Thursday, 4:30 PM
Boston's beat is back
By Christine McConville and Suzanne Smalley
Globe Staff
Boston is bringing back the cop on the beat, an age-old crime-fighting strategy Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis used with great success in Lowell.
Starting Saturday evening, 18 police officers in three city neighborhoods will be spending their entire shifts walking their beats.
‘‘They will be out on the streets, highly visible, solving problems and preventing crime,’’ Davis said of the patrol officers who will launch the Safe Street initiative Saturday afternoon.
The plan calls for three teams of six uniformed patrol officers each to spend their shifts in three neighborhoods: Grove Hall in Roxbury, Bowdoin Street and Geneva Avenue in Dorchester, and in Downtown Crossing. Davis said he plans to add foot patrols to other neighborhoods with each graduating police academy class.
Community activists applauded the initiative, as a positive step toward combating the violence that has washed over the city in the past few years.
‘‘Cool,’’ said Jorge Martinez, a community activist from Grove Hall, about the foot patrol announcement.
‘‘There’s a lot of panhandling, public drinking and other negative activity,’’ he said. ‘‘Having a walking beat will clean up this part of Grove Hall.’’
The Boston Police Department, founded in 1635, has long relied on officers to patrol the neighborhoods. But foot patrols began declining in the 1950s, as the department began putting many of its officers in cruisers, in large part to improve response time.
In December, Davis began his post in Boston after 12 years at the head of the Lowell Police Department. During his tenure there as chief, from 1994 to 2006, violent crime went down by 62 percent, in large part because there were more officers on neighborhood beats.
Within weeks of his arrival in Boston, Davis gave the city a glimpse of what was to come.
When crime spiked in the Back Bay during the holiday shopping season, he doubled the number of patrol officers on downtown streets. He also ordered members of specialized drug and gang units to wear uniforms instead of plain clothes.
On Friday, he announced the new walking beats and explained how they would be organized.
A police sergeant will direct each team and determine the boundaries of the beats, but each team will cover at least several city blocks, Davis said.
Davis plans to appoint permanent members to the teams in the next week or two.
Davida Andelman, chairwoman of the Greater Bowdoin-Geneva Neighborhood Association, said she’s looking forward to those permanent teams.
‘‘[We need] relationships between police and people in the community,’’ she said. ‘‘If you have a relationship, there’s a greater tendency for cooperation, collaboration, and ultimately resolution to these acts of violence.’’
