Politics, petty feuds, and street violence

I loved every minute of my 10 years as a youth worker in Boston, teaming up with partners inside and outside law enforcement who strived like never before to reduce violence -- an effort that brought remarkable calm to the city's streets in the late 1990s. I left Boston in 2001, and it has been painful to witness from the sidelines the past few brutal years in the city.

There is no polite way to say it: Boston's regression into its old territorial self has translated directly into death. A decade ago a young man in Dorchester told me, ''You adults are the real gang members, easy to feel slighted, fighting petty beefs, vying for attention and credit." It is the beefs on the streets that get the headlines. But the beefs in the offices and agencies are now equally to blame for what is happening.

Driving around Boston late at night in the '90s, there was a sense that a small group of motivated front-line workers could outsmart the purveyors of violence. We offered street players the real carrot of opportunities -- or the real stick of consequences. It was an extraordinary time.

The Rev. Eugene Rivers used the media to keep youth violence on the city's agenda. Streetworkers demonstrated through relationships built with troubled youth that despite their horrible reputations they were just lost children. Bernie Fitzgerald and his probation staff at Dorchester Court became compassionate brokers of incentives and consequences. The Boston Police Department's Youth Violence Strike Force seemed everywhere.

Captain Robert Dunford, now a police superintendent, was tough as nails, but he also defended our program and prevented ''my youth" from being driven from a neighborhood whose residents deemed them too dangerous. Detective Paul Joyce, now also a superintendent, created the ''Youth Summer of Opportunity."

Former US Attorney Donald Stern took to heart our plea for job opportunities for city youths, helping to secure close to $30 million from the federal Labor Department.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino gave our ragtag team of clergy, streetworkers, and police personnel elevated recognition and sanction, which many of us used to pressure other agencies to prioritize services to youth. Harvard's David Kennedy brought creative thinking to the table, helping to design Operation Ceasefire, which turned the carrot-and-stick thinking into a replicable approach for driving down violence.

Then it all fell apart. In the late 1990s, when murder rates plummeted to the low 30s, some of us started to see clouds gathering. Boston became a national story. There was glory enough for everybody, but the cooperation turned to competition and control.

The clergy's differences of opinion increasingly drew attention away from the effort to reduce violence. The $30 million for jobs for at-risk youth got diverted. The Youth Violence Strike Force lost its command, luster, and punch. Juvenile probation was severed from adult probation in district courts, and run from downtown. The well-intentioned introduction of professional social workers ended up sidelining the savvy streetworkers. The funding for churches never really materialized. Outreach programs were marginalized, lost their focus, and became moneymakers. The new governor's commitment to hold the line on taxes meant cuts to youth programs.

The lieutenant governor, a criminologist, claimed correctly that no individual program in the Boston Strategy had been ''scientifically" proven by itself to reduce violence, but ignored the fact that Boston's layered approach had received unprecedented scholarly support. Some in the Police Department turned on one-time academic partners like Kennedy, who were striving to keep the partnership together.

We bristled when New York's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, in his parting speech, took a swipe at our mayor and our strategy. But the cold fact was that our city had stopped doing its job.

I relocated to Providence, the third poorest city in the country for children; I was shocked to find almost no resources.

But in Providence things are better now. Community leaders came together for the sake of our youth and have the support of the mayor and the police chief. Nonviolence is used as a tool to challenge the culture we force our youth to grow in. Our partnerships in Providence are working.

The energy in Providence is reminiscent of those days in Boston 10 years ago. Those of us who were part of the ''Boston Miracle" know that it was never a miracle, but hard work by ordinary people behaving, for a time, in extraordinary ways. Divisiveness must not be tolerated, freer rein should be restored to front-line practitioners, and monetary resources should be committed. The Boston strategy was less about philosophy, and more about people; less Plato, more Aristotle.

All eyes will be watching to see if recent signs mean Boston is serious about returning to this work. If it is, I know things can be extraordinary again.

Teny Gross, a former youth outreach worker at the Ella J. Baker House in Dorchester, is executive director of the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence in Providence.