In remarkable start to 2024, Boston has had only two homicides this year

When it comes to gun violence in Boston, 2024 got off to an ominous start. Before the sun rose on the first day of the year, at about 5:30 a.m., a 24-year-old man was shot and killed on a Dorchester street.

But in the nearly three months since then, something extraordinary happened. Or, more precisely, didn’t happen: Boston has not recorded another homicide on city streets. Just one additional homicide has occurred this year, a murder-suicide in late February that law enforcement said was committed by a man who was found dead with a woman in a downtown Boston hotel room.

At this point last year, Boston had recorded 10 homicides. At the current rate, the city would tally 10 for the entire year.

No one expects the remarkable run of tranquility to continue at this level, but law enforcement officials and community leaders have been quietly marveling at what’s shaping up to be one of the least violent first quarters of a year on record.

“It certainly looks like good news, but one thing we’ve found or seen over the years is you can’t project out,” said Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox. “We still have the summer months to go. We still have the fall.”

“Two at this point in the year is certainly remarkable,” Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden  said of the city homicide count, though he quickly added that “it’s a small window, so we’re not going to get too excited too soon.”

Mike Kozu, the longtime co-director of Project RIGHT, a community organization in Dorchester’s Grove Hall neighborhood, has welcomed the peaceful start to 2024, but was also reluctant to trumpet it too loudly. “I don’t like to talk about it because I don’t want to jinx it,” he said.

Shootings are also down dramatically so far this year, with just 10 gunshot victims through March 17, compared with 28 over the same period in 2023, a 64 percent decline.

Boston has long enjoyed low homicide rates and levels of gun violence compared with other cities its size. Last year, Boston had just 37 homicides. Baltimore, with about 75,000 fewer residents, recorded 262, which actually marked a sharp drop from 2022. Washington, DC, saw 274 homicides, while Portland, Oregon, had 73.

After recording 152 homicides during the height of the gang- and crack-fueled violence of the early 1990s, Boston saw gun violence and homicides drop sharply starting in the mid-1990s, a turnaround that became popularly known as the “Boston Miracle.” In 1999, there were just 31 homicides in the city.

A combination of factors has been credited for the figures, including strengthened police-community partnerships, a strong network of community-based groups working with young people most prone to violence, and outreach by faith leaders. At the center of the violence reduction in the mid-1990s, however, was a focused law enforcement strategy that involved identifying gang members known to be involved in gun violence and a delivering no-nonsense message that they could stop shooting and be steered to jobs and services, or feel the full weight of prosecutorial muscle.

The web of community organizations and city service providers working alongside police has evolved and changed shape over the years, but it has remained a more robust approach to violence prevention than what’s present in most other cities.

“Violence reduction is a team sport, and if the team is not working well together the team cannot succeed,” said Thomas Abt, who directs the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction at the University of Maryland. “Boston has a history of positive collaboration between police and community, between police and community service providers and public health workers.”

While that collaboration may explain the city’s overall favorable crime profile, Boston has seen a striking decrease in homicides and shootings this year from its already low baseline level.

“We have a city that’s committed to a comprehensive response to these things,” said Cox. “When you have those services in place and people that we partner with, I think it goes a long way to making this a safe city. And the numbers are kind of playing that out.”

Last April, the Violence Reduction Center that Abt directs convened several days of meetings among Boston leaders that some say helped foster a strengthening of existing partnerships that may now be paying dividends. One outgrowth of the meetings was formation of a Gun Violence Reduction Management Team, coordinated by Isaac Yablo, Mayor Michelle Wu’s senior advisor for community safety.

The new initiative, which holds weekly meetings that include police, community-based leaders, and other city agencies such as the public health commission, is taking a holistic, public health-focused approach to violence prevention, said Yablo. Police are sharing information that allows the other partners to “focus on the right people and connect them with services as a way to deter them from engaging in violence,” said Yablo. “Everyone across the city has a role to play.”

Cox credits the department’s information gathering through the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, or BRIC. Among other things, the BRIC maintains a database of those identified as gang members, a practice that has drawn scrutiny and criticism in recent years from those who say the database has cast too wide a net and wrongly profiled young Black and Hispanic men.

Cox said recent changes have cleared hundreds of names from the database, and he defended the data gathering as a crucial element in the battle to keep a lid on gun violence. “The most violent acts are committed by a very small number of people, and they tend to do it over and over again. So knowing who those people are is really important, and that’s what the BRIC does,” he said.

Carl Miranda, who directs the Boston outlet of Roca, a Chelsea-based nonprofit, said “there’s a lot of great work being done when it comes to outreach to young people at the center of violence.” Roca targets its outreach to 16- to 24-year-olds who have been deemed “likely to shoot other people or be shot by other people,” he said, working to redirect them to more positive pursuits. That work includes weekly meetings with the Suffolk district attorney’s office and probation officials, who steer young people their way.

Hayden, the Suffolk DA, who was meeting with Miranda earlier on Thursday, credits the sustained collaboration among law enforcement, city agencies, community groups, and faith-based organizations for the good start to the year. “We reap what we sow,” he said. “I think we’re seeing it in those results.”

All those involved on the frontlines say it’s important to recognize that things can change quickly. Kozu, the Grove Hall community leader with Project RIGHT, said building relationships with young people is key, something that was badly disrupted by the pandemic. “I think the best example is when we had all those 10 to 14 year-olds running wild at South Bay and Downtown Crossing,” Kozu said of a spate of incidents involving large groups engaged in vandalism and fights downtown and at a Boston shopping center.

“I think people are trying to go back to rebuilding relationships,” he said of organizations like his that are focused on drawing in young people who live in neighborhoods prone to gun violence.

Cox suggested that crime rates can move down in a virtuous cycle, with lower levels of violence bringing rates down further still, while the opposite can also happen, with violent episodes often leading to retaliatory acts that exact more victims.

He said community members have been key to prevention efforts by providing information police can act on before violence erupts. “I would call it a positive cycle of reducing violence, as opposed to the other cycle, where they don’t tell us stuff, then stuff goes on, they feel more fearful, and more violence happens,” he said.

The strikingly low violence rates so far this year, Cox said, may also include an element of good fortune, but he suggested that happens when you’ve laid the groundwork through all the deliberate efforts Boston has made to stem bloodshed. “I do believe,” he said, “that sometimes people, organizations, cities make their own luck.”

This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.