Boston Miracle

This template of many gang suppression efforts never was able to sustain its work, as this article from the Boston Globe reports, but is still being used as a model, as this article from the Monterey Herald reveals, which is too bad, as the built in problems remain, with the major one being that the former criminal street workers who are key to the effort are not highly educated, trained, or spiritually prepared to lead the work for the long period of time necessary to achieve scalable success.

But, even more important than that is the connected weakness, being that the former criminals, after becoming educated, trained, and spiritually prepared, need to develop their own program format rather than following anothers, how they will individually address the problem, for that type of ownership is what builds in sustainability in the nonprofit world as in the for profit.

An excerpt from the Monterey article.

“The room is filled with guys who have seen it all and done worse. The men — as young as 18 and as old as 34 — have been convicted of violent crimes during the past three years, and most are hard-core gang members.

"I know most of you guys that walked in," a San Francisco gang officer tells the group, according to a transcript of the meeting.

“The men know that federal prosecutors, local police and district attorneys have them marked for serious prison time if they ever shoot another gun — in fact, those very people are in the room with them.

“But something is different: The cops and prosecutors keep saying they want to help. Waiting for the gang members in an adjacent room are job and school counselors, offering an alternative to the gang lifestyle.

"I'd much rather see you working and passing by and saying, 'Hi,' than putting handcuffs on you," the gang cop says, "or to have to call your mom and let her know you're dead on the street."

“His message, delivered at a meeting known as a "call-in," is the heart of a strategy called Ceasefire — and it's coming to Salinas.

“When it was first introduced on the East Coast 15 years ago, Ceasefire was seen as a radical experiment. But with research reinforcing its claims of quickly lowering the number of gang murders by up to 75 percent, many are now calling the strategy revolutionary.

“It has been dubbed Operation Peacekeeper, Safe Streets and The Boston Miracle. California's version is the Safe Community Partnership. Whatever the name, studies indicate that variations of Ceasefire have been successful in dropping gang murder counts, usually within a year or two, in the roughest neighborhoods of Boston, Chicago and other cities.”