LYNN — Like many communities across the country, Lynn has been dealing with gang violence for years. Spikes have invariably occurred, prompting police to not only respond to crime, but also take proactive steps to aggressively pursue prevention.
“All of the great work the police department is doing, the extensive outreach that we’re doing as a city, in collaboration with our community partners, is making a difference and facilitating sometimes hard, but important, conversations that ultimately help achieve a greater level of peace and help people feel safer in their homes,” Mayor Jared C. Nicholson said.
Lynn Police Capt. Chris Kelly said gang violence can have significant and devastating effects on the community, with a majority of the violence involving youthful offenders and youthful victims.
“Our residents, our students, school faculty, any members of our community are going to be negatively impacted reading a story or hearing about something online about a violent attack,” he said.
Kelly explained that the three pillars of the department’s work are prevention, intervention and suppression. Through an initiative called Operation Home Check, Lynn Police have expanded their use of home visits in recent years.
Kelly said prevention involves avoiding gang participation through education, development and family support, adding that police rely on community partners who are heavily involved in the prevention piece.
He said intervention is accomplished by providing alternatives and support for youth already involved in gangs, while suppression consists of using law enforcement resources to limit gang activity and influence in the community.
Kelly said that when police saw an increase in youth-related gang violence, the department began a protracted campaign to implement the three pillars to halt escalation. He credited Chief Chris Reddy for being forward-thinking and urging his staff to find alternatives, as opposed to trying to arrest their way out of the problem.
A call to action
Lynn Police saw youth gang violence increase and become more violent in 2023, including a murder in Freeman Square, which began an uptick of violence in the city.
In response, the department took several steps to combat gang violence, hiring plainclothes officers to supplement the gang unit and getting support from the Massachusetts State Police.
“The level of fear and concern within the city was significant,” Reddy said. “We needed to have a strong, visible presence to address that fear and work on stopping further violence.”
At the end of 2023, Lynn Police dealt with multiple shootings, including one that involved seven victims and another with three people being shot, prompting police to make suppression a priority and quickly seeing positive results.
“When we really went into suppression and intervention mode, we did not have a single shot fired in the entire City of Lynn,” Kelly said. “A lot of times, it’s hard to quantify something that you stop from happening, but I think we can see a direct correlation in our efforts at this point.”
Kelly said an increase in manpower played an important role in those efforts.
“In the immediate wake of those significant events, we started supplementing the gang unit with patrol officers hired on an overtime basis,” Kelly said. “We got support from the Massachusetts State Police gang unit, and this mission of suppression was to create an overwhelming presence of police in the community.”
Police saturated known gang areas and conducted proactive motor vehicle stops and street encounters. They were able to seize several illegal firearms and make multiple arrests, according to Kelly.
“I think it’s fair to say, especially with some of the gun arrests that we made, if not for that work and that effective suppression effort, we would have had more violence occur in this community,” Reddy said.
The intervention pillar was also employed, with police making dozens of home visits to known gang members and their families through Operation Home Check.
“These high-risk youths were targeted with some well-established gang members and persons identified as potential associates or future gang members,” Kelly said. “We made several contacts with family members, including contact phone numbers for follow-up visits and information.”
“This was a huge portion of what we needed to do, which was to go beyond just the suppression. This intervention was very crucial in de-escalating the rise in gang violence,” Kelly said.
Another important development was obtaining a grant from the Essex District Attorney’s Office through the Project Safe Neighborhood Initiative (PSNI) and using the funding for gang-violence reduction.
Lynn Police also partnered with the Lynn Juvenile Court Probation Department to continue home visits.
“We work together to provide resources to those affected by gang activity and create environments where individuals feel safe and empowered to resist gang influence,” Kelly said.
Kelly added that home visits took anonymity away from gang members, who believed they were operating out of the spotlight of law enforcement. The connections to family members have produced valuable relationships.
“Most of these kids didn’t think that we knew who they were or who they were associating with. These home visits took that away from them,” Kelly said. “Another part of this was informing the families who might not know about this involvement. A lot of parents were shocked and had no clue their sons or daughters were associating with this type of activity.”
Reddy said the parents were grateful for this knowledge and for the ability of the department to share resources with them.
“I think that kind of communication is critical for us to help parents be more engaged and understand the risks that some of their kids are facing in the community,” the chief said.
Kelly stressed the importance of developing positive interactions.
“These home visits are non-confrontational, positive engagements, and we’re also isolating these youths away from other gang members,” he said. “We want to demonstrate to the community that we’re doing everything we can. We acknowledge that no police department can simply arrest their way out of the problem.”
“We are taking a multi-faceted approach to combat this, and the community should know that we’re doing everything we can to think outside the box,” Kelly added. “We have a forward-thinking chief that allows us to create these programs and partnerships, which is vital to this de-escalation in gang violence.”
Outreach programs make a difference
Lynn Police School Resource Officers (SRO) play an important role in gang intervention, Kelly said. The SROs have utilized the PSNI Grant to develop prevention and intervention programs tailored to high-risk juvenile gang members.
“During this timeline, we had (Officers) Brianna Anderson at Marshall Middle School and Ryan McDermott at Lynn English. They worked to establish trust and rapport with high-risk youth before and after school,” he said.
The officers provided alternatives for youth who were being recruited into gangs or starting to associate with known gang members.
