Innovative Program Targets Rochester's High Murder Rate
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — While walking to a bus stop near his home, 19-year-old Craig Brown Jr. found himself suddenly hemmed in by four neighborhood thugs. He barely hesitated before handing over his jacket and boots.
A construction-trade apprentice enrolled in a job center downtown, the slim teen was so shaken by the encounter on Thurston Road in October 2002 that he started catching the bus at a busier intersection half a mile away. His tormentors, members of a drug-peddling clan nicknamed Thurston Zoo, caught up with him there one morning a year ago.
Although Brown flung aside his tool belt and hard hat and ran, he was shot by a 16-year-old, the bullets ripping into his back and hip. He stumbled across the street, collapsing on the tarmac of a gas station.
The police chief would later brand the crime a "thrill kill," but Brown was clinging to life when a squad car reached the scene and David Kennedy stepped out.
Kennedy, a Harvard University criminologist, had recently been enlisted to work his magic in quelling the unusually high level of homicides in New York's third-biggest city.
"Here was this utterly inoffensive young man who died right in front of us," Kennedy said.
The brazen, daylight attack set in motion an innovative community policing strategy devised by Kennedy: Operation Ceasefire.
It first saw dramatic success in Boston, where it was introduced in 1996; since then, homicides among people under age 25 have declined by 66%. The program has been transplanted, with startling results, to more than a dozen cities, from Stockton, Calif., and Winston-Salem, N.C., to Indianapolis, Minneapolis and New Haven, Conn.
"When it works, you get big, rapid reductions in serious violence," Kennedy said. He expected that kind of success in Rochester, a city of 220,000 that tallied 57 homicides in 2003.
The concept is straightforward: Identify the multiple street groups, often enmeshed in the drug trade, that are committing the bulk of killings. Then set down a vigorously enforced standard: Harm anyone, and your entire clique will be punished.
Hours after Brown's slaying, the triggerman, Antonio Williams, was captured. He would plead guilty to murder in September, drawing a sentence of 20 years to life.
In addition, authorities used every tactic at their disposal -- undercover drug buys, saturation patrols, old warrants -- to methodically dismantle Thurston Zoo, netting 11 young men on felony drug and gun charges.
