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Erin Dalton
National Institute of Justice
The Strategic Approaches to Community Safety Initiative (SACSI) starts with the simple but powerful notion that law enforcement has the power to prevent the next homicide. This concept was not uniformly embraced at the SACSI sites at the onset. Prosecutors, police officers, and probation officers wondered: "Could the decisions we make really affect who will get shot tomorrow night or next week?" This provocative question was eventually answered with a "yes," but only after considerable hard work by many people. This article presents the main lessons from SACSI problem-solving efforts with the hope that the Project Safe Neighborhoods Initiative (PSN) sites will learn from what SACSI has accomplished.
The SACSI sites realized that the question posed could not be answered by a single person or a single agency. They needed a team. They also realized that the question had to be split into more answerable inquiries. For example: "What if we could identify the most violent individuals and most violent groups on the street?" "What if we could follow, document, and map the feuds among these criminally-involved individuals and groups?" These and many other questions were asked and answered in a deliberative way by the SACSI sites, requiring information from both traditional and non-traditional sources.
Next, the SACSI sites learned that they needed strategies designed to deal with the specific opportunities presented by the data. The working groups considered the following: "What if we established an early warning system to monitor assaults and shootings among these individuals/groups and intervene before they became homicides?" "What if we communicated clearly to these individuals/groups that violent behavior would not be tolerated and that if they behaved violently, all of the resources of the community would be brought against them?" "What if we actually made good on our word?"
The question "how can the decisions we make change who will get shot tomorrow night or next week?" became answerable and was answered - although with different strategies in each community. The days of discussing random homicides, of knowing that an individual was at risk to kill or be killed and not being able to intervene in time, became rare events.
SACSI sites efforts to develop the strategic partnerships, to collect and analyze the information needed to answer the questions raised above, and to design and evaluate strategies aimed at preventing the next homicide, demonstrate that large-scale, problem-solving efforts can be rewarding. They also demonstrate the difficulty and challenges associated with problem-solving.
How it started
In the early 1990s, in the midst of youth homicide epidemics plaguing our nation's major cities, the National Institute of Justice funded Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government to achieve a simple but extremely challenging goal: Stop the violence in Boston. The efforts of Kennedy School's researchers and their partners, which became known as Operation Ceasefire, were extraordinarily successful. Youth homicides, which averaged forty-four per year between 1991 and 1995, fell to twenty-six in 1997 and to fifteen in 1998. A thoughtful and rigorous evaluation that describes and validates the team's work is available from the National Institute of Justice. [David M. Kennedy, et al., Developing and Implementing Operation Ceasefire, Reducing Gun Violence, U.S. Dept of Justice, National Institute of Justice (September, 2001). NCJ 188741. Anthony A. Braga, et al. Measuring the Impact Operation Ceasefire, Reducing Gun Violence, U.S. Dept of Justice, National Institute of Justice (September, 2001). NCJ 188741].
Even before a formal evaluation was completed, Boston's Operation Ceasefire was hailed in the media as an unprecedented success. Other major cities started calling and visiting Boston in the hope of replicating its miracle. At the same time, the Department of Justice sought to replicate the process Boston used to achieve significant reductions in youth homicide. The replication was called SACSI. The SACSI sites were funded in two phases. The first phase was funded in 1998 and included: Indianapolis, Indiana; Memphis, Tennessee; New Haven, Connecticut; Portland, Oregon; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The second phase was funded in 2000 and included: Albuquerque, New Mexico; Atlanta, Georgia; Detroit, Michigan; Rochester, New York; and St. Louis, Missouri.
The process involved the following elements:
• Develop a strategic partnership.
•Use research and information to assess the specific nature and dynamics of the targeted problem.
•Design a strategy to have a substantial near-term impact on that targeted crime problem.
•Implement the strategy.
•Evaluate the strategy's impact and modify the strategy as indicated.
This process is not dissimilar to the Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) Initiative model in which U.S. Attorneys will:
•Develop partnerships with federal, state, and local law enforcement and others.
•Develop strategic plans which include crime analysis and strategic enforcement, suppression, and prevention activities.
•Publicize their law enforcement successes to the community.
•Measure the impacts of their efforts.
