Cloth and Badge Story
Parish+Precinct=Peaceful Streets
It was yet another funeral for yet another young man killed in yet another
drive-by shooting. But this time the violence didn't wait while others mourned.
Even before the service ended, gang conflicts erupted into gunshots and a
stabbing within the sanctuary of Morning Star Baptist Church in Mattapan,
Massachusetts. This flagrant disruption of religious observance impelled the
African-American clergy of Boston to act in a way they never had before--as a
group. In May 1992, ministers Eugene Rivers '83, Ray Hammond '71, M.D. '75, A.M.
'84, and Jeffrey Brown, Dv '90, published a "Ten-Point Proposal for Citywide
Mobilization to Combat the Material and Spiritual Sources of Black-on-Black
Violence." Within weeks, the Ten-Point Coalition was born.
Now numbering 42 churches, the Ten-Point Coalition has been instrumental in
creating what has been billed as the "Boston Miracle"--a 77 percent
drop in annual homicides from 1990's record high of 152 to only 35 in 1998.
Although several major cities' murder rates have dropped in recent years,
Boston's dramatic decline leads the nation. An unusual partnership between the
coalition and Boston law enforcement has made a major contribution, according to
Jenny Berrien '98 and sociology professor Christopher Winship, Ph.D. '77, who
have coauthored four articles on the topic. The ministers, Winship says, are
"critical in pushing the police to follow a set of policies that the
inner-city community is willing to support and sees as beneficial and
helpful." Adds Berrien, "That's the whole idea of the 'umbrella of
legitimacy'"--which she and Winship posit as Ten-Point's chief contribution
to reducing youth violence.
"In Boston, youth violence has come to be seen as a joint problem,"
Winship says. "Cops and ministers meet with troublemakers and send a direct
message--either stop the gang-banging [gang violence] or we're going to put you
in jail." These efforts are built on a few shared assumptions: (1) youth
violence must be dealt with as crime, not simply as a symptom of poverty and
broken homes; (2) only 1 percent of youths are responsible for the greatest
violence, and the ministers will help identify them; (3) some kids need to go to
jail, not only for the sake of the community, but for their own sake; (4) the
Ten-Point ministers will have a voice in who gets arrested and how they are
sentenced; (5) if police act indiscriminately or abusively, they will be held
accountable. The ministers, police, and probation officers now "talk
off-and-on on a daily basis," says Berrien, adding that such a "stable
and standardized level of communication" is rare in law enforcement.
New York City, which has also brought down its crime rates, has taken a
different approach, with aggressive "stop and frisk" tactics. But its
police department and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani have come under increasing attack
for instituting what some have called a "police state."
"Community-police relations there are at an all-time low," says
Winship. "Is that a politically sustainable approach?"
A decade ago, the Boston police had their own "kick butts and crack
heads" policy (as one captain put it) to combat gang violence, before the
racially charged Carol Stuart murder case of 1989 prompted a change. Police had
accepted husband Charles Stuart's story of a black male assailant (the Stuarts
were white), and blanketed the African-American neighborhood of Dorchester,
coercing statements in their search for suspects. These rights abuses outraged
the African-American community. Ultimately, the investigation suggested that
Stuart himself had murdered his pregnant wife.
Such incidents, past and present, lead "inner-city minorities to see the
criminal justice system as totally lacking legitimacy," explain Berrien and
Winship in an article in the forthcoming Brookings Institution book Managing
Youth Violence. Residents, they write, "become increasingly unwilling to
cooperate with police or support police activities." Hostile mistrust on
both sides of the police-community equation has been a major obstacle in the
fight against inner-city crime. In fact, during the late 1980s and early 1990s,
Boston's black clergy were among the most severe and public critics of police
excesses.
How, then, did they become allies? Following the Carol Stuart fiasco, the
Boston police department recognized its need for community support and began
overhauling its policies. It publicly weeded out "bad-seed" cops,
undertook "squeaky-clean" policing, and started experimenting with an
innovative multiagency approach to violence prevention. Probation officers, for
instance, had deserted the streets out of fear for their safety. Now,
"Operation Night Light" enables them to join police officers on patrol
to enforce probation restrictions--and consequently, probationers no longer view
probation as a meaningless slap on the wrist.
Over time, Boston police have earned greater respect in the inner city. And
the program is now rolling out nationally: nine other cities, including
Philadelphia, Tulsa, and East Chicago, are putting the coalition's principles
into action. Invitations have arrived from overseas, with London, Durban, South
Africa, and Kingston, Jamaica, among the cities interested. In collaboration with
the Kennedy School's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, the coalition is
planning a national Ten-Point Training Institute. There have even been
discussions with representatives of the World Bank about "the role of faith
communities as nongovernmental organizations that can assist in crime
prevention," says the Reverend Eugene Rivers.
"Ministers have a unique moral authority," Winship says, "and I
think they've been able to hold that moral authority over both the police and the
gang members. Second, they bring a religious language and perspective to
understanding these problems. They can talk about individual responsibility in a
way that avoids the argument between the left and the right." Indeed, both
Texas governor George W. Bush Jr. and Vice President Al Gore have endorsed the
program. Even more important are the results. For 29 months, not a single funeral
was held in Boston for a teenage homicide victim, and during the following 20
months, between January 1998 and August 1999, there were only four--a quadrennial
average of less than one a year.
