In 1988, Moore and Malcolm Sparrow, a Kennedy School professor who was a former detective chief inspector with the British police, asked Kennedy to work with them on a book about new ideas in policing. “So that’s where I got my graduate-school education,” Kennedy said. “I read everything, and talked about this stuff constantly.” He had always intended to return to freelance writing, he said, “but I realized that I was too committed to the work I was doing.” He asked Moore if he could become part of the criminal-justice program at the Kennedy School, and Moore hired him, in 1992.

“It was just a magical time,” Kennedy said, of the early nineties. “There was a sense that something profound had been figured out, and it was going to change everything. We had been dead wrong about crime for so long, and we could see we were at a point of transforming these institutions.”

In fact, nothing changed. Kennedy’s timing was terrible. From 1987 to 1990, during the peak of the crack epidemic, youth homicides in cities across America rapidly escalated; in Boston during that period, youth homicides increased two hundred and thirty per cent, and from 1991 to 1995 the city averaged about forty-four youth homicides a year. Across the country, from the smallest county judgeship to the Presidency of the United States, political races hinged more and more on the question of who could be tougher on crime. From 1980 to 2000, the prison population in the U.S. increased from three hundred and nineteen thousand to 1.3 million. Federal corrections expenditures, driven by new federal drug-sentencing changes, went from five hundred and forty-one million dollars in 1982 to more than $6.9 billion in 2006, and state corrections expenditures that year totalled more than forty-two billion dollars. California now spends about two and a half times as much per prison inmate as it does per student in the University of California system.

By the mid-nineties, crime rates were dropping in cities around the country, nowhere more dramatically than in New York City, where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton were pioneering the zero-tolerance approach and drawing attention to Kelling and Wilson’s “broken windows” theory by aggressively pursuing minor crimes. Advocates of longer sentencing and “three strikes” legislation cited those measures as the main reasons for the decline. Subsequent analysis by social scientists has suggested that the increase in incarceration was only a small factor in the great crime decline; other reasons, such as changing demographics and economic circumstances, and the waning of the crack epidemic, were collectively more important. Nonetheless, by the late nineties, incapacitation—locking a lot of people up for long terms to prevent crime—was the new ruling principle in criminal justice. Deterrence, in the classical sense of the word—using the threat of punishment to prevent crime—had become an even smaller part of public policy.

In 1994, the National Institute of Justice gave a grant to Kennedy and Anne Morrison Piehl, a colleague from the Kennedy School, to work out a problem-oriented approach to youth violence in Boston. They were joined by Anthony Braga, who was then a doctoral student in criminal justice at Rutgers University. Kennedy was eager to talk to cops who had the most street knowledge, and eventually he was directed to Paul Joyce, the leader of the police department’s Youth Violence Strike Force. Over the next six months, Joyce gradually revealed his methods for dealing with violent gangs. He had observed that the use of force and the threat of prison seemed to have little effect in deterring gang members’ behavior. But certain moral authorities from within the community—clergy, ex-cons, outreach workers with street credibility—could sometimes get through to the offenders, especially when their pleas were coupled with the promise of help. Joyce had also figured out how to use the gangs’ own internal dynamics against them. Joyce was cryptic about this part of his operation; when Kennedy asked how he had managed to calm down one gang in particular, Joyce would say only, “We just told them the truth.” The truth, it turned out, was that if one more gang shooting occurred, by any one of their members, the whole group was going to take the blame.

“I just said, ‘Holy shit!’ ” Kennedy told me. “ ‘This is incredible! Do you realize what this means?’ ” Joyce’s techniques, he believed, could be used to formulate a method of “focussed deterrence”—a systematic, repeatable version of the ad-hoc working methods that Joyce and his partners had developed in the streets.

