The Relentless Miracle!
Success is not just about ideas or strategy; it’s about sustained superior performance through relentless follow-up. We believe that the key to achieving results is the commitment to follow through— every promise, every task, every time.
The crew at The RF FACTOR™
The Boston Miracle[1] more rightfully referred to as Operation Ceasefire, wasn’t something supernatural initiated by a divine power. It was not contrary to the laws of nature; however, it could certainly be considered a wonderful occurrence that was a bit statistically unlikely.
Ceasefire was a problem-oriented policing initiative implemented in 1996 in Boston, Massachusetts. It was specifically aimed at firearm-related youth violence as a large-scale problem. The program was rooted in innovative practices developed by frontline practitioners and shaped into a strategy by criminologist David M. Kennedy and an interagency working group. It relied heavily on forming partnerships and alliances with key stakeholders from inside and outside law enforcement and getting them to think and act together in a true and robust collaborative process. The program’s focused deterrence approaches (also known as “pulling levers” policing) have been embraced by police departments in the United States and other countries as an effective approach to crime prevention. (Travis, 1998; Dalton, 2002; Deuchar, 2013).
Operation Ceasefire was a program strategist’s dream, with an influential leader, Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans as its champion and an equally committed operational steward a visionary Lieutenant Detective named Gary French. Studies showed that Ceasefire was associated with significant reductions in youth homicide victimization, shots-fired calls for service, and gun assault incidents in Boston[2].
The “Miracle” Sunsets
Despite all that Operation Ceasefire had going for it, the program as designed, ended four years later in 2000. (Braga et al., 2008). I asked longtime friend and occasional colleague, Professor Anthony Braga what led to that end. He suggested I start looking at Chapter 10 of the book he co-edited with David Weisburd, Police Innovation: Contrasting Perspectives[3], a collection of essays on police innovation by various authors.
In Chapter 10, I found Figure 10.1, Youth Homicides in Boston, 1976–2016
Figure 10.1 reflects that Ceasefire was most successful in lowering youth homicide rates between 1996 and 2000. Then for some reason, the downward trend ended abruptly. Beginning in 2001 and continuing to 2007, youth homicide rates were climbing back to pre-Ceasefire levels. The sustainability of the Boston Miracle’s supply of crime reduction benefits was in jeopardy. (Braga, Hureau & Winship, 2008).
Moreover, other high-profile replications of the Boston approach proved unsustainable during that period. In Baltimore, local political problems undermined the implementation process (Braga, Kennedy & Tita, 2002). In Minneapolis, the strategy was abandoned as the participating agencies returned to their traditional methods of dealing with violence (Kennedy & Braga, 1998).
As a former Chief of Strategic Planning, I learned that an improvement that could not be sustained was not an improvement. Moreover, you could find yourself dealing with a more serious problem than the one you had set out to solve.
The larger Ceasefire story
According to Braga, Winship, and Turchan, the difficulties experienced in Boston and by other jurisdictions stemmed from a limited understanding of the larger Ceasefire story.[4] I’ve selected four points from their report that provide a small glimpse into that larger story:
· Ceasefire was an evolving collaboration that spanned the boundaries that divide criminal justice agencies from one another, criminal justice agencies from human service agencies, and criminal justice agencies from the community. Such collaborations are necessary to legitimize, fund, equip, and operate complex strategies that are most likely to succeed in both controlling and preventing youth violence (Moore, 2002).
· Boston’s innovations included, newly formed relationships among the police and other law enforcement and social service agencies and between the police and the community, with the latter creating important mechanisms for police accountability.
· Boston’s success in reducing youth violence has been attributed to multiple interconnected layers of programs and strategies: public health interventions, police–probation partnerships, enhanced federal prosecutions, police–black minister partnerships, and the Ceasefire-focused deterrence strategy.
· A narrow and inappropriate interpretation of Boston’s success as simply being due to Operation Ceasefire creates the danger of unrealistic expectations of success, serious implementation problems in replicating the Ceasefire program, and an inability to sustain implemented violence prevention programs.
Within these points, certain keywords appear crucial to Ceasefire’s success: collaboration, innovation, accountability, partnership, and sustainability.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary definitions:
Collaboration - to work jointly with others.
Innovation - the introduction of something new.
Accountability - an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or account for one's actions.
Partnership - a relationship resembling a legal partnership and usually involving close cooperation between parties having specified and joint rights and responsibilities.
Sustain – to keep up, prolong.
Two Key Elements
Braga, Winship, and Turchan identified two key elements to support the formation of innovative strategic partnerships and establish trust: first, “a network of capacity consisting of dense and productive relationships that partners could be drawn from”, and second, “a new mechanism of police accountability” necessary to the building of trust that the new programs would prove beneficial to the community.
