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DID CEASEFIRE, COMPSTAT, AND EXILE REDUCE HOMICIDE?*

RICHARD ROSENFELD ROBERT FORNANGO ERIC BAUMER

University of Missouri-St. Louis

Research Summary: Police officials across the United States often claimed credit for crime reductions during the 1990s. In this article, we examine homicide trends in three cities that mounted widely publicized policing interventions during the 1990s: Boston’s Operation Ceasefire, New York’s Compstat, and Richmond, Virginia’s Project Exile. Applying growth-curve analy- sis to data from the 95 largest U.S. cities and controlling for conditions known to be associated with violent crime rates, we find that New York’s homicide trend during the 1990s did not differ significantly from those of other large cities. We find some indication of a sharper homi- cide drop in Boston than elsewhere, but the small number of incidents precludes strong conclusions. By contrast, Richmond’s homicide reduction was significantly greater than the decline in other large cities after the implementation of Project Exile, which is consistent with claims of an intervention effect, although the effect may have been small.

Policy Implications: Criminologists gave police and other public officials something of a free ride as they claimed credit for the 1990s crime drop. We propose that researchers employ comparable data and methods to evaluate such claims-making, with the current analysis intended as a departure point for ongoing research. The use of common evaluation criteria is espe- cially urgent for assessing the effects of the multiple interventions to reduce violent crime launched under the nation’s primary domestic crime-control initiative, Project Safe Neighborhoods.

KEYWORDS: Homicide Trends, Police Interventions, Compstat, Opera- tion Ceasefire, Project Exile.

* Address all correspondence to Richard Rosenfeld (richard_rosenfeld@umsl. edu). We wish to thank Jeffrey Fagan, Janet Lauritsen, Christopher Winship, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous draft. This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ 2002-RG-CX-K005). The points of view and conclusions are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect those of the funding agency or the U.S. Department of Justice.

VOLUME 4 NUMBER 3 2005 PP 419–450 R

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As crime rates in the United States plummeted in the 1990s, it was inevi- table that police and other public officials would claim credit for the decline. How could they resist? Rates of violent crime, especially in the large cities, were falling to levels not seen since the 1960s (Rosenfeld, 2004). Falling crime rates are good news for politicians, and for good rea- son: “The potential political payoff is huge,” a columnist wrote during New York’s crime decline. “If the crime numbers continue their precipi- tous fall, no one will be able to beat Mr. Guliani when he comes up for re- election. . .” (Herbert, 1995). In his 1996 State of the Union address, Presi- dent Clinton embraced the nation’s crime drop and declared: “At last, we have begun to find a way to reduce crime” (Krauss, 1996). A few months later, Clinton greeted the release of FBI crime figures with the claim: “Because of our tough and smart decisions to put more cops on the street and get kids, guns and drugs off the street, we are now beginning to reverse the trend in violent crime” (Butterfield, 1996:A1).

President Clinton joined local officials around the country during the 1990s in what one journalist called “a chorus of self-congratulation” (Krauss, 1996). In city after city, officials attributed the falling crime rates, in whole or part, to a new program or policy they had instituted. Austin’s mayor linked crime reductions to community and problem-oriented polic- ing. Buffalo’s police commissioner attributed the decrease to more aggres- sive enforcement, targeting career criminals, and a youth curfew. In Chicago, the addition of new officers and community policing were credited (the claims for Austin, Buffalo, and Chicago are described in Law Enforcement News, 1997). Detroit’s police chief highlighted his efforts to “improve the image of the police with the community and get as many people involved as possible” (Butterfield, 1995:10). The Mayor of East St. Louis attributed the crime drop in his blighted city to more officers, new equipment, and antidrug and antigang-targeted patrols (Gillerman, 1996). Houston’s chief cited computerized crime analysis, more officers, storefront stations in crime hotspots, and an antigang taskforce (Butter- field, 1995:10). In Los Angeles, officials credited hot-spot and community policing, but they also cited neighborhood crime prevention, a gang truce, and an earthquake as reasons for the crime drop (Feldman, 1994).1

