This article is part of our State of the City project, in which The Dallas Morning News explores the most critical issues facing our communities. The first series focuses on public safety.
The worst violence in a decade thrashed the city. Four teenagers and a grandmother were among those shot and killed. Residents cried for help. Faith and community leaders demanded that city officials commit to a crime-fighting effort.
This wasn’t Dallas in 2020. It was Oakland, Calif., in 2012.
Dallas’ sharp spike in homicides over the past two years bears a striking resemblance to Oakland’s crime surge nearly a decade ago. The Bay Area city of 434,000 embarked on a solution that cut gun violence in half over six years even as its population grew.
For a sustainable approach that yielded consistent results, criminologists point to Oakland’s Operation Ceasefire, a strategy driven by the community — not law enforcement. The approach worked until a nationwide uptick in violence during the coronavirus pandemic.
Dallas Police Chief Eddie García is taking a page from his former Bay Area counterparts to help curb a steady rise in violent crime. The former San José, Calif., chief, who arrived in Dallas in February, said he will employ “focused deterrence,” a key component of the Ceasefire strategy.
In 2019 and 2020, Dallas had back-to-back years of more than 200 homicides — the first time that’s happened since 2004 and 2005. All violent crime increased over the past five years.
Mayor Eric Johnson demanded a violent-crime reduction plan from Dallas police and convened a task force two years ago that produced recommendations, some based on Operation Ceasefire’s tactics.
After a year of protests over policing, Dallas, like other cities, is looking at new crime-fighting strategies. And experts say the time could be ripe to try interventions that don’t rely as heavily on law enforcement.
What is Ceasefire?
Focused deterrence strategies have gone by different names since Boston pioneered the first model in the 1990s to combat gang-related homicides. Similar strategies are now in place in at least 84 U.S. cities and are being tested in other countries, including Turkey and Brazil, to change the behavior of gang members, repeat offenders and low-level drug dealers.
With Ceasefire’s approach, Oakland police review gun violence incidents weekly and identify those likely to become a perpetrator or victim. Officers and community-based organizations invite those at risk to “call-ins” where they warn about the path they are on and offer an out before they pick up criminal charges or fall victim to violence. The program employs life coaches, usually people who faced and overcame similar circumstances, to provide counsel.
“These focused deterrence strategies are an absolute essential ingredient in any smart crime prevention strategy in the United States today,” said Alex Piquero, a criminologist and co-author of a report published last year in response to calls for police reform.
‘The Boston Miracle’
In 2012, Oakland saw violent crime increase 20% over the prior year. That year, 126 people were killed, compared to 102 in 2011 — a 24% increase.
Oakland needed a solution.
The city’s faith-based community had long championed Boston’s Ceasefire strategy, later dubbed “the Boston Miracle” because of its success. A coalition of Black ministers in Boston merged with police to host forums for gang members where they offered financial assistance and job training if they gave up on violence.
It seemed to work. In 1999, Boston had 31 homicides, down from 152 in 1990.
Oakland had tried twice before to replicate Boston’s approach without much movement, which is common when cities start out, said David Muhammad, executive director of the nonprofit National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.
Criminologists note that the programs are only as good as they are implemented, and that focused deterrence strategies are not overnight fixes. Rather, they are long-term investments in neighborhoods where crime is most prevalent.
Killings spiked in cities where programs were abandoned, including Boston. Cities that revitalized their programs saw their violent crime rates drive downward again. Such was the case in Boston.
Oakland redirected existing funds to create a full-time director for Ceasefire, which Muhammad said was essential to its success. Other cities flailed without a person leading the effort, including those that merely added the duty to someone’s existing responsibilities.
But it is hard to say exactly how much it costs a city to fully implement a Ceasefire-type program.
“The great mystery of Oakland Ceasefire” is its budget, Muhammad said. “The part that’s problematic is we now can’t say to other cities, ‘Here’s the budget.’”
Oakland spends about $1.3 million annually on adult life coaching and $1.4 million more on shooting and homicide responses, but those figures are spread among several programs, Muhammad said.
