Well, we sat down after a certain point and asked ‘What are we doing wrong?’ We were making more seizures of firearms, we were making more seizures of drugs, we were making more arrests and we were incarcerating more individuals. But the violence problem was not subsiding, nor was it even leveling off, it was getting worse. We responded to these incidents. We knew the players. We knew who the bad guys were. So, this wasn't like the police department had become social workers. But we also realized that just locking everybody up wasn't working. Nothing was changing.

 At the time we started to do it, this wasn't a plan. We had a couple of dozen kids that we looked at right away that we knew were causing major problems within the community. Probation had those individuals under certain conditions, so we looked at it initially as "OK, let's take them out. Let's take them out of the community, let's make them comply. And if they don't comply, we'll bring it back to the judges and we'll put it back in the judges' lap.

That evolved into individuals that started to comply because they thought we were checking on them. Now, from an intervention standpoint, if they're not out there, they're not perpetrating. But they're not also victims. If they're not standing there, they can't get shot at, they can't get stabbed, they can't get robbed. And from a prevention standpoint -- and again, this wasn't a master plan -- if there's no shooting, if there's no stabbing, if there's no robbery, if there's no drug rip, well then there's no retaliation. And so, if an incident doesn't happen tonight, then a retaliatory incident doesn't happen two nights from now, or three nights from now. And the retaliatory incident from that incident doesn't happen 5 nights from now.

 When we started to realize we were on something, onto something good and something that worked, was when we went from a minimal compliance rate of anywhere from 15 to 17% of the individuals complying with their conditions of probation, up to 60 or 70%.

 I would have to say that, those encounters, running into [the ministers] out on the street, started to change my thinking about them. They started to accept us, less as just the occupying force and more as guys who were actually out there working the community. We were running into these guys, who were actually out ‘working it’ as we like to say. And I think they felt the same.

 When I talk about the clergy, the majority of these kids that we're dealing with, whether they were actively involved in church, the majority of them came from church-going, law-abiding, hard-working families. So whether or not the kids believed a lot of it, their moms were church-going people, their dads were church-going people, their aunts, their uncles, their grandmothers. So now there was a whole new dynamic added because we had ministers up there, we had the black clergy up there, out in the community, working, working with the kids AND working with the police and working with Probation.

 Normally when a police officer responds to a house, it's an antagonistic situation, or many times it's an emergency call. There's something going on that brought the police there. Now, all of a sudden, we were arriving at the door, with probation officers, non-controversial, and we're talking with parents.

And we're also talking with kids who, although they are 17, 18 year old gang-banging drug dealers, they're also putting food on the table for younger siblings, or getting kids ready for school in the morning. So we got to see them a little differently.

 The kids would look right at us in the face and say, "OK Bob, I want out. I don't want to sell drugs, I don't want to be in the gang any more, what is there for me? What can I do, where can I go?" So Freddy [Wagget] said, ‘We need jobs for these kids. We need some mentoring programs; we need some training; we need some schools.

 I always look at the Boston miracle, as they now call it, as three phases. Enforcement, intervention, and then prevention. The first thing we had to do was we had to cut the heads off the snakes. We had to get the people who needed to be taken out of circulation and needed to be basically put in jail or at least into the court system. Secondly, we had to then go in and attack the group that was going to fill the void. They had to have an option. Either fly left and go to jail, or fly right and we'd reach out and assist them. And then the last phase, and again, this wasn't written down on paper. The last phase was what do we do next.

 [My partner] Bobby and I used to go to Dorchester Court or Roxbury Court almost every day. Instead of sitting around for our cases to be called, we would be meeting with the probation officers. And we would be taking notes. And at that time we were meeting almost once a week on these citywide gang meetings. We'd get up, and we'd say, here's what's going on. And some of the cops in the other divisions would say, ‘Wow, these guys are marvelous, they know everything.’ We were getting information from probation officers who knew everything. So, at one point, Deputy Faherty said to us, 'Why don't we bring [the probation officers] to this meeting?' Again, now that's outside the box. Now you have your first non-police officers in the room. Now they come and they make their various presentations and that week Merner and Fratalia have nothing to say, because all our thunder is gone. But what's formed here is the beginning of that partnership.

 When you walk into the house and you see a 17 or 18 or maybe even a 16 year old kid who's putting food on the table for other siblings, who's maybe the head of the household outside of maybe a maternal grandmother or his natural mother who's working one or two jobs. He's dressing the kids for school. He's doing any number of things. And then he's going out on the corner at night selling crack and protecting his drug business with a hand gun. But that wasn’t a side of him that I had ever seen.

 So for obstacles I would have to say it's more mental than physical barriers. Your own fears, fears of being, you know: Are we cops or are we social workers? Are we police officers or are we touchy-feely guys? And then changing the attitudes of others to be the same way. And getting the districts involved; getting communication open; crossing barriers, like we talked about here, with first getting the Boston police talking to the Boston police. Second, getting the Boston police dealing with parts of the wheel that are already in place: Probation, the courts, the clergy, District Attorney's office.

 The two kids that did the shooting ended up going away for life. The third kid called Richie Skinner up and he said, ‘Skinner, thank you, I can't thank you enough.’ And he said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘I seen you out there, I seen you out there last night with the gang unit,’ he says, and I said, ‘I'm going home. And if I didn't go home, I would have been with them. I was going out with them, we were going to that party. I'm not saying I would have been a shooter, but I would have been with them, I would have been the third person in that case.’ And how many times did that happen that we don't know about?

 I can remember when we first started Summer of Opportunity, five or six police officers going up to the 48th floor of the John Hancock building and meeting with the executive vice presidents. It was amazing how much the business community wanted to help us. When they saw that it was cops looking to help kids in a different way, everybody jumped on board.

 There was a funny part of it that we hadn't planned on. One was word of mouth. For every individual we checked, 10 other kids stayed home because they thought we were coming. So there was a compliance rate that wouldn't be measured in the percentages, if you will. There was -- but, from a community standpoint, as a community member, you look out now and instead of seeing 30, 40 kids on the corner, you see 3 or 4. So you start to get a little bit of faith back in the system, the police, the probation, and you become a stakeholder now. You say, "Huh, they're doing their thing, I'm going to help them."