Dan Conley’s website brags that his DA’s office is the biggest in New England.
Why? Boston is the biggest city, but Suffolk isn’t the biggest county.
Middlesex Worcester, Essex are more populous counties.
As are Fairfield County, CT, New Haven County, and Hartford County, CT.
Are we in Boston such a bunch of criminals that we need extra supervision? Or is this a sign of a bloated prosecutorial apparatus that the next DA should work on fixing?
Edit: Candidates, please answer this. I want to hear your thoughts especially.
Please share widely!
Well, the easy answer to this is that Boston (and Chelsea) are near the top of the list of Massachusetts towns in terms of violent crimes per capita. I don’t know if there are similar figures for property crimes for Massachusetts cities and towns, or what the figures are for the counties in Connecticut you mention. But perhaps the simple answer here is the right one? The combination of high population and higher per capita rates of crime means, well, more crime.
To a first approximation, those ‘more populous counties’ are each about 10x in land, 2x in people and 1/10 in density in comparison so Suffolk. (This while completely discounting the daily population shift — the technical term is ‘commute’ — in which a large portion of each of those outside 2x populations spend their days working and interacting with other humans inside Suffolk County)
The DA’s office does not exist because ‘criminality.’ The DA’s office exists because they are a key component of the processes of adjudication: which is a proxy of interactions, legal and illegal, and interactions are a direct function of density. The more people interacting with each other the busier the courts. In fact, the act of stacking people on top of each other to work and play in increased density requires, by itself, an extra layer of ‘supervision.’