Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

by Pete Buttigieg

learned of the Boston Miracle. In the late 1990s, during a similar crisis, community leaders tried a new approach to dealing with the gang-related violence that was causing an epidemic of youth homicide. Using rigorous analysis to map group associations, a team of researchers joined with prosecutors, law enforcement, social service providers, and faith leaders to identify and contact the people most likely to kill or be victimized. The young men (nearly always men) were gathered, in person, for a “call-in.” Here, officials and community members would promise to concentrate all law enforcement attention on anyone involved in the next group or gang to be involved in a killing—and also offer social services for those prepared to make a change before it came to that. Sometimes misunderstood from the right as an amnesty or from the left as a crackdown, the strategy’s true core is in recognizing that would-be shooters are also people. Leaving aside the handful of people who are actually pathological, most of them just make decisions based on incentives and influences around them.