Kennedy also discovered that Joyce’s strike force knew how the victims knew the shooters, and what the beefs between them were. “I said, ‘Oh my God, you know all this stuff!’ ‘Sure we know it,’ Joyce replied. ‘It’s just that nobody asked us for it before.’ ”

In order to broadcast the messages that Joyce imparted informally to gangs citywide, Kennedy, Braga, and Piehl came up with the idea of group forums, or call-ins. “We went to the Boston police command structure and presented it, thinking, This is never going to fly,” Kennedy said. “But they heard us out, and then said, ‘Yep, that’ll work.’ ”

The first call-in was in the spring of 1996, a few months after Joyce had been succeeded by Gary French. By the second round, that summer, youth homicide had dropped dramatically. Just eight homicides were committed over the five months following the first call-in, compared with twenty-eight in the same five months of the previous year—a seventy-one-per-cent decline. In October, there were no youth homicides at all. Things got so quiet that French thought his pager had stopped working. “I almost took my beeper in to have it checked,” he said at the time. “It just stopped going off.”

The Ceasefire team in Cincinnati came together during the first half of 2007. It included members of the police department and the U.S. Attorney’s office, the district attorney, and the county sheriff, as well as Hamilton County probation and Ohio state parole officers. It also encompassed an array of social-service providers and a dozen or so outreach workers, who served as liaisons with the gang members. The cops, social workers, and outreach workers, some of whom were ex-cons, would all have a stake. The group acquired a name—C.I.R.V. (Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence)—offices downtown, and a project manager, S. Gregory Baker, a civilian who handles community relations for the C.P.D. Several former executives from Procter & Gamble, which is based in Cincinnati, volunteered their “best practices” management expertise to the group. Eventually, the C.I.R.V. team numbered almost fifty partner agencies.

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The first Cincinnati call-in was held on July 31, 2007, in a large courtroom in the Hamilton County Courthouse. The C.I.R.V. team assembled in the courtroom first. Then about thirty men, mostly young, were admitted. Heads bent, avoiding eye contact, and sullenly postured like the punctuation at the end of a question for which there is no answer—What the fuck?—they filed into the benches reserved for courtroom spectators. A few who were already in lockup wore handcuffs and leg shackles. They sat down, and the team in the front of the room looked at them. No one spoke.

Call-ins are intensely dramatic events, like modern-day morality plays. At the one I attended, there was a palpable, almost evangelical desire to make the experience transformative for the gangbangers. An older ex-gang member named Arthur Phelps, whom everyone called Pops, wheeled a thirty-seven-year-old woman in a wheelchair to the center of the room. Her name was Margaret Long, and she was paralyzed from the chest down. “Seventeen years ago, I shot this woman,” Phelps said, weeping. “And I live with that every day of my life.” Then Long cried out, “And I go to the bathroom in a bag,” and she snatched out the colostomy bag from inside the pocket of her wheelchair and held it up while the young men stared in horror. When the final speaker, a street worker named Aaron Pullins III, yelled, “Your house is on fire! Your building is burning! You’ve got to save yourselves! Stand up!,” three-quarters of the group jumped to their feet, as if they had been jerked up like puppets on strings.

At the initial call-in, Victor Garcia was the first to speak. He told the young men that he loved them, that they had value to their community, and that he knew they were better than their violent actions implied. Afterward, Chief Streicher addressed them, thanking them for coming, and making it clear that “this is nothing personal.” He then delivered the message: “We know who you are, we know who your friends are, and we know what you’re doing. If your boys don’t stop shooting people right now, we’re coming after everyone in your group.” To reinforce this message at a later call-in, surveillance footage showing some of the invitees selling drugs was projected on a screen at the front of the courtroom. “Raise your hands when you see yourselves,” Streicher said. One by one, hands went up.

The young men were introduced to the social workers, who were available to help them get jobs and educational assistance, if they called the phone number that had been provided to them in an information packet. And two mothers of sons murdered by gangs spoke of their pain and loss.