Criminologists generally greeted such claims-making with skepticism and countered with alternative explanations for the crime drop, most fea- turing some combination of withered drug markets, the booming econ- omy, mass incarceration, or the “little brother syndrome” (younger

1. Not all officials were willing to claim credit for the drop in crime. LA Deputy Police Chief Mark Kroeker told a reporter that, although the news was encouraging, “the last thing we should all do is say, “Oh, it’s because of certain strategies we’re talking about in police work. If you start taking credit for crime decreases, you better start getting ready to take the blame for crime increases as well” (Feldman, 1994:B2).

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adolescents were turned off by the drug use and violence of older adoles- cents) (Lardner, 1997; see also Butterfield, 1996, 1998; Lacayo, 1996). Some criminologists acknowledged they had no idea why crime rates were decreasing and limited their public commentary to airy proclamations such as “I think we can now say a trend has been established” and “Something broad is happening” (Butterfield, 1996).2 Overviews of the crime drop published as it was coming to an end contained elaborate statistical descriptions of the trends but remarkably little in the way of explanatory research on either the crime-reduction claims advanced by public officials or the counterclaims of the “experts” (Blumstein and Wallman, 2000; Cook and Laub, 2002; Rosenfeld, 2002, 2004). “The academic world,” one critic observed, “has not distinguished itself in this field of inquiry” (Lardner, 1997:54).

Evaluating the impact of policy initiatives on crime trends is challenging under the best of circumstances; it is even more difficult to isolate whatever additional difference policy may have made when crime rates are already on the decline. Furthermore, most crime-control policies are not designed for valid evaluation, and those with built-in evaluation designs usually are intended to prevent the criminal behavior of individu- als rather than reduce the crime rates of populations. An individualistic bias pervades criminology. In the midst of the 1990s crime decline, the significant advances in criminology were in the study of individual devel- opmental patterns of delinquency and other problem behaviors (Farring- ton, 2003); analysis of aggregate crime trends remained on the periphery of the field (LaFree, 1998).

In this article, we seek to advance the study of policy impacts on crime trends through an assessment of homicide trends in three cities with widely publicized local law enforcement initiatives: Boston’s Operation Ceasefire, New York’s Compstat, and Richmond Virginia’s Project Exile. Each program has been credited with reducing rates of serious violent crime, including homicide, and each has been subject to some form of out- come evaluation. However, to our knowledge, the crime-reduction effects of the three programs have never been evaluated with comparable data and methods, and the existing evaluations either lack systematic compari- sons with crime trends in other cities or fail to control for other influences on crime trends, both of which are critical for separating the change in crime trends associated with policy interventions from changes caused by other factors. We use piecewise linear growth models to evaluate homicide trends in the three cities during, before, and in the case of Boston, after the intervention periods. Our models control for a broad range of other

2. And some criminologists, an anonymous reviewer reminds us, joined practi- tioners in touting the crime-reduction effects of local law enforcement interventions.

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influences on homicide trends and are fit to data from all U.S. cities with a 1990 population greater than 175,000 (N = 95).

Let us be very clear about our objectives. We do not claim to evaluate the three interventions per se; we have neither the data nor the methods for doing so. Rather, we evaluate homicide trends in the three cities in and around the respective intervention periods and draw inferences from that evaluation about the accuracy of claims that the interventions reduced homicide. Those inferences cannot be as strong as many program propo- nents or critics would like, but they should be preferred over the baseless success claims and counterclaims and handful of disparate empirical inves- tigations that have characterized evaluations of the three policing initia- tives to date.

THE INITIATIVES Ceasefire, Compstat, and Exile arguably are the most important local

law enforcement initiatives intended to reduce serious criminal violence launched during the 1990s. Certainly, they are the best known. In this sec- tion, we describe each of the programs, their intended outcomes, claims asserting their success, and prior research on their crime-reduction effects.

