The Boston Strategy > Players > Police

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	Police Commissioner Paul Evans Supt. in Chief, Ret. Faherty Supt. Paul Joyce Lt. Det. Gary French Sgt. Robert Merner Det. Tito Whittington Ptl. Mark Buchanan Ptl. Greg Brown
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Lt. Det. Gary French
Boston Police Department
Youth Violence Strike Force

It's almost like the old beat cop coming back, who used to know everybody in the neighborhood, who used to be able to say, "Listen, I want you to go see so and so, tell him I sent you, tell him to give you a job in the afternoon." Those things are being replicated. And they haven't been around for 30 or 40 years.

Developing professionally with someone and you've known them for a period of years, you know what to expect from them. You know that they're legitimate. You know that they're going to be up front with you. You are comfortable with them. You're comfortable sitting there brainstorming with them. When you're with somebody you really do trust as an equal partner, you are very comfortable saying some hare-brained idea and having them say "Man that's crazy! What are you thinking of?" You have to have that type of thinking to start to be innovative in what you're going to try to do.

We have so many agencies at work here. ATF, DEA, Animal Control, housing police, school police, probation, parole, and the list goes on. And then we have these community-based partners. And they all feel like "We're all part of the solution. We're all working together. We're all friends."

There's not a lot of formality. People just drop in whenever they want. If I'm out, and I want to talk to one of the partners, I just go over and say, "Hey, can we sit down for a minute?" And that's the way it goes. It's very informal. There are formal meetings, but I think the majority of what takes place, takes place very informally. Phone calls, visits, that type of thing and it's always working on the issue related to youth violence.

We were very good at identifying who the real problematic individuals were and taking some very strong action against them and taking them off the street before they influence the other kids. At the same time, we were working with the kids around the fringe level of the gangs, providing intervention and prevention counseling to them, and getting them into different programming.

When you have kids that are living under constant fear, they're scared to walk out of the house, they're scared to go to the store, they're going to be carrying a gun. They get into a verbal confrontation with someone, they're going to pull that gun. When you have wild cards, and these kids are very aggressive on the street, you have them running around intimidating everybody, scaring everybody. You have everybody carrying weapons. Everybody says "Hey, I don't trust them. They shoot freely and I gotta carry something for my own protection." When you can minimize the fear that these kids feel, you're going to cut down a lot of the violence. And the only way you're going to minimize the fear is by taking the dangerous kids off the street and holding them accountable for their actions.

Law enforcement people have big egos. Institutional egos, department egos-local police don't want to work with FBI or don't want to work with DEA, who don't want to work with Probation, who don't want to work with Animal Control, who don't want to work with the clergy-"I don't want to work with them. I'm a cop." And you have all these different agencies that sit there and say "Geeze, I'm not working with that guy. I'm not working with those people. They did this five years ago and I'm never going to forgive them for it." So as a result, they won't reach out to someone and say "You have expertise in this area. We'd like to do an operation that's going to be dealing exclusively with that type of crime. Can you come in and give us a hand?" Years ago, that wouldn't have happened. Now it's, "Hey, if you've got resources, you've got equipment, you've got expertise, come on to the table and share with us so we can get this job done." That's the general philosophy now.

When you sit down with people from community-based organizations, from different law enforcement agencies, from schools, from DYS, from probation, you start discussing, "What can we do to prevent this crime from happening? What can we do to help these kids out? What can we do to stop a kid from getting involved with a gang?"

It's obvious that from a law enforcement perspective, we do a great job of locking people up. We can do that from now until the cows come home, and we've sort of jammed up jails across the nation. There's really no room. But I think what we have to look at now is locking up the baddest of the bad, the kids that are really going to cause the damage out on the street and then trying to get them off the street so you can work with the other kids who you can provide services to.