A plummeting murder rate has Boston stunned. But can it survive the summer?
When Boston city leaders decided to refocus on violence prevention last spring, they set a modest goal: reduce the homicide rate by 20 percent in three years.
No one expected what the city of 650,000 has seen so far this year: four murders, a 78 percent drop from the 18 that occurred during the same period in 2023.
Luck has played a role, the normal ebb and flow of violent crime. But the longer the silence lasted, the more pressure the city felt to hold on. When summer started with a scorching heat wave, fear increased. Will a seasonal increase in violence disrupt the supernatural calm?
“We’re not even halfway through the year and I’m getting superstitious,” Boston Police Chief Michael Cox said in a recent interview, acknowledging that he doesn’t like to talk too much about the phenomenon. “But we do so many things and hopefully it has an impact.”
The city’s leadership and police are quick to acknowledge that the remarkably low homicide rate is not solely their fault, and that there are larger forces at work. Major cities across the country saw Violent crime drops in the first quarter of this yearpart of an ongoing downward trend after an alarming spike during the pandemic.
Boston’s smaller population, compared to other large cities, helps limit the scope of violence prevention efforts. There is also a strong local base for such work, dating back to the 1990s, when academic researchers, clergy, and community leaders worked together to change so transformativethe “Boston Miracle” attracted national attention.
The city set its new goal last year when Mayor Michelle Wu encouraged law enforcement and public health officials to revive that collaborative approach. Her administration has mined historical crime data to identify 150 “micro-locations” across the city — as specific as a single intersection — where violence has flared up in the past and where custom-designed interventions could have outsized consequences.
A similarly granular approach involves reaching out to past violent offenders and survivors of violence—seen as largely overlapping groups—to find out what they need to stay out of trouble. Some ask for transfers to other public housing, away from conflicts that fuel violence. Others need food, clothing, or health care, or help obtaining GEDs or skills training to prepare them for work.
“Boston is a place where 40 percent of violent crime happens on 4 percent of the city streets, and a very small number of people create a significant portion of the violence,” said Isaac Yablo, the mayor’s 29-year-old senior adviser for community safety. “So if you get to know the people, you’ll eventually get to know the people involved.”
The goal, pursued through neighborhood outreach and weekly meetings where 15 community organizations and city departments share ideas and updates about some of the hundreds of people on their radar, is to engage “100 percent of the individuals most likely to shoot or be shot,” Mr. Yablo said.
Previous efforts to identify those most likely to be involved in crime have raised concerns about racial profiling and a lack of transparency. Ms. Wu, in her former role as a city councilwoman, raised such questions about a gang database maintained by the Boston Regional Intelligence Center and used by the city’s police department. As a result, some changes were made to the database, including the removal of more than 2,000 names, but Criticism of its use has continued.
Some intelligence and analysis from the center is being used in the city’s latest effort to contain the violence, but leaders of the effort say their approach goes well beyond policing, prioritizing public health and basic needs over sorting and keeping an eye on gangs.
Thomas Abt, the founder of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland, who has worked with Boston on its techniques over the past year, acknowledged legitimate national concerns about over-policing but described Boston’s strategy as practical.
“They’re carefully identifying people who they should spend more time on, based on past behavior,” he said. “That’s just smart policy.”
Boston’s homicide rate was already low. The city had 70 killings in 2010 and 56 in 2020, up from 37 last year. Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum and a former Boston police aide, said the city’s police department has become exceptionally adept at deflecting potential retaliation after violent incidents, a tactic he said “is in their DNA at this point.”
Other experts emphasized that several factors other than police help quell urban violence: Massachusetts’ strict gun laws; the significant number of new immigrants, linked by researchers to lower crime rates and top-rated hospitals that excel at rescuing shooting victims.
“It’s not just one thing, it’s a whole set of circumstances,” said Jacob Stowell, a criminology professor at Northeastern University who studies patterns of violence. “The reasons are elusive but fascinating, and it is worth trying to capture and perpetuate them.”
Sandra Susan Smith, professor of criminal justice at Harvard’s Kennedy School who has documented racial disparities in policing in Bostonpraised the city for investing in community organizations — a move increasingly linked to lower crime rates — and said microtargeting of locations and people “is not, by definition, racial profiling, if applied in the manner police describe.”
Still, she warned that attention must also be paid to other ongoing police actions to ensure racial disparities elsewhere are not overlooked.
Earlier in her term, Ms Wu, 39, was criticized for her approach to crime. After the city saw seven murders in the first two months of 2023some found fault with what they saw as a muted response.
Since then, the mayor has built closer relationships with police leadership and assisted in negotiations a new five-year police contract with annual raises of 4 percent and new restrictions on the use of arbitration to overturn officer discipline. She has also opposed the City Council’s recent proposed cuts to public safety funding.
In an interview last month, Ms. Wu described violence prevention as “something you have to work on with the same intensity every day of the year, not just after an incident, when there is pressure to respond.”
However, summer is often a season of increasing violence in Boston, with 30 percent of annual murders, on average, occurring in June, July and August. On May 21, Ms. Wu announced her summer safety plan, including a revamped system to connect youth to jobs, neighborhood mental health services, and funding for block parties and other social events aimed at strengthening ties between neighbors and displacing drug use or fighting in shared outdoor spaces.
Ten days later, the city was rocked by its fourth murder of the year, a killing that was particularly disturbing because officials said the murdered woman was not an “intended target.”
It was a reminder of how fragile peace could be. But even in such moments, Mr. Abbot said, “You execute the plan, you stay the course.”
Some of the progress is the result of long-term police work in high-risk areas. In February, after a two-year investigation into gang activity that originated in a public housing project, federal prosecutors charged more than 40 members of Boston’s Heath Street Gang with extortion conspiracy, drug trafficking and other crimes.
After the raid, police officers and council workers contacted younger residents who had been on the fringes of the gang activity. They asked them to help them find work, education or other help for themselves or their families.
“We want to fill that void before another gang comes along to fill it,” Commissioner Cox said.
City teams also ask residents of at-risk neighborhoods what they think would help reduce crime. Some requests are simple, like more lighting or speed bumps. More complex interventions, aimed at helping residents reclaim neighborhood spaces, are funded with $100,000 in small grants.
Last summer, a $5,000 city grant allowed residents of a public housing complex in the Charlestown neighborhood to host a dance program three nights a week near the basketball court, a popular spot where residents had felt less safe in recent years. A 15-year-old boy was injured in a brutal midday shooting there in 2022.
Organizers from the Kennedy Center, a social service organization with a 60-year history in the neighborhood, recruited a local mother to teach hip-hop classes for girls and found others to lead classes in Haitian folk dance and salsa.
“You saw people coming out of the house, looking at it and thinking, ‘OK, I don’t have to worry about it for this hour,’” said Crystal Galvin, director of community services at the Kennedy Center, who plans to teach dance classes again this summer.
Ms. Wu raised the bar last month and launched the first “Plan to end violence” — a quest that sounds less absurd today than it did a year ago.
“When the goal is to reduce violence, or respond better to it, it subconsciously sends the message that there’s not much you can do,” Mr. Yablo said. “This strategy is, prevent it.”
