Boston Gun Project

The Boston Gun Project, also known as “Operation Ceasefire,” is a deterrence-based, problem-oriented criminal justice intervention that occurred in 1996 and 1997. The project was intended to reduce youth homicide and youth firearms violence in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Gun Project was characterized by an innovative partnership among researchers, practitioners, community leaders, and clergy to assess Boston's youth homicide problem and implement an intervention designed to have a substantial near-term impact on the problem. The Boston Gun Project was based on the “pulling levers” deterrence strategy that focused criminal justice attention on a small number of Boston's youth who were chronic offenders, involved in gang-related activities, and responsible for much of the city's youth homicide problem. Many of these youths were minorities. The Boston Gun Project working group held communications meetings with at-risk members of the community, warning them that further violence and criminality would not be tolerated and would be met with the full complement of the law.

Research suggested that the Boston Gun Project/Ceasefire intervention was associated with significant reductions in youth homicide victimization, shots-fired calls for service, and gun assault incidents in Boston. A comparative analysis of youth homicide trends in Boston relative to youth homicide trends in other major U.S. cities also supports a unique program effect associated with the Ceasefire intervention. This communications-based intervention was coupled with a police crackdown on violent crimes. Homicide rates in Boston fell by two thirds after the strategy was implemented.

[Page 76]The Boston Gun Project is a type of problem-oriented intervention strategy. Problem-oriented interventions work to identify specific problems and to frame responses using a wide variety of often-untraditional approaches. Using a basic repetitive approach of problem identification, analysis, response, evaluation, and adjustment of the response, this strategy has been effective against a wide variety of crime.

The Boston Gun Project was designed to proceed by

• 1.
  assembling an interagency working group of largely line-level criminal justice and other practitioners;
• 2.
  applying quantitative and qualitative research techniques to create an assessment of the nature of, and dynamics driving, youth violence in Boston;
• 3.
  developing an intervention designed to have a substantial, near-term impact on youth homicide;
• 4.
  implementing and adapting the intervention; and
• 5.
  evaluating the intervention's impact.

The driving force behind the success of the Boston Gun Project was the corporation of an interagency working group consisting primarily of front-line criminal justice practitioners and community leaders. The agencies that were involved included the Boston Police Department; the Massachusetts departments of probation and parole; the office of the Suffolk County district attorney; the office of the U.S. attorney; the Boston Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF); the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services (juvenile corrections); Boston School Police; gang outreach and prevention “street-workers”; the TenPoint Coalition of activist Black clergy; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Massachusetts State Police; and the office of the Massachusetts attorney general.

The basic premise underlying the Boston Gun Project included two strategic elements. The first element was a direct law enforcement attack on illicit firearms traffickers supplying Boston's youth with guns. The second element was an attempt to generate a strong deterrent to gang violence. The systematic attack on illegal firearms traffickers included the expanded focus of local, state, and federal authorities to include firearms trafficking in Massachusetts in addition to interstate trafficking. ATF set up an in-house tracking system that flagged guns that had been confiscated by the police within 18 months of being sold. They also focused attention on the city's most violent gangs and their gun suppliers. ATF attempted to restore obliterated serial numbers of confiscated guns and investigated trafficking based on the restored serial numbers.

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