Wellford C.S., Pepper J.V. - Firearms and Violence[c] What Do We Know[q] (2005)(en)

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

What Has Been Learned?

While broad support for the pulling-levers approach may be justified for many reasons, the committee found modest scientific evidence that demonstrates whether these types of targeted policing programs can effectively lower crime and violence. Clearly, there was pronounced and important change in the youth homicide rate in Boston over the period of the intervention, some of which was arguably due to Operation Ceasefire, some due to secular changes in youth homicide, and some due to other (and perhaps unknown) factors. The particular effects of this intervention, however, are unknown. Furthermore, in the committee’s view, the existing data and methods make it difficult to assess how Operation Ceasefire and other similar policing programs affect crime. Researchers cannot hope to credibly control for the many confounders that influence violence and crime using simple time-series comparisons. With similar policing programs being adopted in a number of other areas, there may be opportunities to combine data from these sites to provide more persuasive estimates. Invariably, however, researchers will be confronted with the fact that the programs were not randomly adopted, the trends in violence are influenced by a multitude of factors, and the dynamics of crime and violence are highly complex.

The lack of research on this potentially important intervention is an important shortcoming in the body of knowledge on firearms injury interventions. These programs are widely viewed as effective, but in fact knowledge of how, if at all, they reduce youth crime is limited. Without a much stronger research base, the benefits and harms of these policing interventions remain largely unknown. The committee recommends that a sustained and systematic research program should be conducted to assess the effect of targeted policing aimed at high-risk offenders. Additional insights might be gained by using observational data from different applications, especially if combined with thoughtful behavioral models of policing and crime. An alternative means of assessing the impact of these types of targeted policing interventions would be to run randomized experiments, similar in spirit to those described above. Using this framework, one might hope to disentangle the effects of the various levers and more generally assess the effectiveness of these targeted policing programs.

10McGarrell and Chermak (2003) recently completed an unpublished study of the Indianapolis pulling-levers intervention. Using time-series analyses, they found a 42 percent reduction in homicides associated with the implementation of the intervention and found that homicides were less likely to involve firearms, groups, and drugs.

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