FROM '95 TO NOW...

By Emma DiMaio

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The initial interview with the soft spoken Jim Summey for “Reclaiming the Narrative,” effortlessly and truthfully portrayed him as this oddly gentle presence of a man. "Oddly," because his work involves the deterrence and all out blind siding of criminals. Needless to say,  Summey was able to speak volumes upon volumes of the changes he has brought to a community that continues to struggle amidst a flourishing furniture market and private university since 1997.

 

His remarkable and embellished stream of consciousness that could write a journalist’s article for them was accented quite often with one name. This name peppered the origin story of the Focused Deterrence Strategy that drives the HPCAV agenda, David Kennedy. This personality was such an intense factor in the success story of HPCAV, that it so clearly deserved it’s own feature.  

 

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​DAVID M. KENNEDY

David M. Kennedy is currently a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and the director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay. This is work is only the latest of Kennedy’s lengthy list of achievements in criminology.

 

“What we do is work with outside parties to take on the most serious public safety issues by following what's called and ‘Action Research Framework,’” said Kennedy. “This is where we organize local partners together to research and analyze the selected issue and collectively design and implement an intervention.” This blueprint has resulted in two strategies carried out right here in High Point, the Drug Market Intervention and the High Point Center Focused Domestic Violence Intervention.

 

“Currently I work in the Group Violence Initiative where we do drug market work and are slowly working to expand this into international settings.” Online research shows Kennedy’s impacts are mainly US oriented in addition to work in the UK, but Kennedy revealed his current initiatives are going out to places like Sweden and Mexico.

 

Mr. Kennedy and the National Network support cities implementing strategic interventions to reduce violence, minimize arrest and incarceration, enhance police legitimacy, and strengthen relationships between law enforcement and communities. These interventions have been proven effective in a variety of settings, have amassed a robust evaluation record, and are widely employed nationally. Kennedy truly specializes in the dispersing of gang violence all over the nation through the Deterrence Strategy which originated with Operation Ceasefire.

 

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​OPERATION CEASEFIRE

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Also known as the Boston Gun Project or the Boston Miracle, Operation Ceasefire started in 1996. The project was classified as a “problem oriented policing initiative” which details the identification of a specific criminal pattern or culprit and developing an appropriate response from that vertex.

 

Throughout the late 80s and early 90s, gun violence among youth was skyrocketing in cities all over, from Boston to Newark to Pittsburgh. Homicide in victims 24 years old and under had increased 230% during this time and by 1995, Boston averaged 44 youth homicides a year.

 

As a result, Operation Ceasefire took its pinpointing strategy and honed in on specific crime hot spots. From this, the factors equaling the gun violence conflict came into focus, illicit gun trafficking and gang violence.

 

“The evaluation and field record says that, at least as of right now, Operation Ceasefire is the most effective approach we know of to address homicide and gun violence,” says Kennedy. This strategy, sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and co-directed by Kennedy, Anthony Braga and Anne M. Piehl, was not only studied intensely throughout its process, but heavily in its aftermath.

 

“Anne was faculty at the Kennedy School in the mid 1990s and had a focus on criminal justice matters,” Kennedy explained. “She and I had the idea of doing this kind of applied work in Boston around youth violence.” This idea ultimately morphed into the Boston Gun Project. That proposal was funded by the justice department and prompted the pair to then take on Anthony Braga as a partner. Anthony was coming out of a PhD program at Rutgers and the three then brought Operation Ceasefire to life. Anthony is now the Chair of the Criminal Justice Department at Northeastern.

 

The strategy involved assembling interagency of criminal justice practitioners to gain a larger scope of the conflict, following the crossbreeding with applied qualitative and quantitative research techniques, assessing the nature and dynamics of Boston’s violence and adapting strategies based on evaluated impacts.

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The quantitative side assessed the locations of homicides and the demographics of both the victims of their killers, those criminal’s history, the weapon type etc.

 

The most powerful of these techniques, however, was the qualitative methods. It began by separating those who dealt with this conflict as part of their daily work, that being police, investigators, probation and parole officers, youth corrections, street outreach, prosecutors and community activists. These were the professionals closest to the “what” and “why” of the happenings. What those specialists thought was a gang related issue, was actually a substantial amount of crack dealing groups with loose associations (allied an opposed) and the violence was enormously concentrated amongst these crews.

 

“We took a group of those frontlines folks and systematically audited the number of groups in Boston, their relationships, key figures, etc. which the police knew because that was their world,” said Kennedy. “We also went back five years and looked at 150+ homicides and found, from these officers’ personal insight, what those cases entailed. And what they revealed was dramatically richer than what was in the formal investigative records. And between those two things, we created an entirely different understanding of what was driving the violence.”

 

The design of this project ultimately began in 1995 and is now known at the Group Violence Intervention and is primarily run out of Kennedy’s very own John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Within two years of implementing Operation Ceasefire in Boston, the number of youth homicides dropped to ten, with one handgun-related youth homicide occurring in 1999 and 2000.

 

 

FOCUSED DETERRENCE WITH JIM SUMMEY

 

High Point’s initial use of focused deterrence to target repeat violent offenders grew directly out of Boston’s 1996 Operation Ceasefire, which “combined problem-oriented policing with collaboration between law enforcement organizations and community stakeholders.”

 

In large part thanks to David Kennedy, Ceasefire became a national model for reducing gang violence. High Point enlisted Kennedy’s assistance and adopted elements of the model that included face-to-face meetings with police, community members, and offenders.  It was credibly communicated to certain repeat violent offenders that they would receive special attention from law enforcement, that the community needed the violence to stop, and that social services were available for those who wanted them.

 

“The work in Boston which lead to operation ceasefire was rapidly and dramatically effective at reducing violence, which gained a lot of attention from groups like the justice department and the attorney general at the time,” Kennedy explained. “The Justice Department had me regularly talk at US Attorney's Conferences about this. The US Attorney for the Middle District in North Carolina, Walter Holton called me at work and said, ‘We’ve got a really high crime problem in a place in my jurisdiction called High Point. Is there anything you could do?’”

 

High Point was one of the earliest locations to replicate what had been carried out in Boston. The first real conference held with Kennedy and the High Point Police was hosted at High Point University. Some years later, Chief of Police James Faley came to Kennedy and wanted battle the open air drug markets in High Point with his strategies that had been so successful.

 

The worst of that market, at the time was in the West End section of High Point, where Jim Summey was running West End Ministries at English Baptist Church. Jim was very heavily involved in trying to organize public safety in West End and became a pivotal factor in Kennedy’s endeavors in High point.

 

“My work with David Kennedy began in 2003 when I was introduced to him and the focused deterrence ways of community policing,” says Summey. “Whereas focused deterrence began in HIgh Point in 1997 following its success in Boston in 1995, it’s application was tweaked to be applied to open air drug markets in 2004.  I was pastoring a church in the West End area of High Point, in the heart of a drug infested area. West End, along with four other areas were targeted to utilize focused deterrence to shut down the drug markets.”

 

Beginning in 2004, High Point further developed the focused deterrence concept to shut down those five open-air drug markets. What would become known as the “High Point model” or “Drug Market Intervention Initiative” added what Kennedy calls “the unprecedented— and initially terrifying—element of truth-telling about racial conflict.”

 

“David Kennedy has been a High Point Violence Reduction guru since the mid 1990s,” Summey says, “His friendship, innovation and scholarship has been utilized nationwide resulting in the saving of tens of thousands of lives, due to his violence reduction ways of engaging community and police with true justice.  Truth, redemption, firmness, care and human involvement are hallmark adjectives of his work to bring safety to communities. It was and is my privilege to call him a friend.”