ARCHIVES OF LEAD STORIES
August 4, 2005
Dudley residents rally against public drinking and loitering
Jeremy Schwab
With Dudley Square benefiting from a surge of new
commercial construction and building renovations, neighborhood
business owners and residents say they are fed up with the persistent
drug dealing, public drinking, urination and loitering that tarnish
the image of the square.
Last week, activists, business owners and nearby residents rallied
near the corner of Ruggles and Washington streets to demand more
social services for homeless people and more police intervention
to stop drug and alcohol abuse and other crimes.
Rally participants also expressed a common sentiment — the
petty and not-so-petty crimes that go on in the square will no
longer be tolerated.
“We’re trying to rebuild the neighborhood,”
said Brandy Cruthrid, owner of Body by Brandy Fitness Center on
Washington Street. “I can’t have kids and families
coming here and people are loitering and not getting the support
they need.”
Joyce Stanley, the director of Dudley Square Main Streets, a coalition
of business owners and residents who work on improving the square,
said police need to step up their efforts to fight non-violent
crime in the square.
“It isn’t that police won’t work with us, it’s
just right now it is not enough,” she said. “While
substance abuse and loitering are a low priority for police with
the murder rate rising, they are a high priority for the businesses,
employees and customers that come to the district daily.”
Boston Police Captain Jim Hasson said the department assigns two
beat cops to patrol Dudley Square, and defended his department’s
efforts to work with the community to fight non-violent crime.
He questioned whether activists were mad at the police for missing
the last monthly meeting of the group Dudley Pride, which brings
cops, business owners and activists together to work on improvements
to the square.
“I hope our relationship isn’t that fragile where
I miss one meeting and we have a rally,” said Hasson. “We
are in the community. It’s a true partnership. [But] we
need the information so we can act on that information. When we
walk down the street, all of a sudden people are doing things
right.”
Dudley community members also complained about the paucity of
social services to help the homeless in the neighborhood.
“We’ve been working with the mayor and the police
department, and I know it’s a funding issue,” said
Fred Fairfield, owner of the Roxbury Boys and Girls Club. “But
it isn’t right that they take people from Deer Island and
dump them in our area. There are no agencies that can come down
here and work with them.”
Buses from homeless day shelters drop off their passengers at
the Boston Medical Center each morning and homeless individuals,
many with deep roots in Roxbury, flock to Dudley Square.
The business district’s liquor stores provide many with
their first beverages of the day after they open in the morning
In recent years, Dudley Pride members called for more outreach
to connect homeless individuals with social services. However,
state and federal funding cuts have reduced budgets for a slew
of social service programs, including detoxification services.
The number of available detoxification beds in the state has dropped
from around 900 five years ago to around 500 today, according
to Bill Carrick, program director at CAB Boston Treatment Center.
Two years ago, the detoxification center A Safe Place on Marvin
Street closed after it lost funding.
Practically the only outreach being done currently is volunteer
outreach by Kathy Kim, whose father owns the shoe store Alpha
& Omega on Washington Street. Together with the state Department
of Mental Health, Kim has helped reduce vagrancy, according to
Stanley.
“People who have service needs, they help them get caseworkers,”
said Stanley. “Some people who abuse substances don’t
have the initiative to get through some of these bureaucracies.
It takes street outreach to connect them with services.”
The city has allocated $15,000 to run a three or four month pilot
street outreach program in Dudley Square, in the hopes that the
pilot can attract state funding to make the program full time.
The program, to be implemented later this year, will assess the
needs of the homeless population in the square, according to Jim
Greene, the acting director of the city’s Emergency Shelter
Commission.
“It is a way of getting some folks on the ground to realize
the need and hopefully leverage some type of longer-term solution
from the state,” he said. “Most of the street outreach
in Boston is through the state or federal funding, and we haven’t
had any new resources from the state to do street outreach.”
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