Today in Boston, Michael McDowell will see for himself how the authorities there have cracked down on anti-social behaviour. Seán O'Driscoll reports on an approach that has borne fruit.
When Minister for Justice Michael McDowell flew into Boston last night, he was due to go straight to police commissioner Kathleen O'Toole's office to discover how Ireland can emulate Boston's dramatic crime reduction over the last 10 years.
For both police and academics, Boston has become the crime prevention model for America, with violent crime halved between 1990 and 2003.
Experts attribute much of the success to Operation Ceasefire, a mid-1990s programme that got tough on crime but stopped short of introducing British-style Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbos).
Jack Greene, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Harvard University, will meet McDowell today to explain Boston's crime transformation. For Greene, Operation Ceasefire's success lies in a new approach to community policing, much more co-ordination among government agencies and a probation system that veers very close to the Asbo system . . . but without the attendant civil rights controversies.
"It's all about community, the realisation that it's not just a police responsibility. They brought in the churches, especially in black areas, to get the message across that the cops were not at war with the neighbourhood, then brought them into a system that included all the social services, education, the district attorney and the federal agencies," says Greene.
Once disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Boston accepted that action would be targeted to specific criminals, the police introduced Operation Ceasefire.
"The strategy includes taking the most serious offenders to police stations and telling them in advance that they are being targeted, that the community and police know what's going on and that action will be taken. This had to be done very sensitively with civil liberties objections in mind," says Greene. "It had to be legally defensible and it was only done where police enforcement is the only option, where a softer intervention is not going to change them."
For gang members who refused to come along to a police station to review their case, the police revamped their approach to probation, which was the next part of Operation Ceasefire.
Up to the mid-1990s, the courts had not tailored prison releases to each individual criminal. But after consultations between the police and the probation department, the courts agreed to introduce strict individual conditions, including forcing criminals to comply with police orders to discuss their case.
"The whole new thinking in probation allowed the police a lot more freedom, and it comes with the same underlying assumptions as the British [ Asbo] system," says Greene.
Bob Dunford, Boston's police superintendent, has seen a transformation in the use of probation orders, with much more specific conditions being placed on a convict's freedom, including curfews and a ban on meeting other known criminals.
The most effective use of the probation system has been in the blue-collar neighbourhood of Dorchester, which McDowell will be visiting today.
"In Dorchester, they are more aggressive with probation requirements because they have had a crime problem and probation has been one of the most effective ways of dealing with it," says Dunford.
But the problems have not disappeared. A new generation of gang members is emerging to fill the places left by those who were locked in prison during the big clampdown in the 1990s and for whom probation conditions don't mean much.
These new criminals are more enamoured of gang culture and violence, says Dunford, and they are largely responsible for the sharp increase in gun murders in the last two years. "There is a new youth culture and it's a different scene than when Operation Ceasefire was introduced.
"The older guys are coming out of prison now and they are looking for their territory but it's not there because you've got all these wannabe gangsters coming up.
"These young guys take offence at the slightest thing and it's not this guy against this guy, now everyone in the gang has to be in on the beef (dispute)."
Dunford says that the "violent, misogynistic" lyrics of gangsta rap have helped define the crime scene in a way that was not anticipated by police. "I'm no music expert and I think a lot of hip hop and rap is positive, but it's this other stuff that is creating a problem," he said.
The Minister will also meet workers at the Ella J Baker House, where they teach media literacy and opposition to the commercialisation of gang culture and its "celebration of ignorance and violence".
He will also learn about the Boston police's "broken window theory", which involved setting up neighbourhood response units to deal immediately with quality of life issues in disadvantaged areas before neighbourhoods were allowed to become ghettoised.
This largely means linking up with public works agencies to tackle what may seem like trivial neighbourhood problems, such as broken lampposts or shopfront graffiti.
"If neighbours want to get an area cleaned, we escort the public works people and tow away any car illegally parked that's in their way. It's that immediate," says Dunford. "It sends out a signal to the community. It says: 'We are not going to let your neighbourhood slide'."
George Kelling, a criminal justice professor at Rutgers University, says Boston has essentially broken down its policing into very separate areas, with different problems targeted in each area.
"When you look at the annual police report, it's really a compilation of 13 different reports - the 12 separate areas of Boston and then the central report.
"It comes from a keen understanding that you don't have a city drug problem; you have different kinds of drug problems in different parts of the city. There is no unique reason for stealing a car; cars are stolen in different parts of the city for different reasons."
But Boston's dramatic success on public order offences has come at a price, as Commissioner O'Toole knows only too well.
Last October, on the night that Boston celebrated the Red Sox first World Series baseball victory since 1918, a student named Victoria Snelgrove was shot in the face by a police projectile gun and later died in hospital.
The police department recently settled with Snelgrove's family for more than $5 million and is co-operating with three investigations into the killing in an effort to restore its reputation. Some black leaders complained that it took the death of a white middle-class woman to wake the city up to a growing problem of police excess in disadvantaged areas.
"We will have to deal with the investigative reports as soon as they come out," says Dunford. "I hate the word 'transparency', but I think it needs to be used because we just cannot afford to massage the message. We're got show that we're professional and that we are the model to which all police forces should come."