Mayor for a New America (19 page)

The SWAT team's invasion of the wrong apartment showed the need for better advance information about where the bad guys really were. Neighborhood policing was not social work but law enforcement. It was about residents helping the police protect them. Transparency was the first step. The police couldn't hide their blunders and expect to be trusted with tips about neighborhood criminals. Paul's apology demonstrated that change had come to the Boston Police Department.

Neighborhood policing was now off to a good start.

 

For the last twenty years, we've been too busy answering 911 calls, helter-skelter, all over the place . . . to get to know people. We got in cruisers and stopped walking around. . . . It tore down the whole sense of accountability and responsibility. Technology actually hurt us. It gave us the 911 system, in which everybody just went to the next call. And while we were breaking down, so were the institutions that had stabilized us.

 

—Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans, speaking to a community meeting in Codman Square

 

After the Bell Telephone Company introduced the 911 universal emergency call system in the late 60s, police departments competed over “rapid response,” defined as “the time between dispatch of the call and the officers' arrival on the scene.” The BPD came up with its own in-house metric, “zero cars available” (meaning no patrol cars were free), which measured how long
all
cars in a police district were tied up answering calls. “Since Zero Car Availability was considered a negative, this measure created an artificial pressure to ‘clear the call as quickly as possible' to be available for the next one,” a report concluded. “Many officers attempted to meet this departmental directive, but it came at the cost of minimizing effective interaction with the citizens.”

“Next call, next cruiser” made police strangers in the neighborhoods. It was past time for a new way of policing.

The first step: months of planning and neighborhood-by-neighborhood organization under Strategic Planning teams led by the captains of Boston's eleven police districts. The captains recruited team members from the neighborhoods—activists, church leaders, business owners, youth service workers. The members asked their neighbors to identify the most serious neighborhood problems, and together set “realistic goals” for solving them.

The planning teams agreed on goals reflecting local realities. For example:

• Create safe business districts in South Boston.
  
• Reduce larceny from motor vehicles in West Roxbury.
  
• Make the drug culture less attractive via positive community values.
  

Goals were then narrowed to specific objectives:

• Reduce the number of complaints about public drinking.
  
• Increase drug arrests in the district by 10 percent.
  
• Increase parental responsibility and parents' awareness of the actions of their children.
  

The U.S. Justice Department called Boston's blueprint for neighborhood policing “as comprehensive as any you will find.”

In the districts, meanwhile, officers were assigned to patrol set areas. The same twelve to fifteen officers spread over three shifts patrolling the same ten- to twelve-block area. Day after day. Week after week. Mostly in cars; sometimes on foot. Long enough to become known and trusted.

Their job was not to respond to crimes but to prevent them by fixing the neighborhood's “broken windows”—vandalism, abandoned cars, public drinking, graffiti. Crime could fall statistically, but if people didn't feel safe, the numbers didn't matter. And if people didn't feel safe, they went out less, and the streets became more dangerous. Removing the eyesores of disorder signaled that the streets did not belong to lawbreakers.

Surveys confirmed that neighborhood policing had made a difference. A man I ran into on Dorchester's Geneva Avenue could hardly believe it: “Mayor, its amazing—no more gunshots.” As I put it in my 1997 State of the City address, “Today, everyone can feel safer on our streets—except the criminals.”

“Ten years ago the city paid lip service to community policing,” a civilian on one of the Strategic Planning teams told researchers. “Cops were only visiting the businesses they knew. We had one officer who would park illegally in a bus stop and then sit all day in a single coffee shop. This shop got excellent police protection, but the rest of the business district suffered. Now we have a bicycle officer who is very mobile. He isn't in a car, he is moving, he is friendly. It is no longer us versus them.”

Another team member said: “The Strategic Planning effort was an exercise in process and patience, but it was well worth it. The change between the community and police is evident. They came out of the cars, moved to walking beats—it has been a 180 degree change. Dorchester is a vast area and there are many neighborhood associations and meetings. Our concerns are not falling on deaf ears.”

Responsibility for public safety was shifted from headquarters to the station house, from the station house to the squad car, from the squad car to the walking cop, from the cop to the citizen.

 

Officers and residents across the nation have offered testimonials about how successful community policing partnerships have improved their lives; one police officer summed it up by noting that kids now waved to him using all five fingers instead of just one.

 

—from the “Boston Police Department's Strategic Planning Process: Phase One, Final Report”

 

“Now we're going into the neighborhoods, meeting with residents and making them feel like they have a part in the crime issue,” I told
USA Today
in 1996. We asked people to take responsibility for their neighborhoods—for each other—and they stepped up.

To draw attention to a spike in nighttime disorder in the Back Bay, neighbors held a camp-out in a park. Jamaica Plain residents requested that one team meeting a month be conducted in Spanish to allow their Spanish-speaking neighbors to attend. Because meetings were held after work, some folks didn't have time for supper. So those who could brought potluck dishes to meetings and fed their neighbors.

There was pushback from civilians. Under 911 policing, you reported something stolen from your house, within a few hours a cop would be at your door. Under the new strategy, if the officer assigned to your neighborhood was on vacation, you might wait several days.

There was pushback from the police. “This isn't why I became a cop. If I wanted to become a social worker, I wouldn't have gone through the academy.” That view was out there.

The department figured that young cops would adapt to the new strategy easier than old-timers, but some veteran cops liked its back-to-the-future flavor. “I've been on the job for 32 years now,” said one. “I came on the job when cops did what we're trying to get back to doing. I believe in this neighborhood policing. . . . It gives people a sense of safety, of control. They can approach us, we're a sounding board. If you take care of the little things the bigger things take care of themselves.”