Michael Blass, a public official who was then with the Ohio Department of Public Safety, wrote an account of his experience as an observer at this first call-in. He described the invitees’ “awkward attempts to project confidence, indifference, in some cases, perhaps, hostility. . . . These angry young men, used to being in control in the incredibly brutal environment of the mean streets, were noticeably off-balance and unsure of themselves.” Blass wrote, “I saw a few young men choke back tears. . . . Over the course of a couple of hours, their facial expressions changed from those of cynicism or polite boredom to attention and curiosity.” One young man raised his shackled hands above his head and cried out, “I never knew there was this much love out there . . . seriously, I never knew it.”

One of the gang members invited to the meeting was Dante Ingram, twenty-nine, who had been selling drugs and stealing since he was fifteen. “That’s how we was brought up,” he told me recently. “When your mom’s a crackhead, your dad’s in the joint, your brother sells drugs, and your best buddy got a Cadillac and Jordans—what else you going to do? You got no other role models.” In 2006, Ingram had been caught with a large amount of marijuana and several guns in his house, and sentenced to ten years in federal prison, but it was his first felony conviction and the judge released him on probation. His probation officer had ordered him to attend the call-in.

Ingram told me that he was more influenced by the community-services aspect of the Ceasefire strategy than by the threat of swift and certain punishment. “During the cops’ presentation, I wasn’t really listening,” he said. “Some guys around me were snoring. They were being the typical tough cops, threatening us and whatnot. But you got to understand—threats mean nothing to these guys.”

Ingram kept the card with the phone number. “For the next three weeks, I looked at it every day,” he told me. Finally, he called, and left Stan Ross, the head of the street workers, a message: “If this shit is for real, give me a call.” Ross called, and within a month Ingram had a job in sales with a telemarketing firm.

Kennedy had cautioned the C.I.R.V. team that the murder rate would fall only moderately after the first call-in; it was after the second set of call-ins, “the second turn of the crank,” as he put it, that the mechanism would really take hold. By the end of the year, homicides in Cincinnati in 2007 were down twenty-four per cent from 2006. The trend continued into 2008—by April, there had been a fifty-per-cent reduction in gang-related homicides. Kennedy had made good on his guarantee to the Mayor.

The fourth call-in, held in June, 2008, was a disaster. In contrast to the previous call-ins, during which the young men had been split up into smaller groups, this time a hundred and twenty of them were brought together at the same time, in the same room. In retrospect, this was one of several mistakes that the team made. “We lost control of the room,” Whalen said. Also, for the first time, the team hadn’t rehearsed, and, partly as a result, “We went off script,” he said. Some street workers cursed, and one started flirting with a gang member’s girlfriend. (“Girl, you fine. What you doin’ hangin’ with these thugs?”) Other street workers referred to gang members as niggas, which the cops saw as a violation of propriety and state authority.

Kennedy told me, “Some people within the group had become hungry for that personal transformation, when the individual offenders jump up and declare themselves done with the thug life, and everyone cries. At the June meeting, they didn’t get that reaction, and they ended up pushing too hard.”

In the months after the call-in, the murder rate spiked upward. “We almost provoked them to violence,” Whalen told me. “They went out of the room challenged.”

Streicher threatened to pull the cops off the team if their concerns were not addressed. The Mayor assured Streicher that the mistakes would not be repeated, and persuaded the police to stay involved. Thanks to Greg Baker’s work as project manager, C.I.R.V. did not go off the rails. The next call-in, scheduled for the fall of 2008, was moved back to December, in part to give the team a chance to regroup. For Kennedy, the important thing was that “the system self-corrected,” he said. “That’s huge.”

