Experts such as James Q. Wilson have noted that the inclination for young people to join gangs is understandable as a part of inner city sociopathy, and that efforts to suppress the existence of gangs is fruitless.

For Boston law enforcement officials, not to mention the anxious residents of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, the recent spate of shootings and deaths must bring to mind the inimitable Yogi Berra’s observation that “it’s like déjà vu all over again.”

The epidemic of youth violence, which so far this year has claimed the lives of 15 young people — including presumed innocents Chiara Levin and Quinntessa Blackwell — echoes the social chaos experienced by these same Boston neighborhoods from the early until the late 1990s, and is a problem infecting the social fabric of many urban centers nationwide. In that similarly-violent decade, efforts such as the Boston Gun Project, introduced with cooperation of Boston police, court and parole officers, community leaders, and policy experts from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, helped reduce youth homicides by two-thirds, as well as lowering overall nonfatal gun violence. With the latest shooting taking place in the mid-day rush on an MBTA bus in what has become an all too-inevitable event, the need is clearly here for reexamining some of the techniques used successfully to suppress gun violence and stem what law enforcement officials refer to as the “cycle of violence” operating among Boston’s sociopathic gang members.

Some kind of response has already been called for, of course, from citizens alarmed by the spiking homicide rate, and the inevitability that some of the uncontained gang violence will — as it already has — spill over into the lives of residents peacefully going about their daily business. Some contend that inner city neighborhoods, with fatherless families and unsupervised young lives, serve as natural breeding grounds for youthful crime. Others call for innovative, but seemingly hollow, gestures, such as requiring teenagers to pull up their baggy pants and cease exhibiting gang-like fashion statements.

But experts such as James Q. Wilson have noted that the inclination for young people to join gangs is understandable as a part of inner city sociopathy, and that efforts to suppress the existence of gangs is fruitless. “The conventional thinking,” he says, is “that the purpose of society is to prevent gangs from forming or, if they do form, to ensure that people in gangs will do harmless things, like playing midnight basketball.” Those attempted reforms only make gang membership seem more legitimate to prospective recruits, and for Professor Wilson the reason that young men join gangs is obvious:  “They engage in gang activity,” he says, “because they lack a family structure or because the gang makes life on the street so difficult and so dangerous that unless they join, they lack protection against others.”

What is called for, and what proved to be a workable and productive solution to the youthful homicides in the 1990s, was a targeted response from law enforcement officials, the criminal justice system, and other actors in the crime prevention process. That technique involved three steps: a “surge,” “containment” of the illegal gun use, and what David M. Kennedy; Anne M. Piehl; Anthony A. Braga, the Kennedy School of Government researchers who worked on the Boston Gun Project, have termed a “use-reduction strategy” for controlling the use of handguns by teenage gang members. Communities under assault by reckless, gun-toting teenagers with chips on their shoulders do not wish to wait while sociologists try to change family dynamics in inner neighborhoods or the Mayor’s office proposes giving young felons $200 Target gift cards in a specious gun buy-back plan. What they want, and what law enforcement has to do, is to swiftly act against spiraling gun violence with all players in the criminal justice system making a joint effort. 

“The aim,” says the Harvard researchers, should be to make a “concerted, interagency response the norm where gang violence is concerned, to make gang members understand that this is now the case, and to back it up with a predictability, speed, and weight that will eventually prevent gang violence even when police and other authorities are not present.” The important message, one that changes the customary approach to gang intervention, is not that gangs cannot continue to exist, but that continued events involving guns will henceforth be dealt with in a swift, strong, and deliberate way to make the lives of offending gang members very uncomfortable. Professor Braga calls this the “‘pulling levers’ focused deterrence strategy,” an attempt “to prevent gang and group gun violence by making would-be offenders believe that severe consequences would follow such violence and change their behavior.”

One factor working to law enforcement’s advantage is that the gun violence, though hard to pinpoint in location, is being committed by a relatively small universe of players, most of whom have been previously “touched” by some aspect of the criminal justice system, and who are therefore known by it. Professor Braga, for instance, points out that when gun and knife homicides occurring between 1991 and 1994 are reviewed, both the victims and perpetrators of the murders were often known to the justice system. “Of the victims,” he says, “75 percent had been arraigned for at least one offense in Massachusetts courts, and 20 percent had served time in a youth or adult detention center .  .  . Of the offenders, a little over 75 percent had been arraigned for at least one offense in Massachusetts courts, 25 percent had served time, over 50 percent had been on probation in the past, and 25 percent were on probation when they committed the crime.”

Not only that, the researchers “mapped gang turf and gang size,” identifying the location of “61 different crews with around 1,300 members” who congregate in targeted neighborhoods, and comprise a relatively small sub-segment of Boston’s overall population. The good news? “Gang members represented less than 1 percent of all Boston youth,” Professor Braga says, “and less than 3 percent of youth in high-risk neighborhoods.”

When police and other law enforcement members can isolate prospective felons easily, they have a better chance of reducing gun violence. Gang members who have come in and out of the criminal system are easier to find and more susceptible to legal and supervisory pressure. Professor Wilson points to Boston’s successful Night Lights program, where parole officers accompanied police officers on night patrols, as an innovative way that the criminal justice system can keep pressure on known offenders with a proclivity for gun violence. Parole violators are subject to being put in check, making the presence of a parole officer particularly effective. “By driving around in police cars and by being equipped with the special powers that probation officers have because they are dealing with people already adjudicated by the criminal justice system,” Wilson says, “they can enter spaces and ask questions that police officers ordinarily cannot.”

Putting the spotlight on known offenders — the likely perpetrators of future crimes — helps diminish the likelihood of violent outbreaks. “The effect of Night Lights has been to make probationers realize that the eyes of the community are steadily upon them,” Professor Wilson says. “At any given moment, a probation officer may appear. At any time, you had better have an explanation for why you're not at home or not working.”

Potential shooters with criminal records then begin to realize the high potential cost of subsequent wrongdoing, as do other gang members who have been given a direct and unmistakable warning by authorities as part of the Boston Gun Project’s communication campaign, “often carried out face-to-face between police officers and gang members, to deliver the message that it is violence that has provoked this unusual, heightened activity, and that it will take an end to the violence to make it stop.”

When this message resonates, the hope is that aggressive gang members will put down their weapons, and non-gang teenagers, who may arm themselves out of fear rather than malicious intent, will no longer feel the need to brandish weapons, and a type of serendipitous “ceasefire” will come to the neighborhoods. As the Kennedy School researchers see it, “a period of reduced violence could act as a ‘firebreak’ across the current violence dynamic,” with the ultimate objective “that a successful intervention to reduce gang violence in the short term will have a disproportionate, sustainable impact in the long term.”

Of course, this process involves many other players, notable among them local law-abiding residents whose support is required to allow police, for example, to forcefully quell acts of possible violence on the part of minority youth without appearing to be overly aggressive or insensitive to citizens’ civil rights. “Communities will not support any indiscriminate, highly aggressive crackdowns that put nonviolent youth at risk of being swept into the criminal justice system,” says Professor Braga. “Before implementing a pulling-levers strategy, police need to engage community members in an ongoing conversation about legitimate and illegitimate means to control crime.” But with gun shots ringing out on the streets of Boston on a near daily basis, that seems like an ongoing conversation in which the community will very likely wish to participate.