While the specifics may vary somewhat, both initiatives begin with collaboration, rely on data and information-driven strategies, seek near-term results, and hold themselves accountable for their efforts by measuring the results. This article reviews the (1) organizational structures that seemed most effective under SACSI; (2&3) problem-solving approaches that evolved; (4) tactics that emerged; and, (5) their effectiveness at reducing violence with the hope that the PSN communities will learn from SACSI's lessons and take problem-solving to the next level.
I. Developing an effective partnership
Partnerships represent a key aspect of success for many recent criminal justice initiatives (including SACSI and PSN). Yet partnerships are often assumed to exist when they do not, are difficult to achieve, and are rarely studied. Preliminary assessments of SACSI sites partnerships provide some useful insights.
Key issues in developing partnerships included membership, partnership structure, leadership, and project management. Two especially important and difficult issues in the SACSI sites were (1) whether to, and how to, involve the community and (2) how to balance the need for high-level leadership and support with the need for line-level law enforcement knowledge and know-how.
Establishing the team
Almost as important as deciding who to include as partners is how to invite them to join, how large the partnership should be, and at what organizational level (leaders or line-practitioners) the partnership operates. Race, gender, and culture were also important to the SACSI sites as they developed the composition of their working groups.
After two years of working together, the SACSI sites identified the following partners as most critical to the success of their problem-solving efforts: U.S. Attorney's Office, police department, research partner, district attorney's office, probation/parole agencies, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Most also mentioned a community-based organization or representatives of the clergy as critical to their success.
The consensus that emerged obscures the variation in team memberships and organization. At the beginning of the SACSI initiative, participation ranged from a small team consisting of a core of law enforcement and criminal justice officials without social service and community participation (as in New Haven), to a large and broad team comprised of officials and leaders from law enforcement, criminal justice, social service, and community-based organizations (as in Portland).
Which partnership structure was more successful? There is no easy answer to this question. Partnerships that started small and were relatively homogenous seemed more mobile and quicker to make key decisions. Small groups of law enforcement officials were more likely to trust one another and to share - and be legally permitted to share - sensitive information. However, these smaller partnerships sometimes lacked the diversity of opinions, approaches, and perspectives that characterized larger groups with more nontraditional partners. Also, larger groups may have been better protected from negative community, media, or political reactions.
Several SACSI sites combined these two distinct approaches. They started with a working group made up primarily of law enforcement and criminal justice representatives. The working group remained small until the team had a detailed understanding of the crime problem they were targeting. At that point, the group presented their findings to community and clergy groups and social service agencies, some of whom were subsequently included in the partnership and involved in shaping and implementing the strategies that followed. A benefit of waiting until the initial problem identification and analysis is complete before involving these other groups is that the working groups were able to identify the right groups and affected communities, and their roles were much more apparent than in sites that involved a larger group before a focus for the project was established.
Leadership
One of the most important dimensions of SACSI partnerships is leadership. The U.S. Attorney's Office played a significant role in leading the SACSI partnerships. As the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the community, the U.S. Attorney's status brought local law enforcement leaders to the table. In addition, because the U.S. Attorneys Office had a distance from the everyday local law enforcement business that most police departments, district attorneys offices, and even mayor's offices cannot claim, the U.S. Attorney was usually seen as more neutral in local law enforcement circles. The U.S. Attorney's leadership sometimes helped bring local law enforcement leaders to SACSI partnerships with an open mind. Lessons from the SACSI sites suggest that problem-solving partnerships often fall apart, or never come together, in the absence of a powerful, neutral convener.
Management
If we learned one thing from the SACSI initiative, it was the necessity of having a project director responsible for the hands-on management of problem-solving efforts. This critical team member managed the daily process, facilitated the conversation, moved the group toward the collective goal, ensured that different components of the partnerships worked effectively, held the group to task, and worked with the research partner to think through the nexus of operational capacities, local data analysis, and crime control theory. A successful project director balances the managerial need to keep the project on task while building the capacity of the other partners to shoulder essential tasks and responsibilities. Like effective leadership, problem-solving partnerships cannot succeed, in the absence of effective project management.
