June marks the last month of the school year and the first month of summer, when we always experience our highest peaks in crime. The surge in crime happens every year, and yet every year we plan no differently. The city has a real ally in its residents and community leaders.
To ignore this resource undermines our ability to really take back our streets and neighborhoods. It’s time we be strategic with our resources and it’s time we put the community back in charge of policing our neighborhoods.
Continuing his efforts to run a different type of campaign Michael Flaherty is sharing his crime prevention plan as a video release. For a full copy of our Community Policing White Paper please contact me, Natasha Perez, at nperez@michaelflaherty.com.
-Natasha Perez, Communications Director, Flaherty for Mayor Committee
Click on the video below to learn how Michael feels about the crime in our city.
That seems odd — this is it, right? Why not just link to the document?
please contact me, Natasha Perez, at nperez@michaelflaherty.com.check out our website.<
p>David, we have a white paper that focuses specifically on putting the community back in community and we just posted it on our website for you to review.
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p>-Natasha Perez, Communications Director, Flaherty for Mayor Committee
The white paper is an interesting read. I’m glad the race is moving out of the rhetoric stage and we’re getting to see more thoughtful, detailed, policy discussion. Some comments and questions:
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p>While your video says “violence has no zip code, income, color, or age,” you seem aware of the fact that there are very real differences in violent crime rates between Boston’s neighborhoods. I like the idea that we need to move away from centralized, catch-all policing strategies and develop customized plans for each of Boston’s neighborhoods. Violent crime is influenced by poverty, housing policy, educational opportunities, and a variety of other factors that vary across communities. It’s about time we enable different neighborhoods to address their different problems in different ways.
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p>I’m also happy to see you’ve addressed the potential of increased workforce training, educational opportunities, and substance-abuse treatment programs. I agree that “saturating hot spots with police” isn’t enough, and I’d like to see the City focus resources on more preventative programs.
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p>Community policing and neighborhood involvement are sound ideas, in theory. The problem I see is that, often, “empowered” community leaders aren’t actually given any real opportunities to change ingrained policies and address structural failures. Community involvement and empowerment must be coupled with a willingness on the part of the government to re-evaluate, re-structure, and reform failing policies. We need to do more than ask for input from community leaders–we need to give them the tools they need to make real changes in their neighborhoods.
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p>Michael, I’m happy that you emphasize the need for school-based crime prevention. Putting street workers back into Boston schools is a good start, but we need to go further. Beyond increasing the number of bodies in schools, do you plan to implement any other prevention programs in the BPS? I’d be interested to hear whether (and how) you plan to fund more after-school programs, school counseling, mentoring programs, etc.
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p>Thanks for reading Natasha, I look forward to hearing your response.
You are correct it is time we have neighborhood specific strategies for crime prevention.
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p>However, it is also important to remember that a crime in any one neighborhood affects us all. If two people were murdered in Back Bay or Beacon Hill in one week the City and the Menino Administration would be up in arms. The same should be said for all the neighborhoods in Boston, but sadly this is not the case. I think this is really what people want to hear from the Mayor, that whatever their situation, their lives matter, they count. The price for poverty should not be silence.
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p>Michael believes that jobs are the critical component to reduce the number of youths who join gangs or turn to violence due to lack of alternatives and job opportunities. In order for the city to really make a dent in youth violence, we need to make sure that job opportunities are available to our older youth, who are often the ones that would benefit from a summer job the most.
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p>In addition, Michael has been a longtime proponent of matching our youth with quality year-round employment opportunities, and providing our students with hands-on learning to show them the importance of getting an education and finding a career path.
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p>To acheive the goal and prepare our youth to cature the global economy, Michael has repeatedly called for the city to integrate energy upgrades of municipal buildings with workforce development strategies, specifically green collar job training for those residents facing barriers to employment, particularly at-risk youth.
As an avid news reader, I think there is a growing disparity between the news reports for crime in the Back Bay/Beacon Hill area and the reports in the West Roxbury/Dorchester area. This disparity is also linked to the way in which the City addresses the crime.