BACKGROUND AND PROGRAM LOGIC

Ceasefire, Compstat, and Exile were launched against a backdrop of sharply escalating violent crime rates during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Homicides in Boston among youth aged 24 years and under more than tripled between 1987 and 1990 and remained above 1980s levels through the mid-1990s (Kennedy et al., 2001:1). New York registered a record 2,245 homicides in 1990, well above the previous record of 1,826 set in 1981, prompting one seasoned journalist to warn: “If there are 2,000 murders this year, get ready for 4,000. New York is dying” (quoted in Karmen, 2000:7). Richmond consistently ranked among the top ten U.S. cities in homicides per capita during the late 1980s and early 1990s; in 1994, it ranked number two, behind New Orleans, with a homicide rate of 80 per 100,000 residents (authors’ calculations from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports).

Although the three initiatives were similarly situated in a context of ris- ing violent crime, they differed in problem diagnosis, design, and strategy. From 1996 to 1999,3 Boston’s Operation Ceasefire focused on firearm vio- lence involving youth gangs. Ceasefire’s central objective was to deter

3. Although the Boston police continue to employ certain tactics related to Ceasefire, in its original formulation the intervention effectively ended in 2000 (Braga, 2004). In our assessment of Boston homicide trends, therefore, we define the interven- tion period as 1996–1999.

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youth firearm violence through direct communication to gang youth that firearm possession and use would not be tolerated, and all available levers would be pulled to ensure swift and tough punishment of violators.4 The dual strategy of “retail deterrence” and “pulling levers” was implemented in a series of meetings with gang members involving police, youth workers, probation and parole officials, the U.S. attorney, and the local district attorney. “We’re here because of the shooting,” they would say. “We’re not going to leave until it stops. And until it does, nobody is going to so much as jaywalk, nor make any money, nor have any fun” (Kennedy et al., 2001:27–28). The gang members were told to spread the word on the street. Youth workers also took the message directly to other gang youth. “Stop the Violence” posters were put up throughout areas with high levels of gang violence. Other posters described the sanctions, including federal charges and sentences, applied to recalcitrant gang members: “They were warned,” the posters said. “They didn’t listen (Kennedy et al., 2001:28–41; see also Kennedy, 1998).

A different kind of “retail deterrence” through aggressive order mainte- nance policing is at the heart of New York’s Compstat. Begun in 1994 with the installation of William Bratton as police commissioner and continuing to the present, Compstat sought to restore order on the streets and accountability for crime in the police department. The police were no longer to tolerate minor offenses; they were to make arrests for vagrancy, vandalism, littering, minor drug possession, prostitution, public drunken- ness and urination, aggressive panhandling, and harassment by “squeegee pests.” The logic of the approach is taken from the so-called broken win- dows theory of crime causation: Minor crimes and disorder invite more serious offending by signaling that the police and community have lost control of the streets (Kelling and Bratton, 1998; Kelling and Coles, 1996; Wilson and Kelling, 1982). Aggressively restoring order reverses the mes- sage, thereby deterring more serious crime. In addition, frequent arrests for minor offenses on occasion net bigger fish, such as persons wanted on warrant for serious crimes or who are illegally carrying firearms or large quantities of drugs for sale. Other enforcement changes were introduced under Bratton, including “buy and bust” offensives against drug sellers and anti-gun patrols, but for Bratton the “linchpin strategy” was aggres- sive order maintenance policing (Bratton and Knobler, 1998:228).

The other component of the New York strategy is to hold commanders

4. A second objective of the Boston Gun Project, of which Ceasefire was a part, was to trace and interdict crime guns flowing to gang members (Kennedy et al., 1996, 2001:18–20). An alternative explanation of Boston’s youth homicide decline in the mid- 1990s emphasizes the role of a coalition of clergy members in improving relations between the police and minority residents and offering legitimacy to the Boston Gun Project (see Fagan, 2002; Winship and Berrien, 1999).

