More Than Lightning in a Bottle and Far From ReadyMade

The Pareto Principle, named after economist Vilfredo Pareto who developed the “80/20” rule in the late 1800s, specifies that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. During the past century, researchers focused on business, product consumption, medicine, and the behavioral sciences have observed the same basic persistent pattern regarding the “vital few and trivial many” (Juran, 1954). Not surprisingly, criminologists have lent further support to this principle, or various adaptations of it, by showing that a fraction of offenders commits a majority of crime (Moffitt, 1993), that a small number of geographic locations (such as hot spots, street segments, and even cities) accounts for the majority of observed crime patterns (McCall, Land, and Parker, 2011; Sherman, Martin, and Buerger, 1989; Weisburd, Bushway, Lum, and Yang, 2004), and that a small number of groups of offenders is responsible for a disproportionate level of street crime such as gun violence and drug offending (Zimring, 1981). Academics and criminal justice practitioners alike are intimately familiar with this concept. Nevertheless, there is often a wide disconnect between what is known and what is done. Pioneers in Boston in the late 1990s developed the Ceasefire strategy by drawing on principles of crime prevention that have shown to have crime reduction benefits in a variety of settings (Braga, Kennedy, Waring, and Piehl, 2001). They developed a model that (a) used data to identify the high-risk gangs and groups of chronic offenders that were responsible for the Pareto Principle in action within Boston; (b) generated networks of capacity between criminal justice agencies including police, prosecution, probation, parole, and social services; (c) channeled criminal justice resources to suppress, deter, and alter high-risk offenders’ perceptions of the enhanced sanctions, as well as potential for victimization, related to the continuation of violence; and