Don't Shoot is a landmark work in law enforcement, community action, and social policy: an utterly new way of understanding and addressing gang - and drug-related inner-city violence and the epidemic of incarceration it propagates. David M. Kennedy, who engineered the "Boston Miracle" in the 1990s, cutting youth homicide by two thirds at the height of the crack epidemic, reveals the history and the strategy behind his commonsense yet revolutionary approach to ending crime. Schooled by both street cops and street offenders, informed by venerable social science, tempered in the furnace of big-city politics, squarely facing toxic racial history and present reality, kennedy found common ground that everyone-gang members, drug dealers, cops, and neighbors-could share. The proof is in the miraculous results. Don't Shoot offers a bold way forward. Book jacket.