An earful for Patrick
Deval Patrick's signature slogan - "Together we can" - has been mocked before, but perhaps never as bitterly as yesterday.
Standing in a light drizzle in the spot where her son was gunned down last week, Kim Odom said Patrick has not done nearly enough to address the kind of crime that took the life of her 13-year-old son, Steven.
She rattled off a list of dignitaries who have come to call - Mayor Thomas M. Menino, Police Commissioner Edward Davis, state Senator Dianne Wilkerson - and asked for a meeting with one person who was conspicuously absent, Patrick.
"What is your office doing to end this hurt across the Commonwealth?" Odom asked. "In your infamous words, 'Together we can.' "
Within hours, the governor was on a damage-control mission to Dorchester.
Odom rightly took issue with a television report that said her son was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she said the public would have been outraged if such a slaying had occurred in a suburb. Steven Odom was around the corner from his house, living his life. And, in fact, plenty of people are outraged by yet another senseless killing.
No governor could have prevented Odom's death. But this salvo had been brewing for a while, the result of a growing discontent that Patrick has not done enough to stem violent crime.
Wisely intent on refusing to be drawn into a controversy with a grieving family, the Patrick administration had little to say yesterday. His office did, however, assemble a list of budget initiatives that it said addressed some of the issues Odom raised. They included $1.3 million for summer jobs, $11 million for antigang Shannon grants, and $5.5 million to put more police on the streets. Of this, $4.75 million was earmarked for Boston, a state official said.
Patrick joins a long list of politicians accused of dragging their feet on crime. Activist Lew Finfer recalled a headline from a shooting of perhaps 15 years ago that read: "Parents quail, activists denounce, officials huddle." Years of promises have not been enough to stem the tide of street violence.
"We reel from event to event," Finfer said. "We're not able as a state and a larger community to come up with an agenda that would keep this from happening again and again."
Yet this is not simply an issue of dollars and cents. Just as there is symbolic significance in having a black governor, so does it mean something when he is accused of not doing enough, of not caring enough about the violence threatening African-American youth.
Patrick's landslide victory stemmed, in part, from the hope he brought to places like Roxbury and Dorchester.
"It's not the governor alone that can change this," Finfer said. "But there's an expectation that he might do more, where you never had that feeling about Romney or Cellucci or Weld."
Without question, Patrick erred in not seeing the Odoms sooner. He might have, for instance, attended their son's funeral. Friends say he doesn't like going places just to be seen there. But that hasn't kept Patrick from going to funerals for Massachusetts soldiers killed in Iraq, which he has attended regularly. The perception that urban crime is not a priority should be unacceptable to him, though he seems utterly tone-deaf to it.
Odom called for stricter gun laws, year-round jobs, and reform of the Criminal Offender Record Information law. All are worthy ideas that have been pushed repeatedly. Supposedly, the administration is in the late stages of putting together a records law proposal, and some of her other suggestions are in various stages of legislative limbo. None of these are likely to be acted on right away, notwithstanding the frustration of activists, some of whom used Odom as their spokeswoman yesterday.
Consistently, Patrick's toughest criticism, not all of it fair, has come from people with whom he fundamentally agrees. But a community united in grief is tired of hearing that things take time. Being a savior is a tough business.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.
