One man’s fight to stop street violence in America

BOOK REVIEW

September 30, 2011|By Liz Raftery, Globe Correspondent

David M. Kennedy was a leader in the Ceasefire project in Boston.

DON’T SHOOT:

One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America

By David M. Kennedy

Bloomsbury, 305 pp., $28

The sharp decline in Boston’s youth homicide rate in the late 1990s has been christened “The Boston Miracle.’’ But don’t call it that in front of David M. Kennedy.

“I always hated that name. It wasn’t a miracle, it was hard damned work,’’ Kennedy, who spearheaded the Ceasefire project in the mid-1990s, notes in his book “Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America.’’

Violent crime began soaring in urban areas in the 1980s, fueled by a national crack epidemic. A decade later street shootings had become commonplace in many American cities. “Don’t Shoot’’ chronicles Kennedy’s work with law enforcement officials and community leaders beginning in the 1990s in Boston and then spreading to other cities and states, all the while homing in on gangs as a principal cause of urban killings.

Kennedy, who grew up outside 1960s Detroit, attended Swathmore College and later found himself working as a writer of case studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. There he became involved with the school’s program in criminal justice policy and management and began learning firsthand through his street research about urban poverty and violence.

Later he would become a key part of a Kennedy School team organized to seek practical solutions to stem the mounting numbers of victims. Their work contributed to the creation of the “Boston Gun Project’’ in January 1995, which evolved into “Operation Ceasefire.’’ The idea was to focus on a relatively small group of the city’s most violent offenders - all tied to gangs, with most of the killings resulting from petty feuds among the groups. It essentially involved instituting a zero-tolerance policy on crime - making arrests for even minor violations, such as carrying a single bullet or breaking curfew. Police and community workers met gang members and told them the pressure would continue until the shootings stopped. The gangs took heed, and violent crime rates began to drop.