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Anthony A. Braga

Anthony A. Braga is a Senior Research Fellow in the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management (PCJ) at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and the Don M. Gottfredson Professor of Evidence-Based Criminology in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. He is also a member of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and a Senior Fellow in the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently the Vice President and an elected Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology. He received his Master in Public Administration (MPA) from Harvard, and his PhD in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University.

Research and Projects

Dr. Braga’s research involves collaborating with criminal justice, social service, and community-based organizations to address illegal access to firearms, reduce gang and group-involved violence, and control crime hot spots. Since 1995, Braga has worked closely with criminal justice practitioners in Boston to reduce youth gun violence. He was a member of the Boston Gun Project working group that implemented the well-known Operation Ceasefire gang violence reduction strategy that was associated with a 63% reduction in youth homicides in Boston during the mid to late 1990s.

Since 2007 Braga has served as the Chief Policy Advisor to Commissioner Edward F. Davis of the Boston Police Department. In this role Braga has worked with Boston Police command staff and officers to implement the Compstat management accountability system, reinvigorate the Operation Ceasefire strategy, and develop the Safe Street Team program which uses community problem solving techniques to control violent crime hot spots.

Dr. Braga has served as a consultant on controlling and preventing violent crime problems to many Federal, State, and local criminal justice agencies including the U.S. Department of Justice; U.S. Department of the Treasury; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security; Massachusetts State Police; Baltimore Police Department; New York Police Department; Los Angeles Police Department; Milwaukee Police Department; Oakland Police Department; San Francisco Police Department; and many others. Dr. Braga’s work on controlling and preventing violent crime has received numerous awards.

Recognition

His work with the Boston Police Department on its Safe Street Teams program was recognized by the International Association of Chiefs of Police with its Community Policing Award (2011) and Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award (2011), and he was also a recipient of the U.S. Department of Justice Project Safe Neighborhoods' Distinguished Service by a Research Partner Award (2010) and of the U.S. Attorney General’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Community Partnerships for Public Safety (2009). He has also received several certificates of distinction from the Derek Bok Center for Learning and Teaching for his prior classes offered at Harvard and teaches in the Police Executive Research Forum’s Senior Management Institute for Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Executives Institute.

Publications

Dr. Braga has published numerous scholarly papers and his work has been published in top criminology and criminal justice journals such as Criminology, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and Criminology & Public Policy. His work has also appeared in top medical and public health journals such as New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, and the American Journal of Public Health.  With colleagues, he has authored and edited several books such as Policing Problem Places: Crime Hot Spots and Effective Prevention (Oxford University Press, 2010), Problem-Oriented Policing and Crime Prevention (Criminal Justice Press, 2008), Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: A Comparative Perspective (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2007), and Police Innovation: Contrasting Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Contact Information

• See Dr. Anthony Braga's HKS Staff page
• Email the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management

Published Research

• Reducing Gun Violence in America - Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (from Gun Policy Summit)
• Social Networks and the Risk of Gunshot Injury
• The Effects of Hot Spots Policing on Crime: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
• Serious Youth Violence and Innovative Prevention: On the Emerging Link between Public Health and Criminology
• Can ‘Disciplined Passion’ Overcome the Cynical View? An Empirical Inquiry of Evaluator Influence on Police Crime Prevention Program Outcomes
• Interpreting the Empirical Evidence on Illegal Gun Market Dynamics
• The Effects of Focused Deterrence Strategies on Crime: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Empirical Evidence
• Lessons from a Partially Controlled Field Trial
• Getting Deterrence Right? Evaluation Evidence and Complementary Crime Control Mechanisms
• An Ex-Post-Facto Evaluation Framework for Place-Based Police Intervention
• Reconsidering the Ballistic Imaging of Crime Bullets in Gun Law Enforcement Operations
• Opportunities for State-Level Action to Reduce Firearm Violence: Proceeding from the Evidence
• Research Design Influence on Study Outcomes in Crime and Justice: A Partial Replication with Public Area Surveillance
• The Relevance of Micro Places to Citywide Robbery Trends: A Longitudinal Analysis of Robbery Incidents at Street Corners and Block Faces in Boston
• Intervening in Gun Markets: An Experiment to Assess the Impact of Targeted Gun Law Messaging
• The Empirical Evidence for Hot Spots Policing
• Gun Shows and Gun Violence: Fatally Flawed Study Yields Misleading Results
• Disrupting Illegal Firearms Markets in Boston: The Effects of Operation Ceasefire on the Supply of New Handguns to Criminals
• Creating an Effective Foundation to Prevent Youth Violence:  Lessons Learned from Boston in the 1990s
• Testing for Structural Breaks in the Evaluation of Programs
• Reducing Gang Violence in Boston
• Reducing Gun Violence: The Boston Gun Project's Operation Ceasefire
• Problem-Oriented Policing, Deterrence, and Youth Violence: An Evaluation of Boston's Operation Ceasefire Problem Solving and Youth Violence: An Evaluation of the Boston Gun Project
• Youth Homicide in Boston: An Assessment of Supplementary Homicide Report Data
• Homicide in Minneapolis: Research for Problem Solving
• The (Un)Known Universe: Mapping Gangs and Gang Violence in Boston
• Youth Violence in Boston: Gun Markets, Serious Youth Offencders, and a Use-Reduction Strategy

For more information on these papers and reports, see the PCJ Publications page and the PCJ Gangs, Guns, and Urban Violence Published Findings section.