A nickel for safety
Maybe there's been a better outcome from a trip to a men's room at Fenway Park, but if that's true I don't know about it. So, I'll stick with the facts.
A couple of weeks ago, close readers may recall, I came upon a recruiting poster for the Scottsdale Police Department in a Fenway bathroom. No one's ever said my time was valuable, so I called the number.
The nice police officer in Arizona explained that they had so much money from a special city sales tax dedicated to public safety programs that they needed to look far and wide for police recruits. He admitted crime isn't exactly a problem in Scottsdale, but said residents demanded plenty of cops to keep their streets safe.
After I wrote about this, I got a call from someone who identified himself as Sam Yoon.
Yoon. Sam Yoon. I remember that name. Wasn't he the wildly popular candidate for City Council a year or two ago? But whatever happened to him after the campaign?
Ends up, he won, according to some Globe clips. And for reasons that will soon become apparent, he now gets my nod as the most intelligent member of that august body.
You see, Sam Yoon read that column and had an idea. Today, he plans to file legislation to create a special .5 percent sales tax in Boston, with all of the proceeds dedicated to public safety programs. If successful, the sales tax on goods sold in Boston would rise from 5 percent to 5.5 percent and reap, Yoon estimates, an additional $35 million a year.
Yoon's new mantra: "A nickel for public safety." In other words, for every $10 in consumer spending in Boston, there'd be a nickel tax for more police officers, prosecutors, and social programs to get potential troublemakers off the streets.
"Let's go to Downtown Crossing and ask people who come into work from out of the city, 'How much is that lunch?' " Yoon said. " '$10? Would you pay an extra nickel if you knew it would help fight violence?' That would be a no-brainer.
"If you went to the grocery store and spent $100, would you add 50 cents to fight the number one problem, violence and crime?" Yoon added. "Residents would say, 'Absolutely, if we knew what it would be spent on.' "
And therein, the genius of Yoon's proposal: knowing what it would be spent on. People could measure the impact of the nominal new tax in crime statistics. They could see it in more cops patrolling Boston's streets.
Yoon said he spent the last week pitching the idea to other councilors, with favorable results, the most important of which comes from Council President Maureen Feeney, whose neighborhood of Dorchester has been hard hit.
"I think it's really interesting," Feeney said. "Obviously, the word 'tax' sends people ballistic, but I do think it's an interesting idea in terms of designated funds where we know where they're going."
I asked the mayor, who already has his own proposal to add 1 percent to the meals tax to help defray property taxes in Boston.
"It's a more complex issue than just that," Tom Menino said of the public safety designation. "It should be a quality-of-life tax."
Well, no, but I'll work on him.
The larger obstacle would be Sal DiMasi, the Boston-based speaker of the House who would gladly throw his own constituents over the side of the ship for another cheap headline portraying him as an anti tax crusader -- and has. The state Legislature has to approve any new tax like this, even at the local level.
If this summer is as bloody as some Boston officials fear, DiMasi's going to have a problem on his hands. He can rail all he wants about the nickel, but the bet here is that commuters, diners, tourists, and other assorted visitors will not only be glad to pay for safety, they'll demand to.
From the men's room at Fenway to the council chambers in Boston City Hall. No one ever said politics was pretty.
Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com. 
