ONE ISSUE MANY LOCAL GOVERNMENTS consistently face is how best to ensure public safety while maintaining close relationships with their diverse communities—many of which feel afraid of rather than reliably protected by their own police forces. Seeing increased violence, fueled in part by a virulent epidemic of cocaine use in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the nation’s 17,000 independent municipal police departments faced a crisis in their legitimacy and effectiveness. Many innovative police chiefs throughout the country had begun rethinking the basic strategy of policing that they had diligently developed and pursued.
HKS faculty member Mark Moore pioneered a new approach towards combining academic researchers with innovative leaders of existing public professions to imagine and move towards more effective “strategies” for public sector organizations—in this case, the strategies relied on by police organizations throughout the country. The concept was described as an “Executive Session” on policing.
Starting in 1985, Moore, then the Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and Frank Hartmann, then the executive director of the newly established Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, convened the Executive Sessions on Policing.
These sessions brought police chiefs known and respected in the profession as the principal focus of the sessions, together with union leaders, mayors, city managers, officials from the U.S. Department of Justice, social commentators on police practices, and some academic researchers who had been examining and suggesting reforms in politicking practices. It was also explicitly designed to be bipartisan: both Attorney General Edwin Meese and Michael Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich were active members of the group that met several times over the course of multiple years.
What emerged from their discussions was the idea (and ideal) of a strategy for policing the nation’s cities that came to be called “community policing.” As one 1988 report—coauthored by Moore and James K. Stewart, who was then the director of the National Institute of Justice at the U.S. Department of Justice—stated: “The Executive Session on Policing, like other Executive Sessions at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is designed to encourage a new form of dialog between high-level practitioners and scholars, with a view to redefining and proposing solutions for substantive policy issues. Practitioners rather than academicians are given majority representation in the group. The meetings of the Session are conducted as loosely structured seminars or policy debates.”
The Executive Session on Policing of the 1980s helped redefine the discourse around law enforcement in America—encouraging a move away from purely reactive models toward more community-integrated, accountable, and strategic policing practices. Scholarship and work on policing and justice continues to evolve at the Kennedy School today under Sandra Susan Smith, the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice and faculty director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management. Smith has reimagined the program’s Executive Sessions with a focus on Massachusetts through the Roundtable on Racial Disparities in Massachusetts Criminal Courts, comprising community leaders, policymakers, and legal authorities from across the state.
A model for preventing violence
An important offshoot of the executive sessions involved a sustained research and practice partnership with the Boston Police Department that focused on reducing the sharply escalated violence that came with the national crack epidemic and that disproportionately victimized Black men. Between 1991 and 1995, the city saw elevated homicides: roughly 100 yearly.
Inspired by the Executive Session’s elevation of problem-oriented and community policing, Kennedy School researchers David Kennedy, Anne Piehl, and Anthony Braga obtained Department of Justice funding and joined with the Boston Police Department and others in law enforcement, city outreach workers, service providers, and community activists to analyze the problem and craft a solution. The “Boston Gun Project” research resulted in two pioneering findings, identifying a “supply side” of illicit firearms trafficking and a “demand side” violence dynamic rooted in a small number of loose neighborhood drug groups enmeshed in retaliation and vendetta.
The firearms trafficking research led to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative, which by 2000 was supporting firearm trafficking analysis and intervention in 50 cities. The violence research led to Operation Ceasefire, a groundbreaking strategy in which a team of law enforcement, service providers, and community actors met face-to-face with the drug crews, put them on notice that violence was everybody’s top priority and would get focused legal attention, that there was help for those who wanted it, and that their own communities profoundly needed the violence to stop. Homicide fell almost 70% over the next five years: the first example of effective city-wide violence prevention, and what came to be called the “Boston Miracle.”
That intervention led to the DOJ’s Strategic Approaches to Community Safety initiative, which has been widely implemented nationally and internationally and is driving historic homicide reductions in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Oakland. It was the origin of what is now called “focused deterrence,” which has led to successful interventions in drug markets, intimate partner violence, prison safety, and a wide range of other substantive problems, and the beginning of a rapidly evolving field of evidence-based violence prevention.
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Banner image by Jerry Holt/Star; portraits by Martha Stewart