Police struggle with shrinking force, resources

Fourth in a series of occasional articles examining the mayor's performance on major issues during his 12 years in office.

Seven years after Mayor Thomas M. Menino earned international acclaim for dramatically reducing violent crime in Boston, homicides are again on the rise, and police are struggling to bring criminals to justice.

Although violent crime remains well below the levels of a decade ago -- and residents and visitors see Boston as one of the nation's safest cities -- there are underlying problems in public safety that both the police and neighborhood leaders acknowledge.

Basic police services, for example, have been markedly reduced since the late 1990s, as labor costs have surged. The number of homicides has roughly doubled since 1999. And a thinned patrol force and a diminished pool of detectives arrest or identify suspects in fewer than a quarter of serious crimes reported in the city.

In addition, Boston police are taking longer to respond to 911 calls than they were five years ago. As a result, residents of neighborhoods beset with crime are feeling endangered, say some community leaders.

''I've gotten complaints from neighborhood groups that when they call 911 and say shots are fired they're not getting a response," said Jorge Martinez, director of the Grove Hall community group Project RIGHT, which works with citizens and police to stamp out crime and improve quality of life in Roxbury. ''We've really worked well together, and to have it revert back to what it was would be a real shame."

With police resources constrained, serious crimes, including homicides, are going unsolved. The clearance rate for homicides, the percentage of cases in which police arrest or identify a suspect, has plunged since the mid-1990s. Between 1994 and 2003, the overall homicide clearance rate was 53 percent. Last year, police cleared only 28 percent of homicides.

The homicide clearance rate stands at 35 percent for the first seven months of this year. During the same period, only 23 percent of all major crimes -- which, in addition to homicide, includes rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft -- were cleared.

Menino said that despite the decline in police service and reduced resources for law enforcement, Boston remains safe.

''We're doing a good job on public safety," he said in an interview. ''I think people feel safer than they did in the past."

In Menino's 12th year in office, Boston's violent crime rate remains far lower than that of many major American cities. But in recent years, Boston has not shared the continued dramatic reductions in violent crime seen in New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington.

Police officials acknowledge they are concerned, but say they have learned how to maximize their limited resources.

''It's a concern to be going through a cycle of violence like we are . . . and adding in that we're down so many officers is really stretching us," police Superintendent Paul Joyce said in an interview. ''It's tough budgetary times for the department and the city, but the standards [for public safety] remain the same."

Part of the reason for the decrease in the number of patrol officers on the street -- from 1,466 five years ago to 1,283 today -- lies with the state and federal governments. Justice Department grants that enabled Boston to hire hundreds of police officers in the mid-1990s were eliminated in 1998, and state funding has also declined.

At the same time, a series of concessions to politically powerful police unions means that the city is spending almost twice as much to staff the department as it was a decade ago. In 1993, Menino's first year in office, 1,918 total officers cost taxpayers $114 million. Last year, 1,979 total officers came with a $199 million price tag. In 2000, the department had 2,159 officers, costing $178 million.

Private sector salaries have risen 40 percent in the Northeast since June 1994, according to US Department of Labor statistics. Since July of that year, when the mayor's first full fiscal year began, spending on police salaries in Boston has risen by 69 percent.

Menino said he needs more in direct aid from the state and federal governments. ''We lost $80 million in the past seven years in local aid from the state," Menino said. ''We're out there trying to fight for additional revenues for our city all the time."

In perhaps the most basic measure of police performance, response times, the Boston Police Department is not meeting the standard it once did: The median time for police operators to dispatch officers in 2000 was two minutes. Now, it takes four.

Five years ago it took a median of 10 minutes for officers to arrive on the scene after a 911 call and 44 minutes to conclude the officers' response. Today, it takes 13 minutes to arrive and 60 to finish.

Police have not fallen as far behind when called to respond to serious crimes. It now takes officers a median of eight minutes to arrive on scene of priority one calls, those involving potentially violent or life-threatening incidents, compared with seven minutes five years ago.

Police Superintendent Robert Dunford said he is trying to improve response time. Police officials say it takes longer to clear responses to 911 calls because arrests take longer to process. Police also said the force's resources are being spread thin because they are receiving more 911 calls than in the recent past.

But a Police Department's survey, conducted in 2003 by a market research firm retained by the department, indicates that citizens are not satisfied with the level of police presence in their neighborhoods. In the survey of city residents released in January, 47 percent of the respondents reported seeing a police officer in their neighborhood daily, a 7 percent decrease from 2001.

''Many fewer community policing-related activities, such as walking or riding a bicycle through a neighborhood, were reported by residents in 2003," according to the survey. ''Since 1997, a gradual decline in the portion of residents knowing officers on a personal level has been recorded."

A centerpiece of the city's highly touted community policing model, the crime-watch program, has been cut from six employees in 2003 to four and needs to be better managed, according to a consultant recently retained by police Commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole.