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p>I came across Ross Levanto’s Blog, a Beacon Hill Resident, who attended the Beacon Hill Civic Association meeting held on May 28, 2008 to address the recent slew of robberies in the Beacon Hill area. Link to Blog: http://rosslevanto.blogspot.co…
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p>The meeting generated such publicity that more than 50-60 neighbors in the area were present along with Boston Police Captain, Bernard O’Rourke, and City Council President, Mike Ross. It seems like the meeting was held to address the recent robberies of cell phones such as iPhones and Sidekicks, which are apparent luxury items for teenagers.
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p>Around the same time span as the cell phone robberies in the Beacon Hill area, a 29 year old mother of three was shot outside of her Dorchester home. The shooting was the second of a string of violent assaults that occurred that day. See Link to article: http://www.boston.com/news/loc…
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p>After reading the blog and reading the news about the shootings which occurred around the same time, I asked myself whether the disparity in the news reports and the way the crime was addressed was a product of race or poverty.
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p>Why is it that city officials attend civic committee hearings on cellphone robberies in the Back Bay when there are violent assaults and murders occurring in Dorchester? Perhaps it is because Mayor Menino has lowered the expectations of the outrage of violence and is sending a message that it may be more important to address the concerns of the Back Bay/Beacon Hill affluent population rather than the shootings that are occurring in South Boston.
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p>Will the crime really go away if the city focuses on isolated instances of cellphone robbery while failing to address the brutal crimes occurring in South Boston, just because there is a mentality that crime in other neighboorhoods will always be there?
I think that you are talking about the murder of the teenager in Roxbury, who was shot at 730 in the morning down the street from a high school. Crime is not a race issue, but more a Human Rights issue. I disagree with you about the statement that the press is to blame. It is simply not their responsibility to raise awareness about these acts; their job is to report the news. Rather the responsibility is the Mayor’s. Mr. Menino has not done a good job of raising the level of attention to crime in these neighborhoods as he does in downtown Boston. He has the capabilities, more than any other official, to go into the neighborhoods of Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury, where the violent crime problem. I think he is more interested in lowering our expectations to a level where we do no longer notice crime.
Our violence problem is not just a matter of public safety; it’s also a matter of public health. Our complacent attitude towards these daily acts of violence is not lost on our youth, who are inevitably at risk for developing their own attitude that killings, shootings and other forms of violence is a normal part of everyday life. This kind of dangerous acceptance will certainly have a long lasting effect on the soul of our city.
The field of public health has been really slow to pick up on youth violence as a public health issue. The Boston Public Health Commission has done a great job in the past 2 years in this area, holding community forums and meetings with youth to begin addressing it. If only it were taken more seriously by the city to strengthen its support for the Commission to participate in the violence prevention efforts, as it has been far too focused on law enforcement support. Barbara Ferrer, should be recognized for her leadership at the Commission and putting this issue back on the public health agenda.
The only day I no longer want to notice crime is the day that it no longer exists. Unfortunately, growing up in Dorchester and South Boston, I have always had to be aware of the growing amount of violence that has surrounded me. Not to be aware of it would have been to be an easier target. I admit when I was younger crime either wasn’t as abundant as it is today or it wasn’t as nervous wreck walking the three blocks it takes to geviolent. As a teen I’d be careful walking home from wherever I may have been, but I wasn’t really nervous. Now I’m at from my parking spot to my house. It’s impossible to turn a blind eye to how steadily the violence has grown just in the past 15 years alone. When I first moved from Dorchester to South Boston some 25 years ago, I felt like I lived in a relatively safe neighborhood. Now I go to bed at night and count how many sirens and gunshots I hear throughout the night. I don’t blame the Mayor for the violence that people inflict on others. That’s each individual’s malicious choice. However, I don’t believe the Mayor is doing, or has ever done, an even adequate job of trying to come up with a solution to quelling the violence. It doesn’t seem to reside in his backyard as much as mine, so apparently it’s not at the top of his list of priorities. I don’t believe he doesn’t see the rising crime, I just believe it needs to hit closer to his own neighborhood for him to feel threatened enough to seriously do something about it.
