NATION

HOW TO START A CEASEFIRE: LEARNING FROM BOSTON

BY SAM ALLIS/BOSTON

It is nine o'clock on a gamy summer night, and Bill Stewart is on curfew
patrol. The probation officer bounds up the stairs of a Dorchester
tripledecker apartment building to check on a boy who was once caught with
marijuana. The boy must be home between the hours of 7 p.m. and 7 a.m.,
seven days a week, under a system of courtordered curfews for young
offenders, each curfew set individually by a judge. There had been
worrisome signs of gang involvement in this case. A week ago, someone fired
a shotgun blast into the secondfloor porch, and the boy's parents still
have pellets in their arms and legs.

The kid, who just turned 17, is home. So are his older brother, two of his
friendsand a bag of marijuana. "Three strikes and you're in," says
Stewart. Jail, that is. Two plainclothes policemen who accompany Stewart
confiscate the bag and run background checks on the boy's friends. When
Stewart visits the apartment the next night to make sure the kid is still
honoring the curfew and to search the place, he finds on the wall of a
closet the roster of the Argyle Street Ballers, a small gang that sells
drugs. "Now we know the players," he explains. "Now we can put the weight
on them."

Stewart is not alone in putting weight on potential juvenile offenders in
Boston. The city's Operation Night Light, which began in 1992, and
Operation CeaseFire, which emerged last year, have unleashed deskbound
probation officers in a drive coordinated with other lawenforcement
agencies to keep drugs and weapons off the streets. The joint operations,
part of a larger collaborative effort, have led to one startling result.
Last week Boston completed its second year without anyone under 17 being
killed by a firearm. No other American city with a population over half a
million can match this record. "Boston is the first city in the country to
interrupt the cycle of violence that began with crack," concludes David
Kennedy, senior researcher at Harvard's Program in Criminal Justice Policy
and Management.

In the early '90s, Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan were war zones, teeming
with guns. Since the Dorchester district court first began imposing curfews
in 1991, the city's gangs can no longer hang with impunity on crack corners
at midnight.

Operation CeaseFire is not just a police operation. It involves more than
a dozen agencies, including the U.S. Attorney, the Drug Enforcement
Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Suffolk
County District Attorney as well as the Ten Point Coalition, a network of
43 black churches in the city. Says the Rev. Eugene Rivers, cofounder of
the Ten Point Coalition: "The streets are much safer. The collaboration
between the black churches and the police has produced results unseen in
any other city." The two groups are now quietly working together to clear
up scores of unsolved homicides.

Before CeaseFire, federal and local law enforcement communicated like the
Hatfields and the McCoys. "We were ordered not to notify the Boston
police," says Michael Hennessey, a lieutenant in the school police,
"because it would make the school administrators look bad."

No longer. Today everyone sees everyone else's intelligence. U.S. Attorney
Donald Stern gets a copy of each report on a gun charge from the Boston
police department. Stern in turn uses federal indictments to help take down
Boston's most dangerous youths. All data are fed into the computers of the
Youth Violence Task Force, an elite 65person unit that tracks and targets
gang activity. "We made threats directly to gang members and then delivered
on it," says Police Commissioner Paul Evans. A case in point is the
Intervale Posse, for years one of the most vicious gangs in the city.
Despite repeated warnings from state and federal authorities, Intervale
continued to terrorize its Dorchester neighborhood. CeaseFire struck at
dawn last August, arresting 24 gang members; 15 were brought down with
federal warrants. "They are the teeth of the whole thing," notes David
Singletary, an officer with the Youth Violence Task Force, as he cruises
Dorchester one night with his partner, Kenny Israel, talking to street
kids. "Once you say 'federal time,' it's a different ball game. You can end
up doing your time in Leavenworth, and there is no parole."

Last week Attorney General Janet Reno praised the Boston project, and the
Detroit police department sent officers to learn more about the experience.
Detroit's executive deputy chief Benny Napoleon was impressed by the level
of interagency coordination. "They're all at the table at the same time,
consistently. We would see greater results from trying to duplicate the
ways they do it."

No one in Boston, though, is getting cocky. "If we let up, the homicides
could come right back again," warns Sergeant Kathleen Johnston, who is
responsible for safety in the Boston public schools. "They are like a
chronic disease."