New Approach Cripples Boston’s Gang Network

First, the hard facts:

Homicides in Boston hit an all-time high of 152 in 1990. Eighteen of the victims were 17 or younger. Gangs had turned sections of Roxbury into combat zones. Hardly anyone under 25 walked the streets of Dorchester without a knife or gun. Drug dealers carried out drive-by shootings in cars and on bicycles. One pack of thugs hunted down a young woman and stabbed her 130 times.

Gang behavior had become so bold--particularly after 1989, when a Superior Court judge threw out a gun charge against a teenage tough and blasted the police for violating the youth’s 4th Amendment rights--that gangs disrupted courtrooms at will and intimidated so many witnesses in the corridors that a judge in Dorchester District Court called for assigning the National Guard to secure order.

Boston had reached the point, Police Commissioner Paul Evans recalled the other day, “that there were questions about the future viability of the city. Back then, we really had no sense of the gang structure, and not very good intelligence. We were just going around answering 911 calls and picking up bodies.”

But today, armed with an innovative, low-cost program that is attracting national attention, Boston is winning the war it was in danger of losing. Last year, homicides dropped to 59--a 30-year low. The number of nonlethal shootings was cut in half between 1995 and 1996. School violence is down 20%. Perhaps most remarkable, at a time when U.S. youngsters are 12 times more likely to die by gunfire than their counterparts in the rest of the industrialized world, no Boston teenager under 17 has been killed by a gun or a knife since July 1995.

To find out how Boston took back its streets, hop in Kenny Israel’s unmarked Ford LTD as he turns off Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury. Israel and his partner, David Singletary, are members of the police department’s elite Youth Violence Strike Force. They are dressed in baggy pants, bulky jackets and boots. Singletary wears a diamond earring. Knots of street-corner teenagers see them approach and drift off, trying to look indifferent. The two cops know almost every one of them by name.

In the back seat of their car, Traina Johnson, an unarmed probation officer, is saying: “OK, just to let you know ahead of time, our first stop is [an] assault-and-battery on a police officer and receiving stolen property. He’s got a 9 o’clock curfew.”

Moments later, they are knocking at the door of a two-story house. It is 9:10 p.m. The aunt answers and, no, Seth isn’t home. Johnson tells her this means big trouble; Seth could go to jail for violating the terms of his probation. The three visitors are polite, direct. The aunt says, “I’ll do what I can.”

A Strategy of Collaboration

Juvenile crime is declining nationally, but Boston’s drop has been unusually dramatic. It is happening, criminologists say, because various agencies, ranging from the district attorney’s and U.S. attorney’s offices to the police department and community groups, are setting aside institutional egos to agree on a collaborative strategy.

Plus there is the new role assigned to probation officers such as Johnson. No longer do they just sit behind a daytime desk at the courthouse. By putting some of its probation officers on the streets with the police in an operation the city calls “Night Light,” Boston has changed the rules. It has made probation a deterrent instead of a joke that was widely ignored with impunity.

No longer do offenders on conditional liberty just see their probation officers for a weekly five-minute courthouse check-in. Now they may encounter them at home or on the street, day or night. Anywhere the police are, probation officers are apt to be too, and any violation of court-ordered restrictions--such as ignoring curfew or associating with undesirables--can lead to the state prison at Walpole.

“I think for a lot of kids, Night Light represents an out,” said Rev. Raymond Hammond, president of the Ten Point Coalition, a religious group combating juvenile violence. “They can say, ‘I can resist peer pressure now. It’s been decided for me. I have to be home.’ On a secret level, this is what many of them want.

“The police aren’t using storm-trooper tactics, and the statistics are clear,” Hammond said. “The program is working. The streets are safer. There’s been improvement in every neighborhood. We’re not just talking about Beacon Hill.”

Notorious Gang Now Out of Business

One advantage probation officers have is that, unlike police officers, they can enter a home without a warrant to check on a probationer. They can elicit information more easily than the police because of their influence over and knowledge of probationers. And riding in the back of a patrol car they can spot their “cases” and know immediately if they are in violation of probation. By using a strategy of intervention, deterrence and enforcement, the reasoning goes, they and the police can react before the 911 call has to be made.

The Boston Police Department’s attitude toward gangs and guns is one of “zero tolerance.” When the Intervale gang, one of the city’s most notorious, ignored law enforcement demands to end a series of shootings, officers picked up 23 of its members on the first day of school in 1995, most of them on federal drug charges. The police then called in a National Guard bulldozer to raze the gang’s shack in a vacant lot and to knock down an oak tree into which members had tossed a hundred pairs of sneakers as a symbol of territorial rights.

Intervale is now out of business. And gang leader Freddie Cardoza, who had taunted police officers by casually flipping a bullet when they stopped to question him, is doing 20 years in a federal prison. He was convicted as a career criminal in possession of ammunition--a single bullet.

“That’s the kind of cooperation there is now between law enforcement agencies,” said James Jordan, the police department’s director of strategic planning. “Before, if you’d tried to get the Justice Department to prosecute a guy for having one bullet, they’d have looked at you like you had two heads.”

Additionally, police have been helped in efforts to get troublemakers off the streets by a new state law that mandates a six-month prison sentence for juveniles in illegal possession of firearms--51 juveniles have been convicted in the last 13 months--and by a court ruling that a gathering of three or more people can constitute a gang.

With few exceptions, the kids in Boston doing the killing and the kids getting killed are no strangers to the criminal justice system. In fact, a study by Harvard University’s School of Government revealed that 75% of the victims and killers had already been arraigned in court at least once; almost half had been on probation; three-quarters were associated with gangs.

Between 1988 and 1989, probation officer Bill Stewart saw his caseload reduced by 16--all of them murdered. “I got tired of burying my kids,” he said. “I mean, man, I’ve got teenage cases walking around with colostomy bags because they stepped on someone’s sneakers wrong.”

Stewart recalled the night he tried to comfort one of his dying probationers on the street. He looked at the group that had gathered around the wounded youth and recognized more than a dozen faces. All were on probation and all should have been at home under the terms of their court orders.

Widespread Interest in the Program

The inspiration for Night Light, now in its fifth year, was born then. Police officers initially were leery of Stewart’s suggestion to start joint patrols because probation officers were viewed as the liberal, desk-bound social workers of the justice system. But skepticism faded quickly. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has called Boston a model city in making streets safer. President Clinton chose Boston in February as the site to announce a $435-million campaign against juvenile crime. More than 60 cities and states have contacted Boston to discuss its strategy in dealing with youth violence.

Boston’s strategy may not be applicable everywhere, criminologists say, particularly in sprawling, diverse cities like Los Angeles, where gangs are far larger and most structured. Boston has only about 1,300 hard-core gang members (gangs are responsible for 60% of the city’s homicides), and has been spared the presence of such groups as the Bloods and the Crips.

“I’m not one who thinks we have all the answers by any means,” said Suffolk Country Dist. Atty. Ralph Martin, whose office handles 50,000 criminal cases a year. “But if we’re able to disrupt a beef between two gangs so they decide to go their separate ways, if we’re able to keep a kid from violating probation so that he stays home, then perhaps a shot doesn’t get fired, perhaps someone doesn’t get killed.”