Crime more often occurs in areas where people are on the brink of hopelessness. Drugs take root, children are more interested in gangs than in school. Exclusionary housing policies elsewhere virtually ensure that the disenfranchised are concentrated and segregated into just a few areas in the state. Those areas are almost always poor, and for a variety of historical reasons, poor areas are often disproportionately non-white.
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p>I don’t know anyone who has figured out how to “solve” a crime problem without changing the underlying factors of a neighborhood. If a person is prone to crime due to either substance abuse, mental instability, gang membership, or general hopelessness, policing that person is probably not going to change that fact. Bringing in residents less prone to crime is how to generally lower the crime in a neighborhood. There’s the chicken-and-egg situation — people less prone to crime don’t want to move into a neighborhood with crime — in fact, they move out of neighborhoods with crime and are replaced by other people who are more accepting of crime, perhaps some even more likely to participate in it.
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p>Due to limited resources, the city seems to have decided that it is a better investment to inspire people to keep the faith in Back Bay rather than try and try and inspire people to find faith in Dorchester, because if Back Bay loses faith it could become another Dorchester and then there are two problems to solve. That’s probably not that bad of a strategy.
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p>I don’t think very much can be done to “solve” crime at a local level. I don’t think that the police department in Newton is working extra-hard to keep their crime rate low — it’s just that people in Newton aren’t on the brink of hopelessness, and Newton does a pretty good job of collectively keeping that group of people out of their town via zoning and high property prices. Since everyone does this that population gets concentrated into places like Dorchester — and unfortunately, hopelessness tends to amplify when concentrated. I think that at best, crime rates can be lowered by a small percentage due to policing, but certainly not cut in half or probably even reduced by 25%.
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p>Bringing jobs to a neighborhood, good jobs that can be performed by people on the brink of hopelessness is the way to improve crime. Unfortunately that path is being impeded by factors on a national level, such as our national economic path which has traded the lure of cheap wages, goods and services for jobs which could be performed by people without college educations.
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p>I believe that equalizing poverty across the state would also lower crime on a state level. 100 poor kids are more likely to fail and become hopeless at a higher rate if they are in a single school than if they were each spread across 100 different schools. Unfortunately our state policy encourages segregation, particularly since the advent of the “resident sorting” Proposition 2.5 law which encourages economic segregation — communities now assign “return on investment” values to certain types of residents and then oppose development if the housing is considered to be “not worth it in proprty taxes”.
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p>Crime seems to be a good way to beat up on an entrenched incumbent though, but be careful, when the issue of crime was introduced in Springfield by a candidate running against the incumbent mayor in 2004, it set off a spiral of perception that, to this day, the city has not recovered from. Basically, when you have a mayoral candidate telling everyone how much crime there is, people start to lose the faith, they move out, and it is very hard to prove to someone that crime is down because it is very easy to notice a report of a crime, but very difficult to notice the lack of a report of a crime.
As a proud, life long resident of Dorchester, I have seen first hand what crime can do to a neighborhood. My family has lived, gone to school, and worked in Dot for generations. We have witnessed the horrific effects drugs have on a community, especially its youth. But substance abuse and crime are not solely a Dorchester problem. The people in my community joined together a long time ago to take back our streets from the crime and the drugs, and now more and more people are moving in, as well as a business boom in the area.
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p>This is not to say that all of Dorchester is in as good of shape as my community. There is a huge violence problem in the neighborhood, as well as a massive drug problem still. But to say that crime is a Dorchester problem is completely incorrect. It is a Boston problem. We need to raise awareness in the Back Bay, Charlestown,South Boston, and every other neighborhood.
I agree that better access to substance abuse treatment is needed both in Boston and the suburbs, but I really question whether it makes sense to just give more money to community health centers without a clear and specific plan in place for how the money will be spent. That is just a recipe for waste.
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p>In any case, how much money are we talking about here?
Undoubtedly, substance abuse is inextricably linked to our city’s crime and violence problem, which is why expanding access to substance abuse treatment and recovery need to be part of any effort to make our city safer.