Since its success in Boston, Kennedy’s anti-gang-violence strategy has been tried in some sixty other cities. (Kennedy’s method should not be confused with one devised in Chicago by Gary Slutkin, a physician and epidemiologist, which is sometimes referred to as CeaseFire. Slutkin’s strategy employs community members to mediate potential shootings while also pushing for behavioral change in high-risk individuals and communities.) Kennedy helped Minneapolis implement a violence-prevention strategy in June of 1996, and homicides in the summer months fell from forty-two that year to eight in 1997. But in Minneapolis “the team lost focus,” Kennedy told me, and “all the complicated parts of the mechanism didn’t mesh.” A similar thing happened, over the next five years, in Indianapolis and Stockton, California. Spectacular early results proved difficult to sustain. “Ceasefire takes a lot of manpower,” Wayne Hose, a former chief of police in Stockton, told me. “And you have to have people who believe in it. You have to have someone who will call the D.A.’s office and say, ‘Why aren’t your people coming to the meetings?’ ” Even in Boston, Ceasefire didn’t last; the program was abandoned in 2000, partly as a result of a personality conflict among team members. By 2001, the number of homicides had risen more than a hundred per cent over the 1999 level, and it has remained high. In 2007, Gary French began to implement a renewed Ceasefire approach, and so far the results have been promising.

Franklin Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, who is a leading deterrence scholar, told me that one reason that Ceasefire’s effectiveness is difficult to predict in any given city is that Kennedy’s results have not been subjected to a rigorous independent analysis. “Ceasefire is more a theory of treatment than a proven strategy,” he said, adding, “It’s odd that no one has ever said, ‘O.K., here are the youths who were not part of the Ceasefire program in Boston, let’s compare them to the youths who were. And no one has followed up with any long-range studies of the criminal behavior of the group that was in the program, either. We just don’t have the evidence, and until we do we can’t evaluate how effective Ceasefire really is.”

When I relayed Zimring’s comments to Kennedy, he laughed. “Frank still doesn’t get it,” he said. “There’s plenty of research, but it’s not focussed on the impact on the people in the call-ins, because the strategy isn’t just about the people in the room.” He added, “When you have a couple of meetings and homicide city-wide goes down forty per cent, it’s not because the forty guys you’ve talked to have turned their lives around. There are a thousand guys on the street you haven’t talked to. But the forty get the word out to the thousand—which ruins them as controls for the kind of evaluation that Frank’s talking about.”

Perhaps Kennedy’s greatest success to date has occurred in High Point, North Carolina, a small city, of some ninety thousand people, that is known for producing furniture. (The entire city smells like varnish.) The High Point Strategy, as it has come to be known, was aimed at public drug dealing, not gang violence, but the methodology was largely the same. In 2004, Kennedy persuaded Jim Fealy, chief of the High Point police, to apply his problem-oriented approach to a long-standing open-air drug market in a neighborhood called West End. Fealy and his predecessor had tried for years to shut down the market with periodic sweeps and stings. “We would go in and arrest ’em, and things would quiet down for a few months, but then new guys would be back,” he said. The Reverend Jim Summey, who was at the time the pastor of the English Road Baptist Church, in the center of West End, told me that on Sunday mornings there were so many drug dealers, prostitutes, and johns on the sidewalk in front of the church that worshippers coming for services couldn’t steer their cars into the parking lot.

Fealy was seated at his desk when I spoke to him; a photograph behind him showed him in full SWAT regalia. “Everyone knows I’m as conservative as they come,” he drawled. “My approach as a cop had always been either arrest the problem or scare the problem away with high-profile prosecutions. You know, ‘Cuff’em and stuff’em.’ But in West End the problem always came back.” When he first heard about Kennedy’s strategy, he thought it was ridiculous, but he agreed to meet him. “David said, ‘Give me a half hour before you decide I’m crazy.’ And at the end of that half hour I was still sitting there.”

Kennedy’s strategy not only closed down the West End drug market; the drug market disappeared the day after the first call-in. “We had worked on these problems for twenty years and got nowhere, and in one day it was over,” Fealy said. “In one day. Honestly, I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

It’s unclear whether any of the dozen or so High Point drug dealers who called the services number ultimately left behind the life of crime. None of the root-cause problems behind drugs and crime were solved; drug dealing may have moved indoors, or to other neighborhoods, or to nearby cities. But public drug dealing never returned to West End, and, once the threat was removed from the streets, the community reclaimed its neighborhood. Within weeks, residents were planting flowers in their gardens, and in the spring of 2005 the community threw a barbecue for the police.