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accountable for the crime rates in their precincts. At regular meetings in the “war room” at police headquarters, top administrators grill com- manders on their knowledge of crime patterns and on their crime-reduc- tion activities and plans (Karmen, 2000:92–94). A deterrence logic underlies this approach as well, now directed at police officials rather than at offenders: You are directly responsible for what happens under your command. If you fail, there will be consequences.

In practice it is nearly impossible to separate the two components of Compstat for evaluation purposes. Even in principle disagreement exists concerning which one should be credited for New York’s crime decline during the 1990s. Bratton believes order maintenance policing was the “key” to falling crime rates. Mayor Giuliani, on the other hand, main- tained that police reorganization and greater accountability were primarily responsible (Karmen, 2000:94–96, 120). Critics contend that order mainte- nance policing in New York departed markedly from the “broken win- dows” model, and that whatever effect it may have had on crime was because of aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics aimed primarily at racial and ethnic minorities (Fagan and Davies, 2001). In any event, our analysis is limited to the question of whether New York homicide trends differ signif- icantly from those of other cities after Compstat was initiated. We cannot determine which aspects of Compstat (or Ceasefire or Exile) may have been responsible for observed differences in the trends.

A more traditional deterrence logic underlies Richmond, Virginia’s Pro- ject Exile, which was formally initiated in February of 1997. Exile entails sentence enhancements through federal prosecution for violent or drug crimes involving firearms.5 Federal sentences for such crimes generally are longer than those in state courts, bail is denied more often, and sentences are served in federal prisons likely to be located out of state (Raphael and Ludwig, 2003:254). By increasing the expected penalty for firearm-related offenses, the program is intended to deter firearm carrying and criminal use. By sentencing more violent offenders to longer prison sentences, the program also is intended to reduce crime by incapacitating violent felons. It is unclear whether deterrence or incapacitation is the primary objective of Exile’s sentence enhancements. However, the broad “outreach” cam- paign accompanying the program is intended explicitly to deter criminal use of firearms. Exile is advertised extensively in print and electronic media and on city buses and business cards carrying the blunt and bleak warning that “An illegal gun will get you five years in federal prison,” the

5. Specifically, the program covers felon-in-possession-of-a-firearm cases and drug and domestic violence cases involving firearms (Raphael and Ludwig, 2003:253–254). See the U.S. Attorney’s description of Exile at http://www.vahv.org/ Exile.

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mandatory minimum sentence for federal “felon-in-possession” cases (http://www.vahv.org/Exile). There is, then, something of a “retail” com- ponent to Project Exile’s practice of deterrence, if not as precisely targeted to particular groups and neighborhoods as was the case in Boston’s Opera- tion Ceasefire.

PRIOR OUTCOME EVALUATIONS

The most important obstacle in the way of rigorous outcome assess- ments of the three programs is that each of them was implemented city- wide, leaving thereby no like situated areas without the intervention that might serve as within-city controls, A second obstacle to reliable evalua- tion is that the different aspects of each program were implemented more- or-less at the same time, so that even if a “program effect” was found, it would not be obvious which program component should be credited (sen- tence length? advertising? change in enforcement? change in command accountability? which levers?). Not surprisingly, then, those few outcome evaluations that have been conducted take the form of single-case time- series investigations with limited comparisons with crime trends in other cities.

