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The dramatic drop in homicides and shootings of Boston’s young people in the late 1990s became known as the “Boston Miracle.” While those who worked on the effort say many factors contribute to long-term reductions in violence, a focused deterrence strategy across city government, nonprofit service-providers, trusted community leaders and police is central to Boston’s story. The strategy to reduce violence caught on beyond Boston, often with federal funding, in cities like Baltimore, Maryland and Oakland, California. Now, cities like Tucson, Arizona are turning to focused deterrence for a very different kind of crime — low-level offenses often associated with homelessness.
Focused deterrence usually identifies a group of people most associated with a specific type of crime, and communicates the certainty of criminal justice consequences, while offering support to change patterns of involvement with those crimes. In Boston, police and probation officers met with gang members, made unexpected home visits, and flooded areas that had intergang violence and arrested those driving the conflict. At the same time, social service workers offered services and jobs. This combination of clear warnings, swift enforcement and robust services intends to change not just the behavior of the targeted group, but also their broader network.
In July, Tucson began a pilot focused deterrence program aimed at quality-of-life misdemeanors, such as trespassing, loitering, solicitation and standing in a street’s median. These offenses can cause some business owners and residents to demand a response from the city, but are difficult to avoid for those living on the streets.
The Tucson Police Department has made a list of 50 people frequently involved in these offenses in the city’s downtown and areas to its north and west. Every week, representatives of a team composed of police, city court workers and a city health and wellness department will contact two people from this list to offer them services such as substance-use or mental health treatment and shelter, and warn them of possible harsher consequences with future arrests. Police Chief Monica Prieto told the city council that these consequences could include police encouraging city court to not dismiss future charges or to order substance-use treatment. The pilot will last about six months and could expand to other parts of the city.
Austin, Texas also launched a program where four police officers are each assigned 25 people with frequent arrests, emergency room visits and behavioral health incidents. The officers are tasked with connecting people with services from partner organizations.
While success of some focused deterrence approaches has encouraged adoption across the U.S., police have also ended programs after public outcry or civil rights lawsuits.
A Tampa Bay Times investigation in 2020 found that a Pasco County, Florida, program harassed people who appeared on the sheriff’s algorithmically generated list of likely lawbreakers, as well as their family members. In some cases, deputies overwhelmed them with citations for code violations or arrests. A former deputy said the initiative intended to “make their lives miserable until they move or sue.” In 2024, while settling a lawsuit from those targeted, the sheriff ended the program.
In 2019, Chicago quietly spun down its Strategic Subject List of people the department said were likely to be shooters or victims of gun violence. Critics said the list was too expansive, and the department was not fully forthcoming about how it used the names in enforcement. Furthermore, the list raised constitutional questions and some argued the overrepresentation of young Black and Latino men on the list may have violated state civil rights laws.
The use of focused deterrence to reduce gun homicides is well-studied. However, even when cities base their strategies on research, they can struggle to find success. Baltimore failed to reduce gun violence with strategies that included focused deterrence before its third attempt, known as the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, helped reduce homicides and shootings to the lowest levels in years.
There is little evidence for applying focused deterrence to quality-of-life misdemeanors, said Ben Struhl, executive director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Struhl, who led the lab’s design and support of the Baltimore strategy, said, in theory, the fundamentals of focused deterrence could be applied to a broad range of problems.
Cities should focus on problems that the community defines as most urgent, and ones where the strategy can not only shape someone’s decision in a moment, but also the conditions that lead them to repeatedly make a decision. For example, it may be more difficult to shape the decisions of a person with opioid use disorder focused on avoiding painful withdrawal, Struhl said. They must also keep their eyes on a “triple bottom line”: reducing crime, reducing people’s exposure to the justice system, and improving the relationship between the city government and residents.
It’s also important for cities using these strategies to provide certainty, not only in increased enforcement or stiffer penalties, but also in the availability of services. “A city can't just say they're doing the services and not follow through,” Struhl said. “Every time I've seen a city do that, their overall strategy won't work.”
In Tucson, police introduced its focused deterrence pilot after the city shelved a proposed ordinance that would have created a new drug-related loitering offense. The ordinance would have required police to first warn people to leave public places if they had prior drug-related convictions, or if they appeared to have used drugs or were likely to do so. Subsequent encounters could result in arrest, and a second arrest would carry a mandatory five days in jail. However, Nikki Lee, the city council member who introduced the ordinance, said its enforcement would burden city court and that the police department would propose other measures to address public drug use.
In New Hampshire, the American Civil Liberties Union has sued over the constitutionality of a state loitering law, one of only a few such state laws in effect. The suit alleges that the law is overly vague and gives police broad license to stop and search unhoused people.
The most recent figures show a decrease in U.S. homelessness from 2024 to 2025. However, the number of unhoused people has risen substantially since the mid-2010s. Larger numbers of people living on the street have led to increased pressure on cities from residents, and conservative think tanks, to turn to the criminal justice system as a response to homelessness. A little over a year ago, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to prioritize grants to jurisdictions that enforced laws against open drug use, camping and loitering. A few months later, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) put this order into practice when it dramatically shifted the way the federal government funded local responses to homelessness. The new funding formula incentivized enforcement and it shifted money away from permanent housing and toward transitional housing with requirements to participate in treatment, services or work.
Tucson, along with other cities and nonprofits, sued to halt the funding changes for the 2025 fiscal year, and again over the latest funding. In both lawsuits, a federal judge blocked the new HUD grant priorities. Her latest ruling said the agency did not follow a required process for public notice and comment.
State lawmakers have also compelled enforcement of offenses related to homelessness or enacted camping bans. In 2024, Arizona voters approved a ballot measure introduced by Republicans that allows property owners to request a tax refund for costs they attribute to the nonenforcement of offenses like illegal camping, using drugs or defecating in public. The Goldwater Institute, an Arizona think tank, championed the proposition as well as similar laws in Georgia and Oklahoma. Another think tank, the Cicero Institute, has successfully pushed for statewide camping bans in recent years, including one in Tennessee that makes public camping a felony.
Caroline Isaacs, executive director of Just Communities Arizona, which promotes community safety models outside of the criminal justice system, questions Tucson’s reliance on policing when the city has identified gaps in services for unhoused people. “The things that make us safe are not talked about in terms of public safety, and that is a serious problem,” Isaacs said. “Safety is housing. Safety is no-barrier drug treatment on demand that is free.”