Braga, Winship, and Turchan concluded that Operation Ceasefire simply could not have been launched without either a network of partners who were a central component of its design or the trust that derived from accountability.
For example, the Ten Point Coalition and the Black Ministerial Alliance, Boston's organization of traditional, mainstream black churches, were powerful political forces in the city who engaged in public debate over important issues such as excessive use of force by the police. They formed a crucial network of partners that Operation Ceasefire relied upon, and whose trust was needed to sustain the partnership. A trust that could only be earned through continued police transparency and accountability.
Losing Faith
Suspecting that leadership issues within the Boston Police Department contributed to Operation Ceasefire’s decline, I looked at the Commissioners serving between 2000 and 2007. It was during this period, that youth homicides began to climb, eventually rising to pre-Ceasefire levels. I plotted the names of the Commissioners serving during those years in Figure 10.1 below.
Paul Evans served as Commissioner from 1994 to 2003. He was the influential leader who first championed the initiation of Operation Ceasefire. Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole served between 2004 and 2007. Edward Davis served as Commissioner from 2007 to 2013. During his tenure youth homicide rates fell significantly once again.
The exercise left me with two questions:
Why did Operation Ceasefire end almost three years before the tenure of Paul Evans ended?
How was Edward Davis able to restart Operation Ceasefire in 2007?
To get those answers, I contacted Anthony Braga again for guidance. He told me I would find the answers I was seeking in an article he co-authored entitled: Losing Faith?[5]
Why Ceasefire Ceased
The highly successful Operation Ceasefire program ended when Lieutenant Detective Gary French, the “trail boss” of the approach since it was first implemented in mid-1996, left the Youth Violence Strike Force (YVSF) to lead the Sexual Assault Unit in January 2000.[6]
Ideally, the handoff of a successful violent crime reduction program from one commander to another should go smoothly, each party should share the organization’s purpose and vision for the program to maintain program continuity without breaking cadence. They did not. It was the first sign that Operation Ceasefire was headed for trouble.
“The new commander did not continue the weekly Ceasefire meetings and YVSF operations devolved chiefly into reactive law enforcement approaches, such as serving outstanding warrants, to apprehend serious violent offenders.”[7]
Policies drive - Adhering to Policies Sustain
A common cause for program breakdown is the failure to “institutionalize” it within the organization so that even the newest employee hired could learn “why” the program exists, its purpose, vision, strategy, and tactics. The failure to institutionalize could have been the case with Ceasefire, even though the program had been in operation for 4 years. This failure would also make the program vulnerable to smoke-screen catalysts for change every time a new participant with any clout joined the program. Smoke-screen catalysts such as the “Not invented here” syndrome and the “I’m the expert” syndrome.
In thinking about institutionalization three questions come to mind:
1. Could the new commander have disobeyed a department-issued policy directive to hold weekly Ceasefire meetings to which he should have been held accountable?
2. Could the new Commander have chosen to ignore the department’s policy directive outlining the Ceasefire tactics and implementation plans to be followed, choosing instead to employ his own more “reactive” approaches?
3. Did a department policy directive ever exist?
Policies and directives can drive innovations, but relentless follow-up is required to sustain them and hold partners accountable for doing what they signed on to do.
Let’s consider my two questions on institutionalization from opposite perspectives: a) that an official Ceasefire department directive existed, and b) that such a directive did not exist.
If an official Ceasefire directive existed and was initially disobeyed or overlooked, the follow-up and accountability review process should have tagged the exceptions. Detrimental changes to the program persisted indicating that a directive either did not exist or if it did the follow-up/accountability process failed to expose it or never took place.
As to the perspective that a formal department policy or directive did not exist. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that was the case. We have all been there. After all, when we’re out there chasing criminals and solving crimes there’s never enough time to write stuff like that down. Notwithstanding, shouldn’t something so valuable to public safety as Operation Ceasefire was proven to be – something so surprising to be referred to as a miracle - be institutionalized as the way of doing business?
I believe that the "institutionalization" of a program involves embedding best practices of significant value to your stakeholders into one or more of the solution’s key processes thereby making the practice the standard way of doing things. Moreover, it means, that formal directives and procedures exist to which the parties involved are held accountable for following.
The rockier the road to institutionalization - the more obstacles and challenges there are to overcome - the greater the need for relentless follow-up to ensure those involved are held accountable for doing what’s working and working to fix what’s not.
The problematic handoff wasn’t the only potentially fatal blow to Ceasefire. There were a few more:[8]
The existing network of criminal justice, social service, and community-based agencies was no longer directly focused on disrupting ongoing cycles of gang violence in Boston.