The power of including front-line practitioners in the partnership
Successful SACSI partnerships used knowledge and information gleaned from non-traditional sources. Typically, police chiefs and agency heads are asked about their most serious crime problems. Officers who are out on the streets everyday are rarely asked these same questions. The experiences of the SACSI sites indicate this is a glaring omission. Front-line practitioners are uniquely immersed in the problem. Their knowledge is essential to understanding the dynamics of targeted crime problems. While others may have a solid understanding of the outlines of a problem (e.g., they may know there is a gang component to the violence problem), front-line practitioners typically know the contours and vital details of the problem (e.g., they know who the gang leaders are, which gangs are most violent, and which are currently feuding). To achieve the balance between the need for leadership and the need for front-line practitioner knowledge, some of the sites established a working group with two levels-one with management representatives that met every six weeks or so-and one with line-level representatives that met more frequently.
The significance of involving the "community" in the partnership
The partners in the SACSI sites debated a great deal about the necessity and importance of involving the "community" in problem-solving efforts. Some participants argue that the work of the Ten-Point Coalition or gang outreach workers in Indianapolis or Winston-Salem played a major role in achieving crime reductions in those cities. Other participants consider their role less critical, and even potentially disruptive, to information sharing and development of trust within the partnership. Some issues to consider when deciding whether to involve the community can be articulated: Will the community groups or individuals provide intelligence or perspectives not contained elsewhere in the partnership? Will their participation help craft more effective law enforcement approaches, as well as provide buy-in, that can temper community disapproval for aggressive law enforcement strategies that may be included as part of the initiative? Do they have a unique connection with the offender population? Are they likely to put limits on the trust that can be developed within the group? What issues are presented to the functioning of the partnership if law enforcement information needs to be shared when these individuals/groups are present? These and other questions should help guide the decision about whether to, and how to, include the "community" in the partnership.
The importance of an outside perspective in the partnership
Having someone from outside the operational world who can see practitioners' work from a different perspective, frame operational efforts in a broader context, and validate law enforcement efforts to management and policymakers, make research partners a critical part of the problem-solving team. In addition, having someone trained in research methods and criminological theory has been significant in the SACSI partnerships. These partners helped develop the fullest possible understanding of the targeted crime problem, as well as a strategy that was based on the data and was measurable.
II. Understanding the targeted crime problem
For SACSI sites, the process of identifying the specifics of a problem often began with a review of the formal crime and community safety data, and usually progressed to include interviews, focus groups, and incident reviews. A closer look at two sites--Indianapolis, Indiana and Rochester, New York illustrate the processes. [For a full examination of the Indianapolis Violence Reduction Partnership see Edmund F. McGarrell, and Steven Chermak, Problem Solving to Reduce Gang and Drug-Related Violence in Indianapolis. Forthcoming Gangs, Youth Violence and Community Policing, S. Decker and E. Connors (eds). For more information on the Rochester SACSI project, contact Lori Gilmore, Western District of New York, (716) 263-6760.]
Indianapolis and its violence problem
Indianapolis is a city with just over 800,000 residents in a metropolitan area of approximately one and one-half million. It has long ranked in the mid-range among the nation's larger cities in rates of crime generally and violent crime in particular. However, during the mid-1990s, Indianapolis experienced a significant increase in homicides, reaching a peak level of 157 in 1997. The doubling of the homicide rate, from 10 in 1990 to 20 in 1998, was attributed by local law enforcement to the late arrival of crack cocaine in this mid-western city. (1) Some officials also thought that a gang problem fueled violence on the streets.
The working group used existing information systems (police incident reports, GIS crime mapping, court records) to analyze Indianapolis homicides. The 1997 and 1998, homicides looked similar to those in most urban, U.S. cities. They involved young men, using firearms, in concentrated geographic areas. Many of the victims and suspects had very similar personal characteristics - age, race, and gender - and many had prior criminal history. The most common age for victims was twenty-eight. Suspects were even younger, peaking from ages seventeen to twenty-six with a median of twenty-three. Nearly 80 percent of victims were male and more than 80 percent of suspects were male. Two-thirds of victims and 72 percent of suspects were African-American. At least 63 percent of the victims and three-quarters of the suspects had either an adult or juvenile criminal record. Firearms were used in about three-quarters of the homicides.
