Summit targets gun crimes, intimidation

Boston's top law enforcement officials emerged yesterday from an emergency summit meeting called by Mayor Thomas M. Menino, vowing to take tougher measures to stem a rise in homicides, shootings, and other violent crime.

Police Commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole said she is ordering officers in the next several days to sweep every neighborhood in the city and arrest people with outstanding warrants. Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said he plans to start new court sessions that will focus on gun crimes. Menino said he wants to halt the sale of ''Stop Snitching" T-shirts.

''We're going to go into every retail store that sells them, and we're going to take them off the shelves," he told a phalanx of reporters waiting outside his City Hall office after the hour-long meeting.

But the mayor said he is not allocating any more money for the efforts or pledging to hire more police officers, saying the city cannot afford to do so. The warrant sweeps could further stretch the Police Department, which is already down some 200 officers in recent years.

Officials said that patrol officers will be used for the sweeps and that other city employees will also have to turn their attention to crime-fighting efforts.

''When it comes to resources, we're thin," Menino said, referring to state and federal budget cuts in recent years.

The number of shootings in Boston so far this year is up 34 percent over the same period last year, O'Toole said yesterday. The homicide count, 66 so far this year, has already tied a 10-year high. Police have arrested or identified suspects in only 20 of this year's homicides, the lowest rate in at least a decade.

After gunfire erupted Monday near a Dorchester school playground as fifth-grade pupils were going outside for recess, the mayor summoned nearly a dozen top officials to his office yesterday.

Among those in attendance were the city's public health commissioner, the chief of policy and planning, and the heads of the Human Services Department and the city's Centers for Youth & Families.

''The mood was very serious," said one participant who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was private. ''He wanted an answer."

Officials attributed the surge in violence to an abundance of guns flowing into the city, the slow pace of gun-crime trials, a shortage of police officers, and a growing gang problem fueled in part by a recent increase in the juvenile population.

The police commissioner said her department has identified about 100 ''loosely organized" gangs in Boston. ''They're killing each other over ridiculous things," O'Toole said in an interview.

As for solving crimes, officials laid part of the blame on witness intimidation. The ''Stop Snitching" shirts that have popped up recently, worn by some even in courtrooms, have worsened a culture in which some residents fear helping law enforcement, officials said.

''One of the things I hope the community can really help us with, especially the faith-based, is taking on this whole culture of no snitching, retaliation, because that's the thing the police can't change," the commissioner said.

The mayor said he also plans to ask public relations firms to donate their services in a massive campaign to help counteract that culture.

The Suffolk district attorney said judges often set low bail amounts for gun-crime defendants. Because such trials often aren't scheduled for a year or more, defendants are on the streets, committing more crimes, Conley said. He has asked state judicial officials to institute special gun-trial sessions at courthouses in Boston that, if they agree, could begin early next year.

''When you talk to people, good people, in the community, what is very frustrating to them is a defendant is arrested, let's say Jan. 1, and he's still walking around the following Jan. 1," Conley said. ''This would provide swift and certain justice."

Some community leaders welcomed the new focus on crime-fighting at City Hall and plan to offer ideas of their own.

Christopher Sumner, executive director of the Ten Point Coalition, and the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, cofounder of the coalition and minister at Union Baptist Church, want the mayor to to restart programs that helped stem crime in the 1990s, including a city-sponsored youth basketball league, police training of clergy for dealing with high-risk teenagers, and support groups for young people in crisis.

''I think we are at a crossroads right now," Brown said.

Former Boston police commissioner William J. Bratton, who was in town yesterday for a gang violence conference, said the city should invest the money to bring the number of police officers back up to the levels of the 1990s, when he said there were about 2,300.

O'Toole said that she hopes to get more officers on the street, but that in the meantime, she's prepared to do more with less. The overall police force numbers about 2,100, and the patrol force has dipped to about 1,300 from about 1,500 five years ago.

Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com. Suzanne Smalley can be reached at ssmalley@globe.com.