NCJ Number
178561
Date Published
1998
Length
72 pages
Annotation
The Comprehensive Communities Program (CCP) in Boston brought together the Boston Police Department (BPD), community leaders, citizens, criminal justice agencies, and social service providers over an extended period of time to identify and solve neighborhood problems, and the case study of Boston's CCP approach is based on site visits to various CCP projects and interviews with CCP participants between September 1995 and April 1997.
Abstract
The BPD implemented its CCP approach in a way that broke with traditional policing in the city. The cornerstone of the CCP approach was the strategic planning process, a community mobilization and planning process that occurred in each of 11 police districts and in police headquarters and included more than 400 people who met over a 2-year period. Two provider networks resulted from the CCP, the Youth Services Provider Network (YSPN) and the Alternatives to Incarceration Network (ATIN). The CCP also allowed the BPD to support the Boston Coalition's Drug Court and the Grove Hall Safe Neighborhood Initiative which was a community prosecution program. Experiences of Boston in planning and implementing CCP components emphasized lessons from other program evaluations that indicated projects would be successful if they had charismatic and enthusiastic leaders, sufficient resources, widespread support, and open channels of communication among participating agencies. Of CCP components in Boston, the YSPN was particularly successful because it had key staff at both planning and implementation stages and received valuable resources and expertise from service providers and consultants. The case study includes information on new developments and issues in CCP, synergistic effects of CCP, and CCP sustainment. Appendixes contain supplemental information on ATIN and YSPN participants. 1 table and 1 figure