Crime mapping indicated that homicides were concentrated in particular neighborhoods in three of the five Indianapolis Police Department districts. The specific police beats tended to be the same ones with the most violent crime and the ones receiving the most citizen complaints about drug activity.
The analysis of official crime reports helped paint a picture of the overall patterns, but the picture was not detailed enough to craft interventions. For example, the official reports indicated that very few homicides involved either gangs (one in 1998) or drugs (six in 1997, seven in 1998). Nevertheless, investigators and line-level officers strongly suspected that gangs and drugs were involved in many, perhaps most, of the homicides.
To get a detailed picture of homicides, the working group decided to follow the approach taken in Boston, Minneapolis, and Baltimore. They brought together Indianapolis law enforcement officials with street-level intelligence on homicides and violence to participate in an examination of every homicide incident occurring in 1997. Participants included detectives and officers from the Indianapolis Police Department and Marion County Sheriff's Department, prosecutors, probation officers, corrections officials, and federal law enforcement (approximately seventy-five representatives from ten agencies). The intent was to move beyond the basics contained in official records and tap into the extensive knowledge available from the law enforcement professionals working these cases and areas of the city. Specifically, the working group sought information about motive and events leading up to the homicide, networks of chronic offenders involved in homicides, and whether and how homicides were related to drug use and distribution.
The incident review revealed that approximately 60 percent of the homicides involved suspects or victims who were described as being part of a group of known chronic offenders, or loosely organized gangs. Additionally, more than half the homicides had some type of drug connection involving known users and dealers, as well as incidents tied to drug sales, retaliations, and drug turf battles. The working group, armed with a problem analysis that enabled them to consider interventions, decided to concentrate their efforts on group and drug-related homicides.
Rochester and its violence problem
Rochester is a city of about 217,000 people with a metropolitan area of just under 1.1 million. The metropolitan area has grown over the past thirty years, but the city itself has lost over one-third of its population since its peak in 1950. Rochester has averaged about fifty murders a year. While relatively small in absolute numbers, Rochester's homicide rate is the highest in New York - higher than New York City, 30 percent higher than Buffalo, and nearly 60 percent higher than Syracuse and Albany. It is also higher than cities such as Indianapolis and Los Angeles.
After reviewing the official data, Rochester found much the same general pattern as Indianapolis and other U.S. cities. Homicides involved young, African-American men, using firearms, in concentrated geographic areas, and many of the victims and suspects had prior involvement in the criminal justice system.
Like Indianapolis, the review of the official records was helpful in understanding basic crime patterns, but it left the Rochester SACSI team with little idea of how to reduce homicides. Much of what the analysis of the official records revealed was already widely known by the police and the general public. It was also clear that interventions already underway in this city were not having the desired effect.
The Rochester team decided that a homicide incident review would help give specificity to the problem. As in Indianapolis, the team wanted to develop a deeper understanding of the motives behind the murders and to see if there were patterns or individuals associated with multiple events that could lead to intervention strategies.
The review of all homicides in 2000 proved to be effective. It highlighted motives, weapons, and even individuals common across cases. Analysis of the data gained from the incident review revealed three types of murder in Rochester: (1) A small portion (13 percent) involved people who simply found themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time; (2) About half involved disputes and arguments; (3) About 40 percent involved murder associated with illegal business - almost all drug sales, robberies or robbery assassinations.
The homicide review also revealed that 40 percent of the homicides were connected with more than one assailant. The consensus among the group was that these were not highly organized gangs, but rather small groups of friends, involved in drug-related disputes and drug rip-off assassinations.
Before proceeding to interventions, the working group wanted to know more about the genesis and dynamics of drug houses and drug-house robberies, and needed additional information about the nature and frequency of disputes on the street. This led SACSI researchers to the Monroe County Correctional facility where they conducted lengthy focus groups with inmates.
The focus groups revealed valuable insights into the criminal lifestyle in Rochester. On the whole, the focus group members felt they lived in a very dangerous world. They believed they could run into conflicts anywhere and that most people in their neighborhoods had experienced, or were experiencing, serious "beefs" with others. Furthermore, they believed that weapons carrying and violence were common in their neighborhoods. They talked about "flash and respect" and reported that wearing expensive clothing or jewelry in their neighborhood may lead to envy by other young men. "Too much flash" seemed to be at the root of many conflicts and drug robberies.
