Focused Deterrence: Ceasefire

by Donovan Leighton, FBI (retired)

It’s a really simple concept. We’ll help you if you let us, but we’ll stop you if you make us. — Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison

Introduction

There are many proposed strategies for curbing urban violence. Few are evidenced-based or workable. Focused deterrence, sometimes called Group Violence Reduction Strategy, or more popularly, Operation Ceasefire, is both. However, as with most things worthwhile, implementation requires sustained, robust attention, a committed all-of-community approach, balance, and, most of all, police legitimacy.

The Operation Ceasefire concept involves identifying persons at highest risk of shooting someone or being shot. Identified at-risk persons are requested to attend meetings, known as call-ins, with police, probation, parole, clergy, community members, and influencers such as close relatives (e.g., grandparents acting as parents). Participants are put on notice that police are aware of their criminal activities, told that they are likely to be severely punished unless they desist, and offered assistance including, but not limited to, life coaches, housing, jobs, health insurance, and on-going counseling. It is a simple formula: focus on the most dangerous groups and individuals, put them on prior notice, effectively crackdown, publicize to other offenders, and back up with high value services and community support.

The genesis of focused deterrence was Boston’s 1995 Operation Ceasefire as a component of its Boston Gun Project in which criminologist David Kennedy played an instrumental role. The project brought together Boston police officers, state prosecutors, academics, social service providers, outreach workers, and Black clergyman to focus on deterring gun violators and giving them pathways out of criminal careers. Variations of the program have been implemented in in Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oakland, and Stockton with various degrees of success. The approach is being revisited by cities that had previously tried it without success. Baltimore is one such city.

The Problem

Observers frequently reference America’s gun violence problem, particularly in the wake of a mass shooting event. The problem is actually multiple, variegated problems including mass shootings, suicides, and urban violence. The most pernicious of these, and least subject to candid discussion, is urban violence, particularly in at-risk communities of color.

While America, writ large, has been the beneficiary of a decades long decline in violent crime, at-risk communities of color have not so benefited.  John Klofas of the Rochester Institute, points out, “Nobody lives in the nation. They live in neighborhoods.” Ceasefire pioneer Kennedy describes many of these neighborhoods as “lethal geography.” Nationally, murder rates have fallen since their last peak in the 1990s and are now back to their 1965 levels. For Black men between the ages of 15 and 24, however, homicide, mostly by gunfire, is still the leading cause of death, killing more of them than the next nine top causes of death combined.

When speaking of urban violence, it should be understood to describe street, gang, youth, or gun violence, generally involving young men as perpetrators and victims, generally occurring in urban locations. Two features of urban gun violence is that it is concentrated both in terms of geography and persons. For example, in 2015 half of all U.S. gun homicides occurred in just 127 communities; and more than a quarter were in neighborhoods representing 1.5 percent of the total population.

Urban violence is concentrated in relatively small groups of persons. For example, 60% of the murders in Oakland, California occur within a social network of 1,000 – 2,000 high-risk persons, less than 0.3 percent of the city’s population. In New Orleans it is concentrated in 600-700 people, less than one percent of the city’s population; and in Chicago it is concentrated in a population containing approximately six percent of the city’s population.

Identifying Target Populations

Different jurisdictions have applied varying methodologies to identify suitable participants. In Minneapolis Kennedy and his colleagues reviewed 264 murders which occurred between January 1, 1994 and March 24, 1997. They matched victims and offenders against a gang database and reviewed each case with police officers. Analysis revealed that 45% of the homicide offenders were gang members as were a quarter of the murder victims.

In Oakland law enforcement and analysts examine each shooting weekly and review offenders and victims if they are between 18 and 35, have extensive criminal histories, are part of a street group, and have a family member or friend who had recently been shot. “Data changed the whole dynamic,” says Oakland Ceasefire proponent Ben McBride, “because we knew we could reach around 250 individuals, versus this feeling that there’s 20,000 people running around terrorizing the city and being terrorized.”

Chicago adopted a more high tech approach, ominously denominated by law professor Andrew Ferguson as “Person-Based Predictive Targeting.” Its program relied on an algorithm utilizing 11 variables to create risk scores from one to 500.  The higher the score the greater the risk of being a perpetrator or victim of gun violence. When applied to persons the scores were used to constitute what became known as the “Heat List.” The risk scores proved to be accurate predictors. On Mother’s Day weekend 2016, 80% of the 51 people shot were correctly identified by the Heat List. On Memorial Day 2016, 78% of sixty-four shooting victims appeared on the list.

The Chicago Police Department (CPD) collaborated with academic partners to employ Social Network Analysis (SNA). SNA consists of the visual display and empirical assessment of social relations among actors in a network. SNA software establishes links between individual gang members based on their official known contacts within the criminal justice system, as well as their own social networking on Internet sites. The objective for conducting network analysis was to document and measure the centrality of gang members, so that those specific offenders could be removed and the network crippled. This analysis allowed CPD investigators to determine who the key “impact” players were within the criminal network.

Balance

What appears to be important is focus and balance. Writes researcher Thomas Abt, “No city that has been successful in reducing urban violence can credibly attribute all of its success to a single tough or soft approach—it is always some combination of both. Punishment by itself has not worked. Neither has prevention.” Kennedy pointedly notes, “The false divide between prevention and law enforcement is not only mistaken but catastrophically misguided.”

Examples of the tough approach are cases in which the most violent actors, what Kennedy calls the “impact players”, are targeted, subjected to prosecution, and given draconian sentences. One example is the Boston gang member sentenced to a lengthy prison term for possession of a single round of ammunition under the federal Armed Career Criminal Act. No clearer message could have been sent to the target population contemplating their options.

