Pity the poor soul who, more than twenty years ago, would have predicted that hard-core street cops would be sitting down with serious violent offenders, telling them politely to cease and desist, asking them what they and their families need, and going to extreme lengths to keep them safe and out of jail. Exactly that has in fact become standard practice with police officers nationally; beyond that, and not coincidentally, that standard practice is increasingly understood to work very well indeed. The “focused deterrence” strategies piloted in Boston in the mid-1990s and implemented since then in a range of other jurisdictions are racking up impressive results in preventing violent crime and have become essentially mainstream. What was once seen as at best innovative – but more often to be fringe bordering on the bizarre, as in the face-to-face meetings between authorities and offenders that the Boston strategy invented – is now standard practice and routine not just for special interventions but as a philosophy of policing: it is, one hears police chiefs say, “what we do.”