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p>I completely agree that throwing money at the problem without having a plan would be a reckless and most likely, ineffective approach. Now more than ever, when we have serious budget shortfalls, we need to be strategic with our scarce dollars and direct our resources to where the highest need can be demonstrated. In other words, these strategic decisions must be based on hard data. For example, in East Boston, we have seen a 500% increase in substance abuse among their Latino population. At the same time, less Latinos are accessing treatment programs than their white counterparts. This is particularly troubling as our white population has declined while Latinos are the city’s fastest growing population. These staggering statistics show that there is a real need for the city to increase its prevention and treatment investments within the Latino population, especially East Boston, which is home to the city’s largest segment of Latinos.
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p>At a City Council budget hearing held just a few weeks ago, Michael questioned the Boston Public Health Commission’s strategic planning for substance abuse programs. Despite a clear and growing need for substance abuse prevention and intervention efforts targeted at Boston’s Latino residents, the city is not currently funding a “No Drugs Coalition” program in East Boston. Instead the program runs in nine other Boston neighborhoods. The city’s data shows we have a major public health and public safety crisis on our hands, but we are not using this data to inform our spending priorities and determine where we should focus our drug prevention efforts. If we were actually using our data, then East Boston would have this important anti-drug program in its neighborhood.
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p>In addition, Michael believes funding decisions should give greater priority to programs that employ staff that have been properly trained to work with culturally diverse communities.
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p>I think that is an overly strong claim. They are related, for sure, but they are still two different problems. There is a lot of crime that is totally unrelated to drugs and there is also a lot of drug/alcohol abuse that is not linked to crime.
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p>In any case, you did not answer the question. You have not said anything about how you intend to distribute money to community health centers (those community “No Drugs Coalitions” are not health centers and it is not clear that any of the money they receive goes towards actual treatment programs) or what you expect them to do with that money. Nor have you said anything about what kind of money you intend to spend – or where that money is going to come from.
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p>You say that “Michael believes that funding decisions should give greater priority to programs that employ staff that have been properly trained to work with culturally diverse communities”. That is good, but where is that coming from? Do you have any reason to believe that any existing program is not equipped to deal with our communities? Can you point to an example?
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p>I appreciate the intent here, but it doesn’t seem that you really have a real plan.
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I think we are in agreement that more money should not just be thrown at health care centers without a plan in place. The central point is that health care centers must be an integral part to any strategic plan on crime. To make this work we need to have an understanding of the data for each of the neighborhoods so that we can direct our money wisely.
A slip of the tongue?
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p>”One child murdered is one less child we won’t see graduate from high school.”
Issuance of Massachusetts License-to-Carry permits are at the discretion of the Chief of Police. Currently it is very difficult if not impossible to be issued a concealed pistol permit in the City of Boston.
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p>What would Mayor Flaherty’s policy be concerning issuance of these permits to law-abiding citizens of Boston?
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p>What would Mayor Flaherty’s position be on the right of homeowners to protect themselves, their families, and their property from violence? Currently, Mayor Menino’s advice is to “call 9-1-1” in the event of an home invasion or other violent crime.
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p>What would Mayor Flaherty’s position be in general on the right of individuals to defend themselves, with deadly force if warranted?
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p>Thank you.
is my neighbors walking around with handguns, concealed or otherwise. I don’t care how law abiding they are. I dare say that most residents would rather see more gun control than less. At least if the police accidentally shoot someone, you know they City can afford to pay damages.
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p>In any case, I don’t expect any of the mayoral candidates to support your position in any way, so it is pretty much a pointless question.
Personally, I sure wouldn’t mind if all my neighbors had handguns. I know at least half of them must because I hear gunshots almost every night of the week. Although I don’t own a gun myself, I like knowing that I have the right to do so if I choose. It’s like the saying goes: “When guns are outlawed, Only outlaws will have guns”. I’m a huge fan of the 2nd Ammendment. Although I respect your view on gun control, I’m glad you only dared to say most and not all, because I disagree with you. And if the violence in this city keeps rising, I may just have to change my mind about not being a gun owner. Another reason I like keeping my right to bear arms is because I feel that once that right is taken away, what’s to stop them from taking any of my other rights away? Then it really wouldn’t matter what any of the candidates thought about gun control because we wouldn’t be voting. We’d be a communist country.