New York. The single exception is Kelling and Sousa’s (2001) study of violent crime trends during the 1990s in New York’s 76 police precincts. Controlling for changes in borough-level unemployment, age composition, and a measure of drug involvement, they find an association between decreases in violent crime and increases in “broken windows” policing, as measured by misdemeanor arrests. Kelling and Sousa (2001) interpret this result as evidence for a key plank of Bratton’s policing reforms and against so-called root cause explanations of New York’s crime drop and crime in general. Although the coincidence of rising misdemeanor arrest rates and falling violent crime rates across New York City precincts is compelling, Kelling and Sousa (2001) do not control for several additional factors com- monly associated with violent crime (e.g., poverty, family structure, immi- gration trends) and fail to consider the possibility of reciprocal causation between their policing measure and violent crime: Decreases in violent felonies may enable the police to devote greater attention to less serious offenses, which results in increases in misdemeanor arrests.

Other assessments of Compstat are less sanguine but also less conclusive about its crime-reducing consequences. Several investigators have pointed out that New York’s sharp decline in homicide and other violent crimes during the 1990s was not unique; San Diego, San Antonio, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other large cities that had not implemented similar policing reforms also registered very sizable declines (Harcourt, 2001:90–94; Joanes, 2000). In an early assessment, Fagan et al. (1998) observed that nongun homicides had begun to fall in New York well

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before the Compstat reforms were implemented in 1994. They also find, however, that the drop in firearm homicides is more consistent with the timing of Compstat and conclude that the policing changes may have con- tributed to that decline. Even a harsh critic of broken windows policing concedes that it “contributed in some degree to the decline in crime in New York City” (Harcourt, 2001:103). Finally, the most comprehensive assessment of the sources of New York’s crime drop concludes that changes in policing likely accounted for some decrease, along with a booming economy, escalation in imprisonment, shrinking drug markets, favorable demographic trends, and possible changes in the values of ado- lescents and young adults. However, the author could draw no conclusions regarding the size of the policing effect (Karmen, 2000:262–266; see, also, Conklin, 2003).

In summary, most independent assessments of the policing changes under Bratton conclude that they probably reduced levels of violent crime in New York over and above the effects of other factors. The most defini- tive of the studies (Kelling and Sousa, 2001) does not compare New York crime trends with those in other cities. The others place New York trends in the context of those elsewhere, but they do not employ comprehensive samples of comparison cities or control for other determinants of violent crime.

Boston. The Harvard researchers who participated in the development of Operation Ceasefire compared the timing and magnitude of violent crime trends in Boston with those in other New England cities and a national sample of large cities (Braga et al., 2001; Kennedy et al., 2001; Piehl et al., 2003 ). In a two-part investigation, the researchers first per- formed a time-series analysis of monthly youth firearm homicides, gun assaults, and shots fired calls in Boston before and during the intervention period, controlling for changes in unemployment, size of the youth popula- tion, adult homicide victimization trends, index crime trends, and youth drug activity as measured by arrests. The results indicate a reduction in firearm violence, net of the controls, coinciding with the implementation of Ceasefire.

In the second part of the study, the researchers compared Boston monthly youth homicide trends with those in 29 other New England cities and 39 large U.S. cities, which they adjusted for linear and nonlinear trends in each series, monthly effects, an autoregressive component, and an intervention component in each series. They found three cities in addi- tion to Boston with significant values on the intervention component, but either the direction or precise timing of those effects differ from Boston’s.6

6. In a separate investigation, Piehl et al. (2003) found that the maximum “break”

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The Harvard team concluded that Ceasefire was associated with a signifi- cant reduction in youth firearm violence. Their conclusion would be more persuasive had they included additional controls in both the within- and between-cities analyses they conducted. Nonetheless, their findings are consistent with claims of a program effect.

