HOW TO START A CEASE-FIRE: LEARNING FROM BOSTON

By Sam Allis/Boston

It is nine o'clock on a gamy summer night, and Bill Stewart is on curfew patrol. The probation officer bounds up the stairs of a Dorchester triple-decker apartment building to check on a boy who was once caught with marijuana. The boy must be home between the hours of 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., seven days a week, under a system of court-ordered curfews for young offenders, each curfew set individually by a judge. There had been worrisome signs of gang involvement in this case. A week ago, someone fired a shotgun blast into the second-floor porch, and the boy's parents still have pellets in their arms and legs.

The kid, who just turned 17, is home. So are his older brother, two of his friends--and a bag of marijuana. "Three strikes and you're in," says Stewart. Jail, that is. Two plainclothes policemen who accompany Stewart confiscate the bag and run background checks on the boy's friends. When Stewart visits the apartment the next night to make sure the kid is still honoring the curfew and to search the place, he finds on the wall of a closet the roster of the Argyle Street Ballers, a small gang that sells drugs. "Now we know the players," he explains. "Now we can put the weight on them."

Stewart is not alone in putting weight on potential juvenile offenders in Boston. The city's Operation Night Light, which began in 1992, and Operation Cease-Fire, which emerged last year, have unleashed desk-bound probation officers in a drive coordinated with other law-enforcement agencies to keep drugs and weapons off the streets. The joint operations, part of a larger collaborative effort, have led to one startling result. Last week Boston completed its second year without anyone under 17 being killed by a firearm. No other American city with a population over half a million can match this record. "Boston is the first city in the country to interrupt the cycle of violence that began with crack," concludes David Kennedy, senior researcher at Harvard's Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management.

In the early '90s, Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan were war zones, teeming with guns. Since the Dorchester district court first began imposing curfews in 1991, the city's gangs can no longer hang with impunity on crack corners at midnight.

Operation Cease-Fire is not just a police operation. It involves more than a dozen agencies, including the U.S. Attorney, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Suffolk County District Attorney as well as the Ten Point Coalition, a network of 43 black churches in the city. Says the Rev. Eugene Rivers, co-founder of the Ten Point Coalition: "The streets are much safer. The collaboration between the black churches and the police has produced results unseen in any other city." The two groups are now quietly working together to clear up scores of unsolved homicides.

Before Cease-Fire, federal and local law enforcement communicated like the Hatfields and the McCoys. "We were ordered not to notify the Boston police," says Michael Hennessey, a lieutenant in the school police, "because it would make the school administrators look bad."

No longer. Today everyone sees everyone else's intelligence. U.S. Attorney Donald Stern gets a copy of each report on a gun charge from the Boston police department. Stern in turn uses federal indictments to help take down Boston's most dangerous youths. All data are fed into the computers of the Youth Violence Task Force, an elite 65-person unit that tracks and targets gang activity. "We made threats directly to gang members and then delivered on it," says Police Commissioner Paul Evans. A case in point is the Intervale Posse, for years one of the most vicious gangs in the city. Despite repeated warnings from state and federal authorities, Intervale continued to terrorize its Dorchester neighborhood. Cease-Fire struck at dawn last August, arresting 24 gang members; 15 were brought down with federal warrants. "They are the teeth of the whole thing," notes David Singletary, an officer with the Youth Violence Task Force, as he cruises Dorchester one night with his partner, Kenny Israel, talking to street kids. "Once you say 'federal time,' it's a different ball game. You can end up doing your time in Leavenworth, and there is no parole."

Last week Attorney General Janet Reno praised the Boston project, and the Detroit police department sent officers to learn more about the experience. Detroit's executive deputy chief Benny Napoleon was impressed by the level of interagency coordination. "They're all at the table at the same time, consistently. We would see greater results from trying to duplicate the ways they do it."

No one in Boston, though, is getting cocky. "If we let up, the homicides could come right back again," warns Sergeant Kathleen Johnston, who is responsible for safety in the Boston public schools. "They are like a chronic disease."

--By Sam Allis/Boston