Abstract
Gun violence has been a bone of contention in the United States for the last several decades. The US government has taken a number of legal and strategic initiatives to fight this serious issue. However, it remains to be an unresolved issue in the US political scenario. A growing number of adolescents are involved in firearm violence. It was in this regard, the Boston Police Department started the intervention program called Operation Ceasefire to reduce the gang-related youth homicides. The Operation Ceasefire program helped the city improve its crime rates to a great extent. The program particularly focused on a relatively small population of young people who were actually involved in gun violence.
Gun Violence Programs: Operation Ceasefire – An overview
‘Gun Violence Programs: Operation Ceasefire’ is a report published by the Boston Police Department and located on the National Institute of Justice website. Operation Ceasefire is an evidence-based, problem-solving approach developed by the Boston Police Department’s Youth Violence Strike Force (YVSF) in response to the growing gang-related youth homicides in 1995 (Youth violence: A community based response, 1996). The YVSF was a collective effort of police officers, community groups, and NIJ-funded researchers to design and implement an intervention program aimed at reducing the rate of firearm violence among youth. Although the YVSF struggled for months to design such a program, the task force finally implemented an intervention program called Operation Ceasefire that in turn led to a reduction of firearm violence by 68 percent in one year. While closely evaluating the Operation Ceasefire program, it is identified that this intervention program was composed of two key strategies. The first strategy was to attack illegal firearms traffickers directly. The second strategy was to design and implement a set of intervention actions that would put a strong check on gang members against gun violence. This strategy was called ‘level pulling’ by researchers and they also took enhanced initiatives to spread awareness of gun violence among gang members (Office of Justice Programs, n.d.). This program exploited gang members’ vulnerabilities to a wide range of penalties (levers) whereas there was a ‘retailing’ approach to keep gang members aware of the serious repercussions of firearms violence. The whole working group combined their efforts to make sure that the intervention program was carefully planned and executed. The program outcomes were constantly monitored and evaluated with the support of feedbacks from the Ceasefire researcher team (The Malcolm Wiener Center for Sociology. n.d.). If the working team founded that something was not working according to the plan or something was problematic, they would take collaborated efforts to make appropriate changes to their program design.
Research concepts
While evaluating the research concepts or simply the program theory, it seems that the Operation Ceasefire program is based on a focused deterrence strategy. Referring to Braga et al, “deterrence theory posits that crimes can be prevented when the costs of committing the crime are perceived by the offender to outweigh the benefits of committing the crime” (National Institute of Justice, 2011). The Operation Ceasefire relied extensively on a pulling-levers approach, which tried to put a check on gang violence through enlightening gang members about the serious consequences resulting from violence and gun use. The working group believed that this deterrence-focused intervention approach would persuade gang members to change their behavior and thereby to reduce the firearms violence among youth. A significant feature of the Operation Ceasefire program was that it communicated an explicit ‘retail deterrence’ message to a chosen target audience of young gangsters regarding special response provoking behaviors and the kind of those responses (National Institute of Justice, 2011). The research team planned to communicate the deterrence message to a small audience (real gang members) rather than to a huge general audience (all young people in Boston). The advantageous feature of this approach is that it helped the Boston Police Department to focus specifically on youths who were actually engaged in firearms violence.
The research team also thought that severe punishments for young gang offenders would communicate a strong message to other gang members and prospective gangsters and this situation in turn would assist the Boston government to improve the current scenario notably. As part of this intervention strategy, the working group planned and implemented strict policies such as long-term sentences for chronic offenders, aggressive use of probation restrictions, and wide employment of Federal enforcement powers (National Institute of Justice, 2011). This intervention program gave specific focus to communication campaigns involving interactions with communities and gang members. Community members were taught that complete abolition of gang violence was necessary to bring a permanent end to gang-oriented suppression activities. This approach assisted the regulators to obtain full support from the part of community groups.
Evaluation of concepts
In order to evaluate the efficiency of research concepts, it is better to analyze the effectiveness of program outcomes. A series of studies were conducted a year following the implementation of the Operation Ceasefire in order to identify the final outcomes of the program. For instance, Braga and colleagues conducted a comparison of the pre-and-post time series data and identified that there was a notable decrease in the number of monthly homicides among youth in Boston following the implementation of the Operation Ceasefire (National Institute of Justice, 2011). The study specifically found that Boston experienced a 63 percent reduction in the average monthly youth homicide rates. Referring to this finding, the authors argued that the Operation Ceasefire introduced by the Boston Police Department was really effective to curb the firearm violence and thereby the youth homicide rate in the region. Another study following the implementation of this intervention program found that Operation Ceasefire led to a 25 percent reduction in the average monthly number of citywide gun assaults. Hence, researchers opine that the decrease in the number of citywide gun assaults associated with the Operation Ceasefire can be considered a positive outcome of this intervention program.
The basic evaluation concept for identifying the efficiency of this program was to compare the homicide rates prior to and following the implementation of the Operation Ceasefire. This strategic approach is beneficial to identify the difference in homicide/assault rates associated with gun violence over a particular period of time, giving specific focus to the time point at which the intervention program was introduced. Studies also indicated that the introduction of Operation Ceasefire resulted in a significant decrease (32%) in the “monthly number of citywide shots-fired calls for service” (National Institute of Justice, 2011). In short, the proposed intervention program played a crucial role in improving the gun-related homicides/assaults rates among youth in Boston.
Conclusion
References
The Malcolm Wiener Center for Sociology. (n.d.). Operation Ceasefire: Boston Gun Project. Retrieved from https://www.hks.harvard.edu/programs/criminaljustice/research-publications/gangs-guns-urban-violence/operation-ceasefire-boston-gun-project
National Institute of Justice. (2011). Program Profile: Operation Ceasefire (Boston, Mass.). retrieved from https://www.crimesolutions.gov/ProgramDetails.aspx?ID=207
Office of Justice Programs. NIJ. (n.d.). Gun Violence Programs: Operation Ceasefire. Retrieved from http://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/gun-violence/prevention/pages/ceasefire.aspx
Youth violence: A community based response. (1996). Retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/boston.txt