Richmond. Richmond’s Project Exile has been subject to a single pub- lished outcome evaluation. Raphael and Ludwig (2003) evaluate claims that Exile significantly reduced firearm homicides in Richmond by com- paring Richmond gun homicide trends during the 1980s and 1990s, Rich- mond trends with those in other cities, and adult and juvenile homicide arrest rates in Richmond. The first comparison shows that Richmond gun homicide rates had increased markedly during the 1980s, peaking in the early 1990s. Raphael and Ludwig (2003) conclude that Richmond’s gun homicide decline during the 1990s was to be expected as part of a general regression to the mean common across U.S. cities with high homicide rates. They conclude from their comparison of Richmond’s gun homicide trends with those of other cities that the proportional drop in Richmond’s rates through the 1990s was not unusual. What was unusual was Rich- mond’s gun homicide rate in 1997, the year Exile began. Raphael and Lud- wig (2003) suggest that 1997 was subject to “transitory” influences because it broke a two-year “trend” that began in 1995 and resumed in 1998. Therefore, they dropped 1997 from their trend analyses. “Using this unu- sual year as the base for calculating the change,” they maintain, “is bound to inflate the apparent impact of the program” (Raphael and Ludwig, 2003:258).

To control for unmeasured influences on Richmond homicide trends, Raphael and Ludwig (2003) compare trends in juvenile and adult homi- cide arrest rates. The logic of the comparison is that juveniles are not sub- ject to Exile provisions (or not to the same extent as adult criminals) but are affected by other factors driving homicide rates. They find that juve- nile homicide arrests increased slightly from 1995/1996 to 1998 (again, 1997 is omitted), but adult arrests increased even more over the same period. In other large urban counties, adult homicide arrests declined at a greater rate than did juvenile homicide arrests. Neither finding is consis- tent with the idea that Exile reduced homicide among Richmond adults.

In summary, Raphael and Ludwig (2003) find little evidence to support claims that Richmond’s Project Exile reduced firearm or overall homicide rates. We regard their evaluation as suggestive but far from the final word on Exile’s effects. We reserve our specific criticisms until we present the findings from the current analysis.

in the Boston youth firearm homicide series occurred during the summer of 1996, just after Ceasefire began.

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The results of the outcome evaluations of Compstat, Ceasefire, and Exile are mixed. Evaluations of Compstat and Ceasefire support claims that the interventions resulted in reductions in homicide. The single published study of Project Exile concludes that it had little apparent effect on Rich- mond firearm homicide rates. It is difficult to compare findings across the evaluations of the three interventions, because they targeted differing pop- ulation groups and homicide types, and because they are based on distinct sources of data and methods of analysis.

We use the same data sources and methods to evaluate all three inter- ventions. The logic of our approach assumes that an effective intervention will produce a reduction in homicide that (1) differs significantly from cor- responding changes in comparison cities; (2) occurs during or after but not before the intervention period; (3) occurs in the specific type of homicide targeted by the intervention; and (4) is independent of other influences. By the same logic, an ineffective intervention will produce a reduction in homicide that does not differ significantly from changes in comparison sites or occurs before the intervention or does not occur in the homicides targeted by the intervention or is brought about by conditions other than the intervention. To be deemed “effective” (or not ineffective), an inter- vention must meet all four conditions. To be found ineffective, it must fail to meet only one of them.

ANALYTICAL STRATEGY

To assess the effects of the three interventions, we apply growth-curve models to homicide trends in Boston, New York, and Richmond. We esti- mate each city’s homicide trend as a function of a baseline model of covariates fit to data for the 95 largest U.S. cities. An intervention’s effec- tiveness is indicated by a reduction in homicide during the intervention period that is significantly greater than the average reduction for the sam- ple. Our strategy cannot conclusively rule out other possible explanations for observed differences in homicide trends between cities with and with- out the interventions. However, the absence of such differences would place a particularly strong onus on program defenders to demonstrate that an observed homicide reduction resulted from a particular intervention.

DATA

The homicide data for the analysis were obtained from the Supplemen- tary Homicide Reports (SHR) for the 95 U.S. cities with a 1990 population of 175,000 or more over the period 1992–2001. The data correspond to the distinct type of homicide targeted by each intervention. Boston’s Ceasefire was designed to reduce firearm homicides among the “gang age” popula- tion of adolescents and young adults. The policing strategies in New York

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