In addition to providing invaluable insights into the criminal lifestyle, the focus groups also provided important information about the extent, supply, and reasons for gun carrying; the frequency, nature, and causes of disputes; and the history, operations, and dynamics of drug houses and drug house robberies. Further, the focus groups provided insights into the effectiveness of current law enforcement actions and on-going prosecution strategies such as Project Exile, as well as the level of intrusion and effect sanctions, including probation and parole, had on their lifestyle. From these focus groups, the Rochester SACSI group concluded that they had enough information to start thinking about strategies.
Observations about the problem specification process
The precise nature and flow of the problem-specification process was unique to each of the SACSI sites. However, two generalizations can be made. First, the targeted crime problems were not necessarily what they seemed initially. On the surface, Indianapolis and Rochester (and many other cities) have the same violence problem. After a much closer look, it became clear that the gang and drug-market dynamics were very different in different communities, as were the reasons behind the homicides. Indianapolis had semi-organized gangs engaged in drug turf battles. Rochester had drug-house robberies and disputes among individuals and groups. Second, the process demonstrates the importance of qualitative and nontraditional sources of data. Official data were critical to outlining of the problems, but systematic questioning of line practitioners, community groups, outreach workers, and even offenders, proved much more revealing of the motives and nature of the events. It is in the underlying patterns where opportunities for intervention were to be found.
III. Developing a strategy
Many of the SACSI sites struggled to move from specifying the problem to developing an intervention strategy. In some sites, it may have been difficult to develop a strategy because of an insufficient understanding of the problem - suggesting that the working group needed to continue gathering data. In others, it may have been an absence of leadership at a pivotal time. Often, it was simply the difficulty of matching the resources and assets of the working group to these difficult problems. Reflecting on the Boston experience, David Kennedy, one of the designers of the Boston Gun Project, urges patience. He reminds us that the types of problems likely to be addressed by sustained, large-scale, problem-solving exercises are typically difficult ones - otherwise, lesser efforts would have been sufficient to deal with them. The Boston Gun Project Working Group spent more than a year designing Operation Ceasefire. The SACSI sites took at least that long to design and implement their strategies.
Kennedy's decision rules
While there is no cookbook of lessons that will tell you how to innovate or give you the solution to the targeted crime problem, the Boston and the SACSI experiences offer the outline of a process for strategy development. They also offer effective ways of deciding whether the solutions and tactics suggested to address the targeted crime problem will meet their goals.
In the SACSI sites, the working groups took their problem analysis to community groups, line-level officers, social service agencies, and affected neighborhoods, in an attempt to solicit solutions. Most also looked at similar problems and solutions in other communities, and considered ways to apply criminological theory and practice to identify possible solutions to the problem.
Common suggestions included:
•Reducing poverty in high crime neighborhoods;
•Eradicating drug demand;
•Federal prosecution of all illegal gun carriers;
•Offering parenting classes; and,
•Supporting conflict resolution training and anti-gang programming in the schools.
All of these solutions were plausible ones in many of the SACSI communities. Reducing poverty and other root causes in high-crime areas would likely have an effect on violence in those neighborhoods. Eradicating drug demand would likely eliminate drug markets and the violence associated with them. Federally prosecuting all gun carriers would likely remove many potentially violent offenders from the community. Offering parenting classes and supporting positive training in schools might lead to healthier and less violent at-risk kids.
To narrow down the possible solutions, the SACSI sites applied Kennedy's decision rules to each one:
1) How big of an impact can we anticipate?
2) How long will it take?
3) Can we do it?
4) Do we want to?
As simple as they are, these questions set a very high standard. Most of the potential tactics suggested by SACSI working groups failed to meet at least one of the four rules. Two of the above mentioned examples - eradicating drug demand and federally prosecuting all illegal gun carriers - illustrate the point.
