Louisville Metro Council members frustrated with lack of answers from LMPD about hiring officers

The Metro Council and state legislature should pass laws mandating the implementation of Operation Ceasefire here in Louisville by LMPD, Sheriff, corrections, the courts, county attorney and commonwealth attorney. Putting LMPD in competition with the Sheriff for positions and money is also a good idea.

The "pulling levers" deterrence strategy at the heart of Operation Ceasefire was designed to influence the behavior and environment of the chronically offending, gang-involved youths identified by Gun Project research as the core of the city's youth violence problem. The deterrence strategy may have something to offer other jurisdictions in which problem-oriented policing efforts are aimed at violence that is rooted in similar factors. The Operation Ceasefire intervention is, in its broadest sense, a deterrence strategy. Much of the literature evaluating deterrence focuses on the effects of changing the certainty, swiftness, and severity of punishment associated with certain criminal acts on the prevalence of such crimes.

In addition to increasing the certainty, severity, and swiftness of sanctions associated with youth violence, the Operation Ceasefire strategy sought to enhance deterrence by advertising the law enforcement strategy and personalizing its application. It was crucial that gang youths understood the new regime being imposed by the city. The "pulling levers" approach attempted to prevent gang violence by convincing gang members that violence and gun use would bring consequences, so that they would choose to change their behavior.A key element of the strategy was the delivery of a direct and explicit "retail deterrence" message to a relatively small target audience regarding the response that specific behaviors would provoke. Boston's law enforcement agencies made gang-related violence more costly to participants. Knowledge of what happened to others in the target population was intended to prevent further acts of gang violence in the city. Operation Ceasefire's Working Group understood that law enforcement agencies generally do not have the capacity to "eliminate" all gangs or powerfully respond to all gang offending in gang-troubled jurisdictions. Pledges to do so, although common, are simply not credible.The Working Group recognized that, for the strategy to be successful, a credible deterrence message must be delivered to Boston gangs. Because the Working Group could deploy, at best, only a few severe crackdowns at a time, the Ceasefire intervention targeted those gangs that were engaged in violent behavior rather than expending resources on those that were not.