Police expand homicide squad

Boston police officials said yesterday they are beefing up the department's homicide unit to help reverse a precipitous decline in the number of homicide arrests, a case clearance rate this year that is the lowest in at least a decade.

While the city is well on its way to setting a 10-year high in homicides, the department has cleared 38 percent of its 60 cases so far by making arrests, issuing warrants, or identifying suspects. The clearance rate was 64 percent last year and 53 percent overall from 1994 through last year.

Deputy Superintendent Daniel Coleman said yesterday that he is talking to Police Commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole about adding detectives to the unit's staff of 18 investigators, as well as enhancing computer technology that will make it easier to integrate information gathered by the homicide, drug, and gang units.

''The idea is to improve some of these things," Coleman said. ''We're not going to stay stagnant and status quo."

Coleman said that the homicide unit has already added three investigators and one supervisor and become more diverse since he took command in April. The unit now has investigators who speak Spanish and who are more familiar with Boston's high-crime areas, he said.

The homicide unit, which is already dealing with 21 more cases this year than last, is small, compared to those in other cities of Boston's population, Coleman acknowledged. But he said Boston's department is structured differently than most, relying on detectives in districts and the youth violence and drug units to help homicide detectives.

''It's just the way we do things," Coleman said.

Baltimore, a city comparable in size to Boston and where 271 people have been slain so far this year, has 80 homicide detectives and supervisors.

Coleman said that witness intimidation is among the problems facing Boston homicide detectives.

That is not just a problem in Boston. In Chicago, where the homicide clearance rate has risen from 40 percent last year to 48 percent so far this year, police are trying a new approach to get witnesses to cooperate.

''One thing we're doing is, for gang-related shootings that happen in areas of open-air drug markets, we'll have narcotics detectives go out and do buy busts and then interview the people we've arrested to see if they know anything about the homicide," said David Bayless, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department. ''If someone's shot at 31st and California, odds are a person at 32d and California knows about it. We could always use more community help."

Bayless also said that overburdened homicide detectives have smaller caseloads this year, because Chicago's homicide rate has plummeted from 585 last year to 431 so far this year.

Cliff Karchmer -- director of program development at the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit research organization -- said that Boston's problem with clearing homicide cases is not atypical.

''Thirty-eight percent in the middle of a gang war and gang retaliatory violence is not really unusual," Karchmer said. ''The District [of Columbia] went through it. Recently, other jurisdictions like Kansas City and Minneapolis went through it."

Karchmer, who coordinated criminal justice planning in Massachusetts during the Dukakis administration, said that cities with street violence and gang problems are often not equipped to protect witnesses who live in the hardest-hit neighborhoods.

In Baltimore, witness protection has reached a crisis point. Criminals have begun producing DVDs warning witnesses who cooperate with police that they will be killed.

''We are at the point where our witnesses are going underground: They back off on the stand, and they're getting killed," said Margaret Burns, a spokeswoman for the Baltimore state's attorney.

The Suffolk district attorney's office, which handles Boston homicides, is pushing for a state witness protection program.

David Meier, the assistant district attorney in charge of homicide prosecution, said that the decline in the clearance rate here is not as important as making cases that will lead to a conviction.

But that is small consolation to the families of homicide victims, who are waiting for justice.

''They need to have more people to work with them in their case, investigating their case, and they need people out in the community to help them more," said Bobbie Gaines, the mother of 23-year-old William ''Biggie" Gaines, who was shot in the head at point-blank range by a man riding a bicycle in Ramsay Park in Roxbury on July 25.

Gaines said she feels that police are doing all they can to solve her son's killing. ''Whenever they catch the person who did that to my son, it's not going to bring him back, but it will make a little closure to it," she said.

Globe correspondent Stephanie Vosk contributed to this report. Suzanne Smalley can be reached at ssmalley@globe.com.