Rather than trying to address urban violence one-murder-at-a-time, there could be a shift to criminal enterprise prosecutions coupled with focused deterrence. The gangs, crews, cliques, and other criminal networks, however denominated, are vulnerable to the criminal enterprise investigations and prosecutions envisioned by G. Robert Blakey, drafter of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The 2015 racketeering conspiracy prosecution of southeast District of Columbia’s Simple City gang by the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland demonstrates the potential of this approach. Similar initiatives could produce prosecutable cases which could be held in abeyance, “banked”, and presented as significant “sticks” in Ceasefire call-ins.

Oakland’s Ceasefire implementation, on the other hand, exemplified a softer approach which also produced positive results. “Our Ceasefire strategy is about changing behavior, not arresting our way out of the problem,” stated Oakland Mayor Libby. Former City of Oakland staffer Reygan Cunningham, who was instrumental in developing Oakland’s program, commented that it was mainly about showing “love and respect” for people at risk for gun violence. Oakland, writes Abt, “. . . paid much more attention to a strong community voice and providing a more robust set of social services.” Oakland Police Department Captain Ersie Joyner, one of the department’s most decorated officers, was placed in charge of Ceasefire in 2013. He came to recognize the limits of law enforcement and the importance of the community’s role in breaking the cycle of violence. “The moment we changed our mentality from eliminating gangs to eliminating gang violence, we became awesome,” he commented.

Results

Studies of various programs suggests focused deterrence strategies have significant beneficial impacts on crime, particularly violent crime. A Department of Justice-sponsored pre/post evaluation of Ceasefire found that youth violence in Boston fell by two-thirds citywide in the 2 years after the strategy was first implemented. Crime data indicate that Boston maintained this low level for 5 years (through 2000).

In 2018, criminologist Anthony Braga and other researchers released a study showing that shootings in Oakland had dropped in half since 2011. Ceasefire was found to be directly associated with a 32 percent reduction in gun homicides, even after controlling for other factors like gentrification and seasonal patterns.

Cost vs Benefits

In Oakland it costs $10,000 to put a participant through life coaching. In contrast, the collective costs of murder are estimated at anywhere from $176 billion to $332 billion in criminal justice and medical costs, lost earnings, damaged and devalued property, and diminished quality of life. Once cash stipends are paid out, however, there is a moral hazard risk: why should offenders receive compensation for not offending while law abiding young people receive nothing for continuing to be law abiding. There is no easy answer other than a cost/benefit analysis of violence reduction.

What Causes Failure

Operation Ceasefire has taken various forms in various jurisdictions: some heavy on law enforcement, others heavy on prevention. In some cases, the program has run a ground simply as a result of a change in chiefs. Failure to execute and even inter-agency rivalries have also been culprits.

According to Professor Daniel Webster, director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the strategy works only if officials follow through to help those who want it and to prosecute those who do not. Speaking of Baltimore’s earlier Ceasefire attempted iteration “I don’t think Baltimore kept their promise the last go round on either of those sides,” and “I don’t think they kept their promise to hold shooters accountable, nor did they keep their promise to offer help.”

One of the major causes of failure is a crisis of police legitimacy. In 2017 Ceasefire in Oakland, for example, suffered a near-death experience because ofa sex scandal. The scandal involved officers from Oakland and other departments having sex with a teenage prostitute who was the daughter of a police dispatcher. The scandal ended the career of a promising chief when it was disclosed that his wife had been communicating with the teenager in an effort to withdraw her from prostitution. Because the chief had become aware of her relationship to Oakland officers and he had not taken action his career became a casualty.

In the ensuing uproar Ceasefire almost went down right with the chief. Community members debated walking away from Ceasefire because “they could no longer trust the police.” Oakland Captain Ersie Joyner, then the department’s most decorated officer who was in charge of the program, commented: “I can tell you that the individuals on our team were embarrassed by it, wanted to throw in the towel.”

Baltimore’s attempt at Ceasefire implementation suffered from many defects.  Baltimore’s initial failure appears to have been multifaceted including little staff presence in impacted areas, deployment in too few areas, half-hearted implementation, and lack of perceived support.

Kennedy highlighted contentious inter-agency relationships as a cause. He writes:

“Baltimore had the worst law enforcement politics I’ve ever seen. The three main players, the police department, the state’s attorney’s office, the U.S. attorney’s office, saw crime control as a zero-sum game: anybody gets any credit for anything, the others lose. . .it’s like balance of power politics in nineteenth-century Europe, you line up with allies of the moment to make sure nobody else can succeed.”

What finally doomed Baltimore’s Ceasefire initiative, however, was the controversy and disorder following the in-custody death of Freddie Gray. “We were seeing really dramatic reductions in homicides,” Kennedy said. “Things were going well enough that there was expansion into the Eastern District and then Freddie Gray died and everything collapsed.”

Making It Work

Focused deterrence addresses the complex problem of reducing urban violence. It’s hard work, but aking it work is not rocket science. It requires balance, robust implementation, sustained attention, and all-of-community buy-in. Most importantly, in the words of Ceasefire pioneer David Kennedy, “All you need is ruthless common sense.”

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Donovan J. Leighton is a 31 year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with experience in general criminal, white collar crime, organized crime-drug, and counter-terrorism investigations as well as international operations. He was instrumental in forming the first FBI-Los Angeles Police Department gang task force to address South-Central Los Angeles gangs. He worked his way through the University of California-Berkeley as a civilian employee of the Berkeley Police Department and Oakland Police Department where he earned a BA in Criminology and a JD. He served for a year as a deputy district attorney in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office before entering on duty as a special agent with the FBI. In retirement he is employed as a crime analyst with a major East Coast police department.