Oakland “Operation Ceasefire” in the New York Times
Today’s New York Times has an article about Oakland’s “Operation Ceasefire,” an initiative to cut down on crime by identifying a hundred “persons of interest” and essentially putting them on notice that they’re on that list. It’s a bit early to tell whether it’s doing much good, but apparently Boston had excellent results with a similar program. The Chron and Oakland Tribune also reported on this earlier this month.
Isn’t this sort of weird? Imagine: the police call you up and say “Come down to the station — we know you’ve been bad and we want to talk to you about it.”
So you go down and say “What’s the deal — am I under arrest? What’d I do?”
And they say “You know what you did. And so do we. Just don’t do it anymore!”
Wouldn’t a reasonable person respond, “If you want to charge me with a crime, then do it — otherwise, up yours”?
You have a good point, but I think a lot of these folks are on parole or probation and therefore more subject to regular contact with the criminal justice system (in the form of periodic reports or meetings, for example). It’s also a sort of carrot-and-stick approach, or at least they’re trying to make it that way–the statement will be more like “look, we see you’re involved in this pattern of criminal activity, and we’d like to see you out of it, but if you persist, we will come down on you hard.” I don’t know the details (and from the report, I’m not entirely sure the Oakland cops know the details), so I’m not willing to pass final judgment on the program yet, but it merits a look.