Eradicating drug demand
If drug demand were eradicated, illegal drug markets and the violence associated with them would dissipate. Thus, this strategy would pass rule #1 by yielding significant impacts on violent crime. All members of the working groups would have happily eradicated drug demand, and many members desperately wanted to do it (passing rule #4). However, eradicating drug demand would take longer than the working group had (failing rule #2) and was not something the working group had resources, know-how, or capacity to accomplish (failing rule #3). Thus, this strategy was discarded.
Federal prosecution of all illegal firearms carriers.
This was clearly something the working group could accomplish (passing rule #3), and, the results were likely to be almost immediate (passing rule #2). However, when working groups carefully examined the impact this strategy will have and the amount of resources required to sustain it over any duration, most groups concluded that this tactic was not targeted enough and did not offer enough "bang for the buck" (failing by rule #1). Further, when working groups considered the desirability of this action, most concluded that a good number of these offenders came from impoverished, addicted, and broken families, and not all of them deserved to be treated as hardened criminals, particularly if something better could be offered. Working group members also knew that many communities would not support federal prosecutions for all firearms carriers. For these, and other reasons, this strategy was not appealing (failing by rule #4). The strategy was discarded.
The SACSI sites had to keep searching until they found tactics that were both doable and effective in the short-run. The tactics that eventually passed the test were more often enforcement-focused than some working groups would have preferred. Thus, some sites developed a parallel track in which longer-term interventions were implemented and assessed.
IV. Common tactics
SACSI sites rarely settled on a single tactic as the immediate best answer. Rather, they used a variety of integrated tactics (which came together as a single strategy) aimed at identified causes. While every strategy was different, a few tactics were common to many of the sites and to Boston. Common tactics are described below.
The list
The goal of "the list" is to identify the most serious, violent offenders in the city and increase the arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of these offenders. If you can identify the most serious offenders, those responsible for most of the violence, and put them away, you will reduce violence and fear on the street. How the offenders for this list are identified is critical to success. Some cities relied solely on criminal history data, and thus sometimes identified older offenders who were not necessarily the most likely to commit homicide. Other cities combined criminal history data with a monthly version of the incident review process. In incident reviews, practitioners examined recent homicides, as well as other types of incidents (including shootings, shots fired, assaults, and/or robberies) to bring on-going violent events to bear in developing the list.
Once the list was developed, efforts were made to increase the arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of these offenders. In some sites, part of the effort involved establishing a team that screened all firearms and/or violence cases to determine the appropriateness of local or federal prosecution. This tactic is referred to in Richmond and other cities as "Project Exile." Some cities also increased the enforcement of bench warrants and increased probation/parole scrutiny on individuals on the list. In some communities, the list became something that was feared on the street.
This tactic was not used by all of the SACSI sites. Working groups that did not have strong community support feared being accused of "profiling" if they were to develop or use a tactic such as the list. On the other hand, working groups that were supported by community coalitions stood behind the list as strategic enforcement which sought to rid communities of the "worst of the worst", the offenders everyone wanted off the street.
Lever-pulling
The lever-pulling strategy attempts to: (1) increase the perception among high-risk individuals that they were likely to face criminal sanctions if they continued to engage in violence; (2) make high-risk individuals aware of, and provide access to, legitimate opportunities and services; (3) communicate clearly and directly to them; and, (4) be credible by following through on the threat of sanctions when violence occurs and by making services and opportunities available as an alternative to criminal activities.
The lever-pulling strategy starts by selecting a narrow target category of illegal behavior (for example, gang violence in Boston or adult offenders who involved juveniles in crimes as in Winston-Salem). The working group then delivers a direct and explicit message to a relatively small, targeted group regarding what kind of behavior will elicit a special response from law enforcement and what that response will be. Then the working group monitors the targeted group and the targeted behavior closely and follows-through when individuals or groups step out of line.
When individuals or groups commit targeted acts, the reaction must be immediate and certain. The working group must make good on its word, and "pull levers" on those who have engaged in violence. The working group should then communicate the results of the crackdown with others they are trying to effect. In other words, the working group should tell the targeted group (for example, Gang B) why members from Gang A are being prosecuted federally for their violent acts and what will happen to them if they behave similarly.
