Marco Conceptual

There are two elements that comprise what we in Boston called the Ceasefire Initiative. One—this was the inspiration for the Boston Gun Project and why it is called the Boston Gun Project—is that this is a gun problem, and there seemed to be an oppor- tunity to do something directly about the illegal acquisition of firearms. It was not gun control, tra- ditionally construed, but attention to what seemed like a missed opportunity, focusing on the fact that where young people and adult felons are concerned, gun acquisitions are already illegal. However those guns are acquired, it is a crime, and to the extent that new guns and used or stolen guns are being sold within these circles and on the street, that is a criminal enterprise. If you went to most local police departments and asked them about their burglary strategy, their car theft strategy, or their prostitution strategy, they would have one. Some strategies might be good, some might be bad, but departments would have one. But if you asked them about guns, the response generally would be, “Huh?” One of the goals in the Gun Project is to try to change that. This is a profile of a gun trafficker. Boston has been tracing all of the firearms recovered by the police for the last 5 or 6 years. Generally, we trace guns only in support of particular investigations. We find the smoking gun next to the body and no perpetra- tor, and we trace the gun to try to find out who might have been the shooter. Finding the same situa- tion with somebody standing there, we don’t trace the gun. Boston started tracing all of its guns, not to solve particular crimes but to try to figure out how this illicit market in firearms might be working and whether there was something that could be done about it. And, it turns out, there was. So these are real guns, real gun stores, and real people. When you look at these traces, you find patterns.

Crime Prevention as Crime Deterrence

➤

➤

A number of guns used in crimes came from one gun store in Georgia. They were all bought by a handful of first purchasers. This is information that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) can give you when they trace guns. Anybody famil- iar with the street scene could see that these guns were the kinds of guns that are popular among gang members. And when we matched the possessor information—that is, from whom the guns were taken—with the Boston Police Department informa- tion, it turned out that the majority of these individu- als were known Boston gang members. Something was wrong here. When this was investigated by ATF, what was wrong turned out to be that these purchas- ers were selling guns to two individuals who did not show up anywhere, because they did not have their names on any of the paperwork. These two individu- als were taking guns up to Boston and selling them in the neighborhoods. Both of these guys are now in Federal prison. It turns out that this unapproachable gun market is actually not that unapproachable after all. These relatively new guns turn out to be more popular among gang members and youth offenders than among older people.

We still have many used and stolen guns floating around out there, and you are not going to find the providers of those through traces. But the good news is, at some level, the people who know where those guns are coming from get arrested all the time because they are chronic, active, street offenders. The way you get the older and stolen guns is by talking with these offenders, the same way we have always “flipped” narcotic offenders around narcot- ics. Police are now interviewing these guys about where their guns are coming from. They can lead you to these providers of both the new guns and the old and stolen guns. Subsequent police work can put these guys out of business. So there is, in fact, a meaningful opportunity for doing something about guns out there.

Here is the second thing that quite unexpectedly came out of this problem-solving process. The Gun Project worked by convening a large group of front- line practitioners. We had police; probation; parole; local and Federal prosecutors; youth corrections; school police; and street workers, who in Boston do direct outreach to gang members and at-risk youths. Later in the process, a number of other groups got involved. What all of them said at the outset was

that this was a gang problem, that these are chronic offenders hurting one another: “We know who they are. When they get killed we know both the victim and the shooter.” For various reasons, my Harvard team was not enamored by this analysis. But we pursued it, and it turned out to be largely correct. And again, there are reams of research out of both Boston and Minneapolis on this. There were 155 victims, 21 and under, between 1990 and 1995. Again, this is not Chicago or Los Angeles, but it is bad enough.

When we ran criminal histories on each of these victims, we found that 55 percent had an arrest record in Massachusetts, about 20 percent had been in either an adult or juvenile lockup facility before they were killed, more than 40 percent were on some sort of probation at some time before they were killed, and 15 percent were on active proba- tion supervision at the time they were killed. In addition, 25 percent of offenders committed murder while on probation. The offense counts were re- markable. Each of these groups, both offenders and victims, had an average of 10 or less offenses. About half of them had more than 10 offenses. And they were being arrested for all sorts of crimes. This is a classic concentration of offending. Crimi- nologically, the only new thing about this was that it applied to this new population of young offend- ers. We always knew this about adults. Guided by our practitioner partners, we examined the gang problem in Boston. In Boston, these are small, fluid street groups. But they know who they are in the community, and the authorities know who they are. We found 61 gangs, with about 1,300 members, total. In the summer of 1995 when we did this analysis, the Intervale Posse, which is a group in Roxbury, had an active dispute with the Big Head Boys, and a historical but at the moment quiescent dispute with the Castlegate and Fuller Street gangs. What our practitioners said, and our own subse- quent research showed, was that this was what was generating most of the killing among young people in Boston. This was not primarily about drug business. It was mostly about respect and personal issues, very Hatfield and McCoy. It was vendetta- like, extended over time, sometimes extending to younger siblings and friends. There were 1,300 kids in total in these groups. That is less than 1 percent of their age group in the city, less than 3 percent in