Straight Outta Boston
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L.A. Police Chief William Bratton
Kennedy, a leading academic criminologist and the architect of the only anti-gang-violence strategy that has ever worked against modern street gangs, shares much of Sherrills' view. As chief designer of Operation Ceasefire, Kennedy presided over a public-private antiviolence initiative that got such dazzling results, so fast, that it is now known in law enforcement circles as the "Boston Miracle." Using a mix of prosecutorial and psychological tactics, Ceasefire has since been replicated in so many small to medium-sized cities that it has emerged as academic criminology's answer to the urban peace movement, the favored gang-crime control strategy of the intellectual best and brightest. And like Sherrills, Kennedy sees the emphasis on huge, hyperorganized crime syndicates as a red herring, a distraction from the real engine behind the routine murder of young men in American cities, and a product of the misconceptions that the public and the police have about gangs.
The first of these misconceptions, Kennedy says, echoing Sherrills, is that gang members are murderous superpredators. "That's not true," he says. "One of the interesting things about these guys is that if you can pull one aside and talk to him away from his boys, they start talking about how shit-scared they are, and how they don't like this stuff, but if they don't act in certain ways their friends and their enemies all turn on them. You get the occasional psychopath, but most of these guys do not have the same commitment to violence that they might to making money on the street." In the words of T. Rodgers, founder of the Bloods crew in the notorious "Jungle" neighborhood, where Training Day was set, there are only two kinds of gang members, "cowards and kids, and both of them just want attention."
"Another story is that it's all about drugs," Kennedy says, "and that's not true either." While most gang members do participate in the drug trade, the popular image of Crips and Bloods battling for crack-dealing turf is as outdated as the movie Colors. Nor, in Kennedy's view, is gang violence a sickness somehow endemic to ghetto culture—"because almost everybody in these neighborhoods doesn't participate. Hardly anybody goes this way." In Boston, Kennedy found that even within the most gang-dominated neighborhoods, fewer than 5 percent of young men were gang members. A 2004 outburst of gang killings in San Francisco produced a similar finding: Only about 100 young men in the entire city were thought to be truly dangerous, and a couple dozen were thought to have done most of the killing. "But because almost everybody deals with one or another of those fictions," Kennedy says, "it's very hard to engage with what's really going on."
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.