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August 12, 2004

City grapples with rash of shootings

Jeremy Schwab

From the slaying of basketball coach William “Biggie” Gaines during practice in Roxbury July 25, to the shooting of 11-year-old Jenry Gonzalez during football practice in the South End August 1, to the shooting of 15-year-old Jaime Owens as she hung out with friends in a Dorchester park August 4, a rash of brazen violence has shocked elected officials, police, clergy and community groups into taking action.

The Boston Police launched Operation Neighborhood Shield over the weekend, working with the State Police, FBI, Boston Housing Authority Police and others to arrest dozens in Boston’s inner city.

Last week, the outspoken Rev. Eugene Rivers and his wife Jacqueline, who heads the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation, called on black men to take more responsibility for stopping the crime in their communities.

During a press conference Sunday, city councilors Charles Yancey, Chuck Turner and Felix Arroyo called for government and business leaders to create more jobs in Boston’s neighborhoods of color in order to give youths more economic opportunities outside of drug dealing.

But in order to accomplish these objectives, speakers at disparate press conferences, from Jacqueline Rivers to the Rev. William Dickerson, said leaders must work together.

With the number of murders in the city already topping last year’s total, clergy, police, elected officials and outreach workers hope to rebuild the partnerships that helped them quell a similar wave of violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“I commend all those individuals who have stepped forward so far,” said Yancey during Sunday’s press conference at the Carter Playground in the South End, where Gonzalez was shot. “But we need a more coordinated strategy. And that strategy must emanate from the community. We have resources I think we are not utilizing.”

Boston Police Superintendent Paul Joyce met last week with an estimated 30 community leaders. At the meeting, police representatives emphasized that their department is already reaching out to youth, conducting over 100 visits a month with parents and at-risk children and conducting street patrols using outreach workers who have had run-ins with the law.

But more needs to be done, say clergy and elected officials. Yancey, Turner and Arroyo called for legislation allowing assets seized in drug busts to go to drug-treatment programs, crime-watch groups and youth programming.

The three city councilors and clergymen urged residents to conduct take-back-the-street walks and to step up neighborhood watches at MBTA stations and other public locales.

“We will have meetings in communities to talk about where the gaps are, and from there we will identify goals,” promised Arroyo. Arroyo and his colleagues also said they would meet with police.

Meanwhile, more money is needed for law enforcement, community centers, jobs and youth outreach in inner-city neighborhoods, say activists.

“We are not dealing with the root cause of the violence,” said Turner. “For any city to be whole and healthy, we must have an economic strategy where all members are integrated into the economy.”

Unemployment in Massachusetts as a whole is higher than in the mid-1990s, and black men are employed at lower rates than other groups.

During the boom of the mid- to late-1990s, as unemployment rates fell, clergy, police and community residents collaborated to put offenders in jail and steer other youth away from crime. This so-called “Boston Miracle” was credited with bringing homicide rates down dramatically.

The recession of 2001, however, brought fewer jobs and also led to budget cuts at the federal, state and local levels.

The cuts have translated into a reduction in services. The number of police in the city, for instance, has dropped from an estimated 2,300 in the mid-1990s to under 2,000 today.

The federal and state governments no longer provide summer job funding for teenagers, though the city and business community have picked up most of the slack.

“For the last three years or so, we have stripped young people in the city of basically every resource they can have,” said community organizer Jesus Gerena of the Hyde Square Task Force. “After-school programming has been severely cut. Community centers are generally closed in the late evenings and on weekends. If we see an increase in violence when we cut these programs, I think that speaks for itself.”

Meanwhile, the increased police presence is unlikely to stop the violence in the long term, say observers.

“It may result in a short-term lessening of violence,” said Turner. “But these officers have been brought in to create a show of force, then they will be gone.”

While some observers in communities of color see the stepped-up police presence as a positive step, others were lukewarm or even hostile to the idea.

Yancey and Sadiki Kambon, director of the Black Community Information Center, said they saw the potential for abuse by officers with state troopers and others not familiar with Boston coming in to assist.

“It’s overkill,” said Kambon following Sunday’s press conference. “Yesterday, I saw two state police motorcycles, two Boston police motorcycles and a state police cruiser pull a black man over in Grove Hall just to give him a warning.”

Boston Police representatives could not be reached for comment for this story.

 

 

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