When Menino took office in 1993, the Police Department employed 100 walking beat officers. Today, there is no set number of officers working on foot patrols. Department officials said they still order officers to walk through neighborhoods, but couldn't say how many officers on average are assigned the job. The department added a bicycle squad to handle the traditional increases in crime during the summer.

Department officials say that community policing is more than bicycles and foot patrols.

''Community policing is not a walking beat, and it's not a bicycle beat; it's the way the Police Department works with the community publicly and privately to address and solve problems," Dunford said. ''The mission is reduction of crime and service of people."

Even as the city struggles in some public-safety areas, the overall community policing model that garnered Boston international praise in the late 1990s is still considered effective by department officials and community leaders.

About 70 Boston police officers work as community service officers, attending crime-watch meetings and listening to citizens' concerns about everything from vehicles with loud mufflers to violent crime.

At one such meeting held recently on Day Street in Jamaica Plain, police Sergeant Richard Houston distributed a list of the locations and dates of recent crimes in the neighborhood. Residents asked about several incidents, including a stabbing and a recent assault.

The assault was not a random crime, but rather a fight between people who ''all knew each other," Houston assured a resident who was especially worried because of the crime's proximity. The weapon used in the fight ''could have been a stick," he said.

Residents at the meeting said they are happy with the attention police pay to their concerns and said the neighborhood they once were afraid to walk in after dark now feels safe.

''Back in the early '90s when the first crime watch was started, you couldn't have a meeting like this because it was too dangerous; that's how far we've come," said Marcus DeFlorimonte, a member of the Day Street Crime Watch group who worked on neighborhood safety issues under the administration of Mayor Raymond L. Flynn in the early 1990s.

''Your neighborhood doesn't change unless there's a partnership with the police," said DeFlorimonte, a real estate developer.

In 1993, the year Menino took over as acting mayor, 98 people were murdered in Boston. Twenty-two of the 98 murder victims that year were under age 19.

In his 1994 inaugural address, Menino pledged to ''stop the murder of our children." He said he would expand community policing to do it.

In the late 1990s, Boston's murder rate plummeted. The 31 homicides in Boston in 1999 was the lowest total since 1961, when 26 people were slain in the city. Homicides had declined an astonishing 80 percent from Boston's bloodiest year, 1990, when 152 people were slain. In a June 1998 cover story, Newsweek magazine highlighted Boston's success as a model for cities nationally, reporting that as a result of the partnership between police, clergy, and the community ''juvenile crime here has fallen dramatically."

Other cities aspired to match the crime-fighting ideal represented by what was called ''the Boston Miracle." One widely emulated program was Operation Ceasefire, which sought to reduce gun crime by telling gang members that violence committed by any of them would result in a crackdown on all of them.

Shortly after Ceasefire launched in 1996, Boston's homicide rate plunged. An average of 45 people age 24 and under were killed each year from 1992 through mid-1996, before dropping to about 15 a year.

Joyce said the city is exploring new tactics, but said the philosophy underlying Operation Ceasefire still exists, because community leaders and city and state agencies continue to work together to reach high-risk youths.

The 51 killings in Boston this year, nine of them of victims under the age of 19, represent a significant increase from the historic lows of the late 1990s. But Boston is still a far safer city than it was during the years of bloodshed before Menino took office.

''Police know when crime starts to go up, and they just flood those areas and it works," said Emmett Folgert, director of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative, a nonprofit community-based agency working with teenagers. ''I was here in the mid '90s. It's better. In the mid-'90s the murder rate was almost triple what it is now. . . . We definitely have made great progress."

The community partnerships forged in Boston in the last decade still work, police say, and without them, crime would be much worse.

Police officials hail the Boston Reentry Initiative, which matches clergy, youth workers, and police with juveniles and adults leaving the prison system to offer counseling, job leads, and friendship. Joyce could not provide statistics indicating how many of the people in the program have committed more crimes, but he estimated that about two-thirds have not committed new offenses as serious as those on their criminal records.

Officials also tout Operation Homefront. Under the program, started in 1998 by the department's gang unit, police visit high-risk minors at home to build relationships with their families. Police said they have made about 365 visits to youths' homes since the beginning of this year.

Menino faults the federal government for slashing public safety aid to cities, even as it spends billions to fight terrorism.

''The federal government has to realize that we also need officers on the streets of American cities," Menino said. He noted that the elimination of federal funds for hiring officers has resulted in nearly 300 fewer police in Boston this year than in 2000.

''There's no simple answer to the problem" of crime, Menino said, ''but I think we do it better than most."

Previous articles in this series appeared on May 22, Aug. 2, and Aug. 31. The ''Menino's Record" series can be found at www.boston.com/news/specials.Suzanne Smalley can be reached at ssmalley@globe.com.