Assessing deterrence in the FBI's Safe Streets gang initiative

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For nearly three decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has provided federal government resources to assist with local and state gang enforcement efforts through the Department of Justice's Safe Streets Violent Gang Initiative. During this time, the FBI has established the Safe Streets initiative as one of the most active gang enforcement efforts in the country-in a strategy where street gangs are portrayed as a form of criminal enterprise. This view of the groups animates an enforcement approach based on the FBI's Enterprise Theory of Investigation (ETI), which identifies and prosecutes gang leaders and highly involved gang members. Despite high levels of enforcement activity, and official claims linking these efforts to the dismantling of street gangs and reductions in gang violence, surprisingly little research has been conducted into the strategy. The current study adds to this limited body of research by examining Federal Bureau of Investigation efforts to combat street gang violence in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts. Through a social network-based approach, this research places this evaluation in the context of broader issues related to deterrence, punishment and the communication of risk. A diffusion of innovation framework is used to reconceptualize the principles of punishment to operate according to network principles of communication and peer influence within the groups targeted. In this framework, the effectiveness of sanctions and threats of punishment are accessed by individual perception and behavioral response. A longitudinal-based Stochastic Actor Oriented Model traces that response in accordance with the principles of specific and general deterrence among targeted and untargeted individuals. In this research, the general deterrence mechanism is enabled by the social ties between individual gang members, which serve to communicate information on punishment risk from targeted gang members to the untargeted. Analytically, social ties also function as the key measure in a diffusion of innovation model used for the first time with a network of cooffenders. While the results of this research cannot be generalized because of its network approach, the study raises a number of important questions pertaining to the FBI's Safe Streets Violent Gang Initiative, and for future research. In particular, assumptions related to sanction severity in the FBI's approach to street gangs were not supported and the general deterrence mechanism linking punishment with communication, failed to impact the perception of risk in the desired direction. These findings highlight the need for more research into this very active and popular strategy. Additionally, diffusion models revealed a relationship between the observed patterns of ties between offenders and the communication process, which conditioned the transmission of risk information within the larger structure of the Lynn gang network. While limited to this network, this finding does raise a number of questions related to how deterrence-based messages may be communicated in gang and criminal networks--Author's abstract