The primary method for delivering the lever-pulling message in the SACSI sites was a series of forums (or highly formalized meetings) with the target audience. The targeted audience of criminally involved individuals was most commonly identified through a combination of ongoing incident reviews and the use of the list. Federal and local prosecutors, accompanied by local, state, and federal law enforcement, explained the sanctions (levers) that would be applied to individuals and groups participating in violence. At the same forum, clergy and community leaders expressed their concerns about violence in the neighborhoods and the number of young men being victimized and incarcerated. The meetings also offered descriptions of available services and support opportunities available from providers, community, and clergy participants.
While this was the general format for the forums, the message, messengers, and precise format for the meetings varied across sites. Letters or phone calls to offenders, billboards, and posters may also serve as primary or secondary ways of notifying offenders of the message. What is critical is not necessarily how the offender is notified, but that the message reaches the right people, and that the message is clear, direct, and, most important, credible.
Home visits
Another key tactic in the SACSI sites were unannounced visits to the homes of probationers and parolees by teams of probation/parole officers, police, and in some cities (like Winston-Salem) clergy representatives. The home visits reinforced the message that the criminal justice community was united and serious about ensuring that targeted offenders were not committing violent offenses. Often these teams met not only with the offender, but also with the offender's family and neighbors, to let others know what was going on. Some of the visits ended with drug tests and some ended with distribution of resource information and contact sheets for services for the offenders and their families.
V. Measuring outcomes
The SACSI sites are using multiple techniques to determine if their interventions are having the intended effect. Most sites took careful pre-intervention measures of key violence indicators such as homicide, shootings, robbery, and aggravated assault, especially in the neighborhoods where the problems were concentrated and the solutions were implemented. All sites continued to monitor the indicators monthly, and where appropriate, by neighborhood to determine the impact. If key indicators showed an effect, SACSI site researchers sought to determine whether the effects could be replicated and predicted over time. They also attempted to identify alternative interventions or other dynamics (for example, economic or demographic changes) that could have caused these effects. Because some of the sites (for example, Winston-Salem) applied their strategies in several neighborhoods, they were able to compare the "test" areas with the "control" areas - those that experienced comparable violence but had not received the resources of the working group. The comparison of test and control areas was done to determine whether targeted crime was being displaced to other areas of the city.
In addition to these measures, several sites sought to determine how the strategies were affecting the city at large. For example, researchers in Indianapolis examined data over time from NIJ's Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program, which regularly tracks drug use by arrestees by asking questions about their drug use history. The researchers used ADAM to assess offender awareness of SACSI tactics, to learn more about the perceptions of criminal justice system effectiveness, and to determine if perceptions have changed on the street due to the strategies. Similarly, researchers in New Haven conducted pre- and post- intervention surveys of fear of crime in neighborhoods where the interventions were most acutely focused. SACSI sites have also attempted to determine whether the notified group has taken advantage of services and opportunities provided, and what effect these resources have had on offenders.
SACSI site results
The University of Illinois - Chicago is conducting an evaluation of all of the SACSI sites. The initial findings from the first five SACSI sites funded in 1998 (the sites funded in late 2000 have not begun implementing interventions yet) are promising. For example, in Indianapolis, targeted crimes were down 11 percent from the 1999 level and 46 percent since 1998. Memphis has also seen its targeted crime (sexual assault) rates decline 26 percent over the course of intervention. Winston-Salem's statistics indicate a steep decline in the use of firearms in violent crimes in targeted areas. SACSI publications should be available in the coming year.
VI. Conclusion
The lesson from Boston Ceasefire and SACSI is that law enforcement can prevent the next homicide. To do so, they need to build the right team and to ask the right questions. More often than not, the answers to these questions come from crime incident reviews, focus groups, and interviews with practitioners, in addition to administrative criminal justice system data. Only once the team has asked and answered all of these questions, can they design strategies to deal with their unique and precise problem. Over time, the team learns to assess their strategies and modify their approaches until they can predictably prevent homicides. These steps sound easy but each one contains many pitfalls. The lessons from SACSI are offered with the hope that the problem-solving model will continue to be improved upon by the Project Safe Neighborhoods Initiative.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erin Dalton is a program manager at the Department of Justice's research institute, the National Institute of Justice. For more information, please contact her at: daltona@ojp.usdoj.gov; 202-514-5752.
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