BOSTON — The Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association held a closed-door meeting Wednesday night to bring city and state stakeholders together to discuss the safety issues plaguing the city’s downtown and Boston Common area.
Following the meeting, Rishi Shukla, an organizer of the event and co-founder of the Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association, said it was productive, and we’ll start to see changes being implemented, specifically with law enforcement, as soon as this week.
“It’s not easy when you see homicide red tape on the way to camp, that’s not a pleasant conversation to have with your kids,” Shukla said.
Though he couldn’t get into specific details for safety reasons, he said a number of changes have been initiated.
“Operations, pivots, Transit Police, Boston Police, Suffolk University Police, Emerson College Police, private security is being enhanced as well throughout the district,” Shukla said.
Shukla said they’re also working with property owners to enforce no trespassing signage as well as implementing overnight security details.
But Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn said there’s a bigger policing issue that needs to be addressed: staffing.
“We’re probably short five or six hundred officers. Officers are consistently working 16 hours a day,” Flynn said.
Flynn said it’s unacceptable, and it comes at a time when he believes more officers are needed in specific areas like Downtown and Chinatown. He along with others at the meeting support a zero-tolerance policy for criminal activity.
“It’s not enough to wait for us to get back to school, for these kids to go back to school and have the problem go away, we need to address this now,” Ryan Kearney, general counsel for the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, said.
Kearney said he supports greater enforcement of holding people accountable for the crimes being committed.
“When we’re talking about juveniles that are plaguing the area, causing property damage, sexual assaults they’re being accused of, that’s no longer kids being kids, that’s something we need to start treating as the adult crimes that they are,” Kearney said.
Which is why Shukla said they’re all coming together, doing everything they can to take action now to stop the problem before it gets worse.
“If you ask residents randomly over the next two, three, four weeks do you feel more safe than you did today, I hope the answer is yes,” Shukla said.
The group now has another meeting scheduled for January to get ahead of the issues of crime they typically see during the spring and summer months.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
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