Another effective collaboration involves Lynn Public Schools, Lynn Police and the Lynn Community Health Center Adverse Childhood Experiences Response Team (ACERT). It incorporates parent education, advocacy, and a referral program from first responders to a traumatic event, Kelly said.
The mission of ACERT is to respond to families, and especially children, in the wake of violence and connect them to appropriate trauma-informed support and services in the community, according to Kelly.
When the department can identify someone in the community who has been a victim of trauma, they are connected to the ACERT team, whose resources include pediatric care, school-based health centers, dental care, eye clinics, mobile markets for fresh produce, and North Shore WIC (Women, Infants, and Children).
The team is also able to connect families involved in domestic violence with HAWC (Healing Abuse Working for Change).
Kelly said there are other partnerships that have helped make it possible to lower youth gang violence, including teen drop-in centers run by the Lynn Parks & Recreation department.
“Parks and Rec is a tremendous partner on the weekly teen drop-in center,” Reddy said. “We recognize that for a lot of kids in our community, when school is out, there are very limited options for them.”
The chief said police know it is important to fill that gap and provide a constructive space.
“We do similar activities at Marshall and Breed middle schools. We have a number of officers there who interact with kids informally,” Reddy said, adding that kids are offered lunch and the opportunity to stay occupied during school vacation, with a safe place to go and have fun.
Another partnership was created with the Juvenile Court Probation Department and the Lynn Police gang unit and Youth Services Unit (YSU).
Kelly said the YSU uses a referral program with the Justice Resource Institute, a division of Children’s Friend & Family Services, geared to juveniles just starting to get into trouble or who are victims of crime.
Resources include home therapy, one-on-one mentoring, and a behavioral health and trauma clinic.
Another valued partner is Lynn Youth Street Outreach Advocacy (LYSOA), which is committed to empowering the highest-risk youth in the community to reach a positive purpose in life. In 2019, 134 youth and young adults received outreach services from LYSOA. By 2022, the number had grown to 318, with 276 served in 2023.
“The numbers are climbing, and the outreach work they do is tremendous,” Kelly said.
Roca, an organization whose mission is to disrupt violence by engaging young people and police to heal trauma and find hope, also works collaboratively with Lynn Police.
“(Roca Chelsea Director) Joe Furnari and other members of ROCA have been vital to the success of the police department’s outreach programs,” Reddy said. “The work ROCA and LYSOA do in the community, providing disruption of the harmful behaviors and steering these kids towards paths that can help them achieve their GED or high school diploma is critically important. I’m truly grateful for both organizations and the work they do.”
Lynn Police also use the Lynn Community Gang Assessment Report, which provides key research on the needs of the city. Funding is provided through the Senator Charles E. Shannon Community Safety Initiative, a state grant program administered by the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security. Funding is used to support Local Action Research Partners (LARP), Kelly said.
LARP provides expertise in the areas of data gathering, data analysis, and program evaluation, in addition to providing info on best practices.
“We take the best practices and most successful programs, and we implement them here. Then, we try to make those grow and even work better for us in the city of Lynn,” he said.
The department uses the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), which creates a comprehensive gang model as the blueprint for them to use in their practices and programs.
“Everything we do is to improve the current gang intervention strategy in Lynn,” Kelly said
The OJJDP model is meant to address the root causes of criminal gang activity by spreading responsibility and accountability for resolving the gang problem throughout the community and among service providers, making it no longer solely a law enforcement problem.
Reddy said other partners include LifeScene, Catholic Charities and North Shore Community College.
“Law enforcement plays a really important role, as do the school department, nonprofits, community partners, particularly those that work with young people, and the public as a whole,” Nicholson said.
Hard work rewarded
Mayor Nicholson said last summer the City tripled the number of jobs offered to youth, and is working with Roca on a workforce development partnership, in which Roca hires people to provide job training that networks with the DPW.
Nicholson also highlighted the efforts of City Councilor-at-Large Nicole McClain, who launched the Youth and Adolescents Task Force, and the research being done by North Shore Community College, the addition of the Justice Research Institute, and its expansion into the Lynn Housing Authority & Neighborhood Department.
“Last year, we also helped set up a mentor spotlight event where we invited different groups that provide mentoring into City Hall and communities to facilitate matchmaking between those interested in mentoring and the groups that run those programs,” Nicholson said.
Nicholson, city councilors, the DPW, Department of Community Development, and law enforcement have all gone door to door to show residents the different departments that are here for them to use.
“Not only can you reach out to police, but also there’s all of these different resources available,” the mayor said.
All of the programs mentioned have provided major help to the police department to help double down on their efforts.
“I also want to acknowledge that Captain Kelly’s team working under the Criminal Investigation Division, working with our partners at the State Police, the Essex County DA’s Office and some of our federal partners, brought significant indictments in this past year,” Reddy said.
“That takes those impact players off the streets, those small group individuals that have been highlighted. Then you combine that with the intervention and the greater awareness by families and the access to this programming, the two things came together for that reduction we’ve seen,” he said.
He said that accountability, enforcement, and suppression are a piece, but so are prevention and intervention and the work done with their partners.
“I really want to emphasize that the hard work and dedication of our patrol officers and our partners, on a daily basis, has had a direct impact on the reduction to gang violence in the city,” Reddy said.
