members, on traffickers of guns showing
short time-to-crime, and on traffickers of guns used by the city’s most
violent gangs;
• Attempting restoration of obliterated serial numbers and subsequent
trafficking investigations based on those restorations;
• Supporting these enforcement priorities through analysis of crime
gun traces generated by the Boston Police Department’s comprehensive
tracing of crime guns and by developing leads through systematic debriefing
of (especially) arrestees involved with gangs or involved in violent
crime.
The Boston supply-side approach was implemented in conjunction
with the pulling-levers demand-side strategy to reduce youth violence.
The gun trafficking investigations and prosecutions followed the implementation
of the pulling-levers strategy, so their effects on firearm-related
violence could not be independently established (Braga et al., 2001a).
However, the National Institute of Justice, in partnership with the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, recently funded a demonstration program
in Los Angeles to examine the effects of disrupting the illegal supply
of firearms on the nature of the illegal market and on firearm-related
violence (Tita et al., 2003). In addition to addressing the firearm-related
violence problem in Los Angeles, this interagency law enforcement project
was developed to provide other jurisdictions with guidance on how to
analyze and develop appropriate problem-solving interventions to control
illegal firearms markets.
Other Applications of the Pulling-Levers Focused Deterrence Approach
After the well-publicized success of Boston’s Operation Ceasefire, a
number of jurisdictions began experimenting with these new problemsolving
frameworks to prevent gang and group-involved violence. Braga et
al. (2002) detail the experiences of Minneapolis (MN), Baltimore (MD),
the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles (CA), Stockton (CA), and Indianapolis
(IN) in tailoring the approach to fit their violence problems and
operating environments. Although specific tactics sometimes varied across
the cities, these programs implemented the basic elements of the original
Boston strategy, including the pulling-levers focused deterrence strategy,
designed to prevent violence by and among chronic offenders and groups
of chronic offenders; the convening of an interagency working group representing
a wide range of criminal justice and social service capabilities;
and jurisdiction-specific assessments of violence dynamics, perpetrator and
victim characteristics, and related issues such as drug market characteristics
and patterns of firearms use and acquisition. All were facilitated by a
close, more or less real-time partnership between researchers and practitioners.
Basic pretest/posttest analyses from these initiatives revealed that
these new approaches to the strategic prevention of gang and groupinvolved
violence were associated with reductions in violent crime (Braga
et al., 2002). To date, these replication studies are mostly descriptive in
nature.10