Churches, businesses and nonprofits supplement Ceasefire with jobs and education, further diluting the precise cost.
By the end of 2018, Oakland reached a historic crime reduction milestone, Muhammad said. Gun-related homicides and injuries decreased for six consecutive years. The drop from 2012 to 2018 was 49%.
A slight increase followed in 2019. But the first few months of 2020 looked good. By the end of March 2020, Oakland had a 40% year-to-date decline in homicides. Had Oakland maintained the trend, it would have recorded the lowest homicide rate in the city’s history.
But the pandemic swept the country, as did a rise in violence. Ceasefire’s person-to-person efforts paused. Oakland had 102 homicides last year, the first time since 2012 its annual homicide numbers reached triple digits.
Oakland police declined to comment to The Dallas Morning News about their efforts with Ceasefire. But during a February interview with an ABC News affiliate in the Bay Area, Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong said pandemic restrictions such as being able to meet face-to-face “prevented us from utilizing our Ceasefire strategy, which has been effective for many years and has shown the ability to decrease violent crime.”
‘Something to attach to’
Oakland’s Ceasefire officers once took credit for major arrests or busts. Life coaches, who work independently of police, had the difficult task of earning trust from Ceasefire recruits, said Darcell Harrison, a life coach for 13 years who is now a supervisor for a nonprofit that provides life coaches.
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A life coach is the furthest person in the program from law enforcement, life coaches say. Officers share information, but not vice versa, Harrison said.
But potential clients would say, “No way, you’re police.”
“I’ve been to jail more times than you have. I’m definitely not the police,” Harrison, 49, would tell them. Harrison, a West Oakland native, had been to jail about 30 times by age 28 for selling drugs and violence related to drug deals.
Roughly half of his clients changed their lives for the better, he said. They enrolled in school or took advantage of vocational training and created lasting careers that provide living wages sustainable for the Bay Area’s high cost of living.
Others stayed out of trouble, but reverted to old ways when they stopped participating.
“If you’re asking somebody to detach from something, you have to have something for them to attach to,” Harrison said. “You can’t ask the person to stop selling drugs and you have nothing to fill that void.”
Researchers won’t say with absolute certainty that Ceasefire alone reduces crime. That would require randomized controlled experiments, which don’t exist. Criminologists concluded that such programs should be one of several crime reduction strategies.
Ceasefire’s critics say that the program gets credit for the other organizations’ work and that gentrification, not Ceasefire, pushed crime out of Oakland.
“All we’re doing is moving crime around. We’re not reducing crime,” said George Galvis, executive director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice. He works with many of those whom Ceasefire identifies as at-risk.
Galvis’ organization reintegrates people into society after prison, and it mobilizes youth to be part of policy-making.
Some already leery of police view Ceasefire as another law enforcement measure that targets Black and brown people, he said.
How it could work in Dallas
Dallas has considered implementing Operation Ceasefire, and the mayor’s Task Force on Safe Communities recommends a key component of the program and its different variations. This month, the city contracted with a violence interrupters program to hire community members who can intervene in conflicts, just as Oakland’s Ceasefire does.
In late 2019, under demands from Johnson to produce an effective crime-fighting strategy, then-Chief U. Reneé Hall offered Operation Ceasefire. But Hall never got the program onto its feet before she resigned last year.
García, her successor, said the data shows that programs like Ceasefire work.
“Focused deterrence program is a program that we’re going to initiate here 100%,” García told a group of journalists.
San José is similar in size to Dallas, which has about 1.3 million residents, but the California city has far fewer homicides.
San José also is significantly wealthier than Dallas. The median household income in San José was $109,593 between 2015 and 2019, according to the census. Dallas’ median income over the same period was $52,580.
García reiterated what many studies show, which is that any version of focused deterrence takes time to build and produce results.
“Police departments are not the only cog in the criminal justice wheel, and in order for us to turn the ship in violence in Dallas, we all have to work together,” García said.
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