Between 2001 and 2006, gang-related homicides grew as conflicts among gangs continued largely unchecked.
Problematic relationships between the Boston Police Department and Ten Point Coalition further prevented these agencies from carefully constructing and mounting a coordinated response to serious violence among Boston gang members.
Homicides and shootings increased without abatement, citizen perceptions of the Boston Police grew increasingly negative, and Boston Police officers generated more complaints of disrespectful treatment from minority residents.
The unraveling of the so-called “Boston Miracle” may not be surprising. Sustaining effective collaborations in which the partners truly think and act together over an extended period is challenging. Yet, it must be done as no single institution can mount a substantial response to complex youth violence problems. Institutions must coordinate and combine their skills and actions in collaborative ways that can force multiply their separate impacts.
There are other compelling reasons to rely on collaborations that transcend the boundaries that separate criminal justice agencies from one another, and human service agencies and criminal justice agencies from the community. Such collaborations are essential for leveraging each group’s unique value, knowledge, and resources most relevant to helping control and prevent youth violence.
It can also be challenging to sustain initiatives that draw upon the resources and capabilities of partners distributed across multiple organizations.
A Miracle of Miracles?
As Figure 10.1 reflects, youth homicides rose to pre-ceasefire levels during the period 2000-2007.
In 2007, Edward Davis was named Boston Police Commissioner. Dr. Anthony Braga was appointed Chief Policy Advisor to the Commissioner, nobody knows more about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to violent crime reduction strategies than Braga.
After several years of ineffective responses to a resurgence of youth violence, affecting the partnership between Ten Point ministers and Boston police officers, both agencies appropriately refocused their efforts on community-based violence prevention.
In response to the alarming rise in serious youth violence, the Boston Police Department, and its partners, reintroduced the Operation Ceasefire approach in mid-2007. This time Commissioner Davis was the program’s principal champion, guided by Dr. Braga his chief policy advisor who wrote the book on the ins and outs of what made the first Ceasefire so successful at one point, and what led to its collapse.
Operation Ceasefire II was designed to address the persistent violent conflicts among gangs and draw upon the principles of violence prevention established in the original Ceasefire strategy. Remaining at the strategy’s core was the collaborative approach within the existing network of criminal justice, social service, and community-based partners in Boston. By implementing a focused deterrence regime, youth homicide rates experienced a significant decline once again, a pattern that continued beyond Commissioner Davis’s tenure. (Figure 10.1).
Getting a second chance to protect young lives –could this be the Relentless Miracle?
BE RELENTLESS
[1] Duane, Daniel (January 2006). "Straight Outta Boston Why is the "Boston Miracle" -- the only tactic proven to reduce gang violence -- being dissed by the L.A.P.D., the FBI, and Congress?". Mother Jones. Retrieved November 24, 2024.
[2] Braga, Anthony; Kennedy, David; Waring, E.J.; Piehl, Anne (2001). "Problem-Oriented Policing, Deterrence, and Youth Violence: An Evaluation of Boston's Operation Ceasefire". Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. 38 (3): 195–226. doi:10.1177/0022427801038003001. S2CID 1218757.
[3] Weisburd D, Braga AA, eds. Police Innovation. In: Police Innovation: Contrasting Perspectives. Cambridge University Press; 2019: i-ii.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Braga, Anthony A., David Hureau, and Christopher Winship. "Losing Faith? Police, Black Churches, and the Resurgence of Youth Violence in Boston." Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 6.1 (Fall 2008): 141-172
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
Excellent piece, Pete. It's not enough to develop a strategy & implement it operationally within the agency & with stakeholders. If policy isn't written & leadership at levels doesn't embrace it & relentlessly hold themselves and others accountable, it never becomes institutionalized. No matter what the change is leadership (along with education & training) makes the new idea "the way we've always done it," not just a flash in the pan visit from the good idea fairy.
Great article Pete. Thanks for posting. Having been the operational commander of the Cincinnati Police Department’s CIncinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence, I’ve seen this play out. It’s much easier to refocus a violence reduction effort than it is to rebuild it after it’s been dismantled. Key is agencies need someone capable of driving it every day with the cops and all of the partners. That person can’t be someone who makes it all about themselves. My cops and I used to stand behind the cameras at the press conferences and laugh listening to people who were no part of our efforts take credit for them and describe things that never took place. Key for us was that the other CPD cops, our operational partners and more importantly the violent gang members knew who was responsible. For us, street cred always trumped the opportunity to say look at us. Having helped implement successful violence reduction strategies in other cities, the right leader, who can drive the effort, by sheer force of personality if needed, is critical.