A fresh grip on gangs, gun crimes

Four years ago, Cincinnati was getting a reputation no city wants, one of out-of-control shootings, often by gangs.

Midway through 2006, with killings headed for a city-record 89, police cracked down with a “zero tolerance” plan. A 60-officer task force swept inner Cincinnati's high-crime neighborhoods, arresting anyone for everything from jaywalking to homicide.

Some 2,600 arrests later, police could claim street crime was down, but the homicides kept mounting. And the department's relationship with people in the affected neighborhoods — poisonous for years and worse since its fatal shooting of an unarmed black man set off riots in 2001 — was fraying.

“We were all sort of at wits' end,” Mayor Mark Mallory told The World-Herald.

Then the city tried a different approach, essentially an organized form of creative persuasion. And the homicide toll began easing, from 89 that year to 68 the next — the biggest annual decline of the decade. Last year 60 were slain.

The mayor is so convinced that the credit belongs to that persuasion project, the Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence, he refuses to call it a “program” anymore. From now on, he said, it's simply how Cincinnati polices.

“It's the way we do business.”

Many U.S. cities, including Omaha, have spent years looking for ways to curb gang violence. Most efforts have not yielded results as dramatic as those in Cincinnati, which follows an unorthodox, aggressive recipe invented in the mid-1990s.

It's not an easy strategy.

Executing it requires high levels of local research, political will, cooperation among law enforcement agencies and social service groups, plus strong neighborhood-level backing, according to interviews with crime analysts and studies of some of the 60 or so cities where the approach has been tried. The difficulty of mounting and maintaining the strategy means it's usually fully undertaken in large cities where people are convinced gang violence has reached a crisis level.

Omaha, averaging about 32 homicides a year over the past decade, uses parts of the strategy but not all, and not to the same degree or with the same level of organization as cities like Cincinnati. Several Omaha officials, public and private, say the city's anti-gang efforts are stronger now than ever and say Omaha is focused on tactics that can make long-term reductions in gang violence.

The Cincinnati strategy is an immediate approach — a way to reduce killings now, not cure the long-term social ills in which gang activity is rooted. It's based on a concept criminologists call “focused deterrence” — zeroing in on a small core of worst offenders and using creative ways to persuade gang members to stop shooting.

The idea was born in Boston two decades ago.

* * *

Like many cities in the late 1980s and early '90s, Boston's core was awash in a potent new form of cocaine called crack. The drug was fueling sales competition — and bloodletting — among gangs.

Among experts, pessimism was high that police or courts could accomplish much. Neither traditional techniques, such as intensified police patrols and tougher sentences, nor a flurry of experiments such as boot camps were making much of a dent.

Boston's strategy grew from an unusual partnership: in-the-trenches cops from the gang unit, black clergy from the worst-hit neighborhoods and Harvard University professors. The Boston Gun Project, as the research effort was dubbed, began by dissecting the problem of gang homicides.

Its “aha! moment,” the lead professor, David Kennedy, later wrote, was the discovery of what's since become a common principle of criminology: how relatively few offenders were involved. Sixty percent of the youth homicides could be traced to vendetta-style, must-get-respect hostility among about five dozen gangs. Their core membership was just 1,300 individuals, about 1 percent of the city's youths — hardly enough to populate two average American high schools.

Armed with that insight, researchers drew other players into the working group — federal, state and local prosecutors, city departments, community groups and social workers who dealt with gangs on the street.

From those odd bedfellows evolved the new strategy, which the city dubbed Operation Ceasefire and launched in 1996.

Its essentials:

Ÿ A laser-like focus on understanding one specific problem, gun homicides among youths: They set aside worries about root causes — poverty, racism, education, broken families and drugs — instead concentrating on the here and now. Intense research into why people were shooting one another produced a list of the “worst of the worst” gang members, replete with detailed personal information.

Focused deterrence: All the gang members on the list who could be summoned — most were on probation or parole — were called to a giant meeting. Police gave them a message: We know who you are and what you've been doing, and from now on an entire gang will be punished if one of its members kills.

A second message came from clerics, ex-gang members and the parents of victims: Your neighborhood loves you and needs you, but not if you're dead. You are better than this.

The social workers added a third message: If you want out of gang life, we'll help you find jobs, addiction treatment, education, whatever.

The three messages — group punishment awaits, do right not wrong, and here's a way out of thug life — became the strategy's hallmarks, Kennedy told The World-Herald.

Making it stick: When killings happened, police carried out their threats against the offending gang, using the personal data gathered earlier to pressure members, through unusual tactics called “pulling levers.” They impounded the unregistered cars of gang members, for instance, and visited their homes unannounced to talk to parents. The cops shut down favorite gang hangouts, busted members for public drinking, enforced probation curfews in “bed check” style and turned any legal screw they could — all while repeating the message: The crackdown continues until the shooting stops.

Just as important, Kennedy said, was what police didn't do. They avoided indiscriminate tactics of the past — such as neighborhood sweeps and traffic checkpoints — to encourage now-budding cooperation between residents and police.

What happened next came to be called “the Boston Miracle.”