That veteran was among the first cops to practice neighborhood policing. He and his partner worked a pilot program in Roxbury's Academy Homes. They befriended nine-year-old Jermaine Goffigan. He invited the two officers to his ninth birthday party on Halloween. They stopped by and wished him well.

Twenty minutes after they left the party, Jermaine was dead, gunned down in a gang crossfire as he stood in front of his home.

Jermaine Goffigan. I named a park after him.
^*
He was out trick-or-treating in a Dracula mask. Police found five Tootsie Rolls and a lemon drop in his pockets. Who could have guessed that Boston was about to go two and a half years without losing another Jermaine? Not a single kid killed in twenty-nine months.

That was the “Boston miracle” celebrated by the national media and saluted by President Clinton.

That, and this: In 1995 there were ninety-six homicides in Boston, fifty-nine in 1996, forty-three in 1997, and thirty-five in 1998.

And this: In 1995 Boston's crime rate ranked it twenty-eighth lowest among the fifty largest cities, twenty-second in 1996, and twelfth in 1997.

So crime was down. One of the objectives laid out in the 1995 Boston Neighborhood Policing Initiative was met.

A second objective was to reduce fear of crime. In a 1997 BPD survey, 75 percent of Boston residents said they felt “very safe” at home at night. Nationally, only 43 percent of city dwellers felt “very safe.”

The third objective was to improve the quality of life in the neighborhoods. Here the results were less impressive but still encouraging. The proportion of Bostonians calling graffiti a serious neighborhood problem was “significantly lower than the national sample,” and “a smaller portion of Bostonians than Chicagoans believe that graffiti, drug dealing, public drinking, and abandoned cars are a serious problem in their neighborhood.”

Crime fell everywhere in the 90s, but faster and lower in practically every category in Boston. A puzzling exception: Triple the percentage of Bostonians than city residents nationwide said “dogs running loose” was a serious neighborhood problem.

The St. Clair Commission advocated neighborhood policing to restore public confidence in a Roache-era BPD that ranked twenty-eighth out of thirty major cities in solving murders and twenty-seventh in arrests for felonies like rape and robbery. Two years into the new strategy, 84 percent of Boston residents had a “great deal” or “some” confidence that the police could prevent crime, compared to 58 percent of the national sample.

Perhaps surprisingly, the police had embraced neighborhood policing. Whereas only 17 percent listed arresting criminals or reducing crime as their prime goal, 68 percent listed goals like “helping people/making them feel safe.”

Except for those wild dogs, all the trends were good.

“We're working together for the first time,” I said, referring generally to police-community cooperation and specifically to a partnership between Boston police and state agencies.

Between 1990 and 1995, a quarter of offenders in murder cases were on parole at the time of their offense. Parolees bore watching, but no one was watching them. Under Operation Nightlight, Boston police officers teamed with Massachusetts probation officers to make nightly visits to the homes of high-risk offenders to see if they were observing the terms of their parole—2,500 visits in 1996. These bed checks gave parents and grandparents welcome leverage to keep their young men off the streets. Cooperation from families helped make Nightlight work. According to the FBI
Law Enforcement Bulletin
, “Going from zero supervisory visits to thousands each year made a substantial impact on the comparatively small number of offenders causing the most problems.”

Representatives from eighty cities visited Boston to see how we did it. “We're stealing every idea that Boston hasn't locked down,” said a Minneapolis police lieutenant after his visit. “Look what happened to your body count. . . . You're doing something right.”

 

Then the police union and Democratic politicians set progress back.

I believe in unions. They put the American Dream within reach of men like my dad, a member of the Machinists Union.

So it pained me when the Boston police union impeded neighborhood policing.
^*

I also believe in the values of the Democratic Party. However, I was ashamed of my party for a vote cast by the overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts state legislature.

The vote repealed a century-old law allowing Boston's police commissioner to make personnel decisions affecting public safety without negotiating with the police unions. Paul Evans needed that flexibility to implement the new strategy. In practice that could mean assigning younger officers to jobs veterans (wrongly) considered “RIP” (retired in place) and wanted as a benefit of their seniority. The Boston Police Patrolmen's Association (BPPA) could not tolerate that. So its political action committee (PAC) donated heavily to the lawmakers' campaigns, and the Democrats voted to forbid Evans from changing deployments without union approval.

Citing Boston's record in reducing crime, Governor Paul Cellucci, a Republican, vetoed the Democratic bill. “I do not believe that it is in the best interest of the Commonwealth,” he said, “and, in particular, the citizens of Boston, to change the existing relationship between management and labor when the public safety could suffer.”

I lobbied state senators to sustain Cellucci's veto. I argued these points:

1. Neighborhood policing worked.
   
2. Management flexibility made it work.
   
3. A vote against management flexibility was therefore a vote against the “Boston miracle.”
   

I was wasting my breath. Every Democrat voted to override the governor's veto.

One of my aides drew the moral: “Get me a PAC and a checkbook and I'll get some votes too. What are we going to do, not give out any passes for the Marathon this year?”

The override came in January 1998. That year, the miracle faded. Kids started killing other kids again. Boston's crime rate ticked up. Was the legislature's meddling in neighborhood policing
the
cause? No. Was it
a
cause? Undoubtedly.

“Relations between City Hall and the police, frayed by contract negotiations and the police commissioner bill, have reached an all-time low,” the
Globe
observed. Shortly after the vote, free copies of
Pax Centurion
, the newspaper of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, were missing from their usual places in City Hall and had to be restocked.

I had a tough relationship with the BPPA. Every time the police contract was up for renewal, pickets dogged me. One year, a dozen officers showed up in front of the National Press Club in Washington, where I was speaking. “I'm laying off 1,700 people, and they're asking for a raise,” I told the audience. “I just don't have it.” And BPPA picket lines nearly stopped the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which, for the first time, was held in Boston.