Rhode Island wrote the nation’s first Homeless Bill of Rights but has seen unsheltered homelessness climb sharply and proposed protections die in committee — leaving the state open to enforcement-first models that have drawn constitutional lawsuits elsewhere.
On July 21, Tucson’s police chief, Monica Prieto, stood before that city’s council and introduced a six-month pilot with an unlovely acronym — TROAI, the Top Repeat Offenders Analysis and Intervention Program — that will identify roughly 50 people who have racked up between six and 14 misdemeanors in the previous twelve months, hand them a warning about what happens next time, and offer them services. The offenses at issue are trespassing, loitering, solicitation, standing in the median of a street: the ordinary residue of having nowhere to go. Rhode Island has no such program. It has, at the moment, something more dangerous — the conditions that make one attractive.
The technique being borrowed is called focused deterrence, and it was born here in New England. Operation Ceasefire, launched in Boston in 1996 by the Police Department’s Youth Violence Strike Force in partnership with prosecutors, probation officers, universities and clergy, identified the small number of young men driving gun violence, told them plainly and collectively that the next shooting would bring the full weight of every agency in the room, and simultaneously put job offers and social services on the table. The National Institute of Justice’s evaluation of the Boston Gun Project documented a 63 percent reduction in youth homicide victimization, a 32 percent drop in shots-fired calls and a 25 percent decline in monthly gun assaults. That is the “Boston Miracle,” and the number gets cited the way a nonna cites her own sauce recipe — reverently, and without much interest in whether anyone else can reproduce it…