The city's homicides among people 24 and younger fell from an average of 44 a year in the first half of the decade to 26 in 1996, the first year of Ceasefire. In 1997, the number dropped to 15. Total homicides, of all ages, fell from an annual average of 100 during the decade's first half to 31 in the second.

* * *

Of course, the meaning of the numbers — and whether they could be sustained — was much-debated and still is, Kennedy said. Nationally, homicides eased over that period, from a high of 24,703 in 1991 to 18,208 in 1997, by FBI count. Yet Boston's drop was so striking, especially among youths, that other cities rushed to copy its crisis-intervention strategy.

At the same time, Uncle Sam handed the new idea a mixed blessing.

The U.S. Justice Department in 1998 financed a 10-city pilot project — Omaha participated as an unofficial observer — and then in 2001 the feds set up a grant program, Project Safe Neighborhoods, or PSN, to give cities a chance to re-create Boston's approach.

The federal attention gave the new strategy credibility, Kennedy said. But it also introduced complications.

PSN at first emphasized only a small ingredient of the Boston recipe — federal prosecution of gun crimes. Cities taking this route threatened, sometimes in TV commercials and billboards, to put every gun criminal in federal prison for a long stretch.

Prosecutors did put more shooters behind bars, but there was a tradeoff, Kennedy said. Gun crimes proved too numerous to make every one a federal case. Shooters still on the streets soon realized that, he said, and tended to see racism, grudges or luck as determining which cases prosecutors took to federal court.

That reduced the threat's deterrent effect, he said.

Eventually the Justice Department gave cities more leeway in designing their PSN programs, acknowledging that “exclusive reliance on increased federal prosecution (of gun crimes) was of limited utility.” It's still considered an important tactic — a way to get the worst shooters off the street — in many places, including Nebraska, where federal firearms prosecutions have risen more than fourfold over the past decade.

* * *

In a criminology climate that increasingly demands evidence — not merely hunches or slogans — as a basis for public policy, focused deterrence has begun to prove itself, said Kennedy, now at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He advises about a dozen cities or states each year on the strategy, including Cincinnati. He describes the approach as “simple but complicated.”

Simple, he said, because it's like “what a really good parent does” — threatening only credible punishments and carrying them out consistently.

Complicated because “many moving parts” and disparate players must work together, even as a program's experienced people retire, move on or get voted out of office.

The strategy is hard to sustain because political currents tug at it from two extremes: Get-tough politicians want to turn it into an all-police-and-courts crackdown. Idealists want to make it all social services, to combat poverty, racism, poor education, unemployment, broken families and other root causes.

Focused deterrence, he argues, offers “a way off that seesaw” — a way to reduce killings now instead of a generation from now.

* * *

Mallory, Cincinnati's mayor, is a believer in the Boston-style intervention.

Still, he said, “it's a tough concept” to communicate. “We've struggled.” He recalled his bewilderment during his first phone call to Kennedy about the strategy. “It just didn't make sense to me. We're going to round up these bad guys and say, ‘Stop'?”

But the idea — and initial results — captivated Mallory, a manager by schooling who spent 11 years in the Ohio Legislature before becoming the first African-American popularly elected to Cincinnati's mayorship. Most citizens can't describe the strategy, he said, but support it because he can point to a 37 percent reduction in homicides since its outset — data verified by the University of Cincinnati, “no mumbo-jumbo.”

The riverside city of 334,000 has taken extensive steps to cement the strategy so that it will endure. For instance, best-practices manuals have been designed with help from the Cincinnati-based multinational firm Procter & Gamble. The goal is for the practices to be institutionalized to the point they outlast changes in politicians and personnel.

Sustainability “is what sets us apart from other cities,” said CIRV's executive director, S. Gregory Baker, who added that its research-heavy techniques are being extended to other crime problems, such as domestic violence and metals theft.

One big payoff, Baker said, is that the moral voice of Cincinnati — the way the police and people talk about violence — is now more unified and thus better able to confront gun culture.

“Criminals no longer can hide behind, ‘Well, the Police Department is racist,' ” he said.

The city devoted about $500,000 to CIRV during its first two years, but that didn't require finding new money, Mallory said. Cincinnati has always spent big on public safety, so existing funds were simply redirected, he said.

Without CIRV, Dante Ingram “wouldn't be here. ... I'd be locked up or dead.”

Ingram, 32, was on probation for drug and gun convictions when the initiative began and was in the first group summoned to hear its warnings and moral appeals. What made the difference for him, that day and since, he said, was “seeing that people really cared.”

CIRV helped him land two brief jobs and saw him through another brush with the law. Later, the program offered him a job as one of its 15 “street advocates,” as Cincinnati calls its city employees who reinforce the no-violence message in neighborhoods and guide those who want out of gang life to social services, such as education or employment help.

Arthur Campell, 27, is volunteering with CIRV while hoping to get hired on. He was atop its “worst” list when he got out of prison not long ago, he said, but seized the chance to start changing.

“It's a good program for someone to stop and think what you're doing with your life.”

Contact the writer: 444-1140, roger.buddenberg@owh.com

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