Straight Outta Boston
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In South Central L.A., a gang-intervention counselor talks with a youth named Kemo, who was later killed.
But to hear it from people on the street, like Aqeela Sherrills, who has become a national figure in grassroots peace activism, speaking at dozens of conferences as far away as Croatia, running a Watts-based nonprofit that brokers truces between gangs all over the country, and meeting with the likes of director Michelangelo Antonioni and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Bratton is missing the point. The mid-'90s drop in crime, in the view of Sherrills, happened not because of any top-down policing strategy but because thousands of men and women just like Sherrills, in a homegrown, street-level effort now called the urban peace movement, began devoting their lives to the tedious work of defusing conflict, day in and day out. Most gangs, they'll tell you, are less about drug dealing or violence than about community, desperate young people looking for surrogate families.
"A lot of people think that there's a level of sophistication within the gang culture like the Mafia," Sherrills says. "Not at all. There's no organization, there's no nothing." The Crips gang, Sherrills insists, admitting that he is still a member, "is not a sophisticated entity in any way. There's probably 1,200 cats in my neighborhood, and it's all broken up into cliques. So you got the Parolees, the Peta Roll Squad, the Boss Players, you got the Tiny Locs, and they all claim Grape. But they all in they own cliques. And you got the jackals in the neighborhood, people who rob folks, the drug dealers, the peacemakers, and then you got the killers. Individuals who are known, who shoot people." Responsibility for the new upsurge in violence, in Sherrills' view, has nothing to do with the gangs at all. It has to do with the system, with America's ongoing refusal to address poverty and racism, its continuing manipulation by the prison-industrial complex, and the government's betrayal of peacemakers, switching funding back over to the construction of jails and the arming of police forces.
Though Bratton takes credit for "Operation Ceasefire", it was actually another thing, an idea, from a Grassroots organization within Boston that came up with a "gun buyback" program, which required cooperation from the community and the police. This program wasn't based on "threatening" the youth to stop shooting though; rather, it was telling everyone in Boston that if you have a gun, if you go to a local community and give it to them, they will pay you money for it without getting you arrested for carrying one with or without a license. Within a year or so during this project, they confiscated over a thousand guns each year that it was in effect... this was MAJOR to Boston's violence rate.
However, the police DID crack down on youths and gangs for even the smallest of crimes.. so with the Police's "zero tolerance" "Ceasefire" in effect, many people got arrested in a greater metro area of merely 2 and a half million people... so the results were shocking and HUGE.
... but to us in the inner city, it wasn't shocking to see the crime rate go up 5 years later since we saw everyone in our neighborhoods get locked up.... cuz 5 years later, there was a statistic out that wasn't surprising: for 4 of the poorest areas in the Greater Boston area, close to 500 people were coming out of jail returning home who got arrested during the "zero tolerance" Police era of the early-mid 90's in ONLY 4 areas that equally merely 20 square miles combined. Mind you, this is ONLY small 4 neighborhoods. In result, little by litte we saw news articles talking about how old gang members were claiming back their neighborhoods and crime sky-rocket.
Just a little info that maybe the readers might find interesting from someone who lived in the areas mentioned during the time's mentioned, and for clarification that the "gang problem" didn't dissappear, it just got swept under the rug, which is why it didn't work afterall.