Then things would be they way YOU like them.
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p>Crimes are usually committed by repeat criminals. From a 2006 Globe article:
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p>It’s 2009 and things are still the same.
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p>We have the tightest gun control in the country. It’s not working because it’s not enforced. The police and the courts are feckless. Whenever I read about some gangbanger getting caught with a gun then released or only serving a light sentence, and then hear the Mayor blame “illegal guns” or “lax gun laws” in some other state, I can only shake my head in disbelief.
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p>Given that the police and courts cannot and will not protect me, I would like the means to protect myself.
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p>Why can’t you get your head around that? Why do you think it’s so wrong?
I agree that recidivism rates are extremely high, but then you also have to remember that to repeat any offence, you have to have committed your first offence. It just seems to me that criminals are starting at a younger and younger age with each passing year. And there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s the repeating criminals that are teaching the trade to each child who hasn’t committed their first crime yet.
The Second Amendment does give us the right to bear arms; however, guns are harmful to neighborhoods and gun control should be enforced. Sure, in the short term, guns can provide protection to residents who feel they need protection, but in the long run, it will only spurn a greater trend of violence.
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p>At the end of the day, Bloodshed is still an act of violence even if someone is using a gun as a weapon for protection.
He talked about the crime problem – and how he’d deal with it – at length on our podcast. http://www.leftahead.com/?p=284 Fascinating stuff.
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p>(We’ve also had McCrea and Yoon on, with Menino booked for Tuesday.)
Is necessary. I hope you/the candidate are/is familiar with the work of the Boston Workers Alliance.
Midge I can tell you that Michael supports CORI reform passionately and keeps up to date with all the coming and goings, but is always willing to be educated more. If you think it would be helpful for him to sit down with this organization I am happy to make it happen. This might seem a bit odd, but the best way I can explain his passion is by sharing with you, a conversation I had with Michael including my own internal meanderings.
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p>Me: Michael we are rolling out our crime policy next week, I know we have spent months on this, talked to police, the community, activists and basically everyone, but we need to review this one more time. I want to pitch this on Monday.
Michael: Tasha, I am ready, but I still feel as though it is hard to make all the important points in a single press story. Particularly, the need for jobs for youth that are provided year- round and that teach new skills. What about the need to hire more people of color in the police department in leadership roles. How do we articulate that this would be central to my administration and a real change for Boston without it sounding like a platitude? Also, drug and alcohol abuse treatment and most important, CORI reform.
Me: Yep I get it; we say jobs for youth about 100 times. We have some solid plans to train our workforce for the green economy. And, we talk about making the police department look more like the community. Are you ready? (Lord let us be ready)
Michael: But CORI reform.
Me: We talk about giving jobs to people with CORI issues too.
Michael: You know I was an assistant DA? You know, that I know, we have a recidivism crisis. We need to address it.
Me: Ok I get it. (Its 11:30 on a Sunday night and it will be criminal if I am forced to stay up much longer)
Michael: The problem is too many people want to give a hand out, but not a hand up. How many small businesses do you think want to give a job to someone with a record?
Me: Really that is awful. I get it. (Whoever you have in mind, please lord do not suggest that they become my press assistant)
Michael: We need to do more. The City should lead by example and hire more people with CORI records. I have an idea. You and I are going to the prison tomorrow to talk to people as they are released, and then you will see what I have seen. You can ask any one of these guys — What are they planning on doing now that they are out?
Do you have a job lined up? Nope. What are your plans? Just hanging for a while to see what pans out. What opportunity does the city provide to this group of residents?
Me: That sounds great, but I think the schedule is kind of tight tomorrow – you know press and all.
Michael: It is a good idea; we need to shed light on this issue. Maybe we can help a couple of folks find jobs.
Me: Cool. (Let it not be as my press assistant)
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p>While I am paraphrasing a bit, this is a real conversation. I share this with you only to make fun of myself and highlight my own failings, which I suspect are more normal than not. I suspect this is why I decided to join this campaign. Michael has the ability to take a leap of faith where I cannot. This is what real leadership is all about.
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p>Natasha Perez