The overall aims and objectives of this Fulbright Police Fellowship project were to share best practice whilst looking at ways to build upon work already carried out in respect of reducing offending by young people and consider the scalability and transferability of programmes so as to inform the policy making process and practical application of related strategies in Scotland and the United States. To achieve this, reference was made to the pioneering work carried out by Professor David Kennedy at the Centre for Crime Prevention & Control, John Jay College, New York and Professor Anthony Braga at the Harvard Kennedy School in respect of the Boston Ceasefire Project in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A key part of the research was to find out how these early programmes have developed in terms of sustainability and viability, and how they have helped to shape and inform wider criminal justice policies and operational procedures.
Through visiting and working with the Boston Police Department (BPD) and the many State, private and voluntary organisations operating within the City, this Fulbright Fellowship looked at how front line services are delivered and how operational activity links into and integrates with other police, government and partnership initiatives to reduce youth crime and offending to ensure, where possible, that such activity is not undertaken in 'silos' but as part of a wider crime reduction strategy.
