Boston cops and black churches - New Approaches to Fighting Crime

Public Interest, Summer, 1999 by Christopher Winship, Jenny Berrien

In recent years, homicide rates in a number of large American cities have plummeted. Between 1990 and 1996, New York's rate dropped 58.7 percent, Houston's 54 percent, Los Angeles' 27.9 percent, Philadelphia's 17.7 percent, and Washington, D.C.'s 15.9 percent. In most, if not all of these cities, the precipitous decline in homicide rates derives from even sharper declines in youth violence. However, not all cities have been so fortunate. For example, in Baltimore, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, homicide rates have risen by 7.5 percent, 45.3 percent, and 103.8 percent respectively. A key question then is: Why has youth violence fallen so significantly in some cities but not in others?

Certainly, part of the decline in youth violence can be attributed to the robust economy, as well as to the nationwide decline in the number of youths aged 15 to 24, the most crime-prone age group. But these factors are present in almost all cities, and thus cannot explain the differences across the nation. Besides, similar declines in homicide rates did not occur in the mid and late 1980s when the economy was also strong. And the 7.7 percent drop in the number of youths aged 15 to 24, from 1986 to 1996, is too small to account for much of the improvement.

The dynamics of youth violence are complex, depending upon a myriad of factors that vary from city to city. But certain features of violence reduction in Boston stand out, yielding important answers as well as lessons for other cities. The drop in homicide rates in Boston has been the steepest in the nation. Between 1990 and 1996, Boston's rates dropped 61.2 percent, from 152 homicides to 59. In 1997, the rate dropped further to only 43 homicides, a total decline of 72 percent from the previous high. By 1998, only 35 murders took place. Perhaps even more stunning is that, for the 29-month period ending in January 1998, Boston had no teenage homicide victims. Since that time (as of this writing) there have been four.

Boston is also unusual in that a group of ministers, the Ten-Point Coalition, is thought to have played a key role in reducing youth homicides. The media has already lavished attention on the coalition's work. Newsweek ran a feature story; Time, Sojourners, the Weekly Standard, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution have all run major stories on the ministers. PBS made the Ten-Point Coalition the subject of a documentary.

What we will explore is whether the coalition has, in fact, played a significant role in reducing youth violence in Boston. At first glance, the answer appears to be no. Crime rates have ropped dramatically in other cities without significant involvement from the clergy. The fact that only three ministers - Eugene Rivers, Raymond Hammond, and Jeffrey Brown - have been centrally involved, and that even they have not devoted themselves to the coalition full time, suggests that too little has been attempted by the churches for them to have played a substantial role in the crime reductions. And David Kennedy, a researcher at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, has documented how new law enforcement policies and practices have led to more effective ways of dealing with youth violence. The assertion that the Ten-Point Coalition has been a significant player would seem to be, at best, good public relations.

We will argue, to the contrary, that the Ten-Point Coalition has played a critical role in Boston's sharp drop in youth violence. It has done so by changing the way the police (and other elements of the criminal justice system) and Boston's inner-city community relate to each other. In its intermediary role between the two parties, the Ten-Point Coalition balances the community's desire for safe streets and its reluctance to see its children put in jail. It has created what we will call an "umbrella of legitimacy" for fair and just policing.

The Boston story

Boston has never been considered a violence-plagued city on the scale of Los Angeles or New York. But in 1990, 152 homicides occurred in Boston - a record high. The roots of this violence took hold in the late 1980s, when crack-cocaine found its way into Boston's inner city. As the crack market developed, so did turf-based gangs and gang violence. To protect their financial stakes in the booming crack-cocaine market, as well as to maintain "respect," the gangs increasingly turned to firearms. "Disrespect" was punished by violence. And a vicious cycle developed, in which individuals joined one gang to protect themselves from another gang. With firearms serving as the primary method of protection and retaliation, as well as being tools for spontaneous assaults, the frequency and severity of violence grew to a level never before seen in the Boston area.

Since Boston law-enforcement agencies had not previously dealt with turf-based violence and criminal gang activity, their initial response was inadequate. Up until 1990, the department denied that there was a "gang problem." Many current Boston police officers have vouched that the department simply had no policy for combating gang violence. Without an in-depth understanding of the problem or a plan of attack, police officers fell back on the aggressive, riot-oriented tactics of the 1960s. In addition, because homicide has traditionally been handled on a case-by-case basis, the police department aimed at making the "big hit" and arresting the "big player," rather than addressing the group-based nature of gang violence.