# Boston Police Boosts Number Of Officer On Overtime



## kwflatbed (Dec 29, 2004)

*SUZANNE SMALLEY*
_The Boston Globe_










Boston police started flooding officers on overtime into the city's neighborhoods last night, in what officials are calling the most ambitious show of force in nearly two years.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino said yesterday the effort will cost the city a significant sum, but he said he wanted to make residents feel safer, whatever the cost. The mayor has been under fire as violent crime, especially shootings, has surged in Boston.

"This will be a seven-day-a-week event that we'll have police in neighborhoods," Menino said in an interview. "Public safety is our priority. . . . It'll be an increase in the budget, but we'll work those issues out. We had a $10 million overage in our budget last year."

In an interview yesterday, Police Superintendent in Chief Albert Goslin said the department will pay dozens of officers to work overtime.

"With the volume of incidents and the frequency of things . . . I'm certainly concerned," Goslin said. "Anybody who sees what's happening on a fairly regular basis and says they're not concerned wouldn't be honest."

Four people were slain in Boston this week, including a 19-year-old girl who was shot as she stood on her family's porch smoking a cigarette. By yesterday, 31 people had been slain in the city, seven more than the 24 homicides that happened by the same point last year.

Nearly 80 percent more people have been wounded by gunfire in Boston so far this year than in the same period last year, police statistics show.

Plans for the new initiative were developed in a series of meetings held by commanders at police headquarters this week, officials said

Police Superintendent Robert Dunford said in an interview yesterday that the extra officers will initially be deployed only in the city's most violent neighborhoods, where police fear that long- simmering gang feuds may spin out of control as the summer begins. As time goes on, the program will broaden to cover the entire city, Dunford said.

A major concern is retaliatory violence between rival groups of young men. Dunford said police are worried that a shooting on Heath Street in Jamaica Plain Thursday night may trigger a violent response. In a separate incident in Dorchester, three young men from a gang faction were arrested with a firearm on Wendover Street, a hot spot of back-and-forth violence between street groups in Dorchester.

Goslin said the new program is still being finalized and will not be in full swing until next week. He said it is too early to say if other agencies will be involved, but a police official with direct knowledge of the program said the State Police, MBTA Transit Police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives are expected to participate.

The new effort will be similar to Operation Neighborhood Shield, Dunford said. Police made 297 arrests, interviewed 1,907 people, and recovered 31 firearms in the first three weeks of that operation, police said.

But the effort cost the city millions. At the height of the operation during the last week of August 2004, the city paid $1.8 million in overtime to police. The operation, along with the Democratic National Convention and the Red Sox playoff series, led the Police Department to spend more than 70 percent of its $20 million annual overtime budget in the first four months of the fiscal year.

It also led to some strife with the community. Leonard Alkins, the head of the NAACP of Boston, was critical at the time of what he called "police that are being turned out into the community like storm troopers."

Dunford said police will take care to ensure that residents don't feel alienated by the intense police presence. He said he has left it to district captains to deploy the additional officers as they see fit. Captain James Claiborne, who oversees the Jamaica Plain district, will use his extra money to put officers on walking beats, Dunford said, while other captains will deploy extra plainclothes officers in anticrime cars or patrol officers in marked cruisers.

Community leaders reacted with delight yesterday to the idea of a heightened police presence.

"If they come out real full-force, like they did in 2004, I think we'll see a real decline in the violence that's going on," said the Rev. Shaun Harrison, president of Youth Crisis Ministries.

Emmett Folgert, director of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative, agreed. "There has to be a pushback on the rise in the violence," he said. "The areas where this occurs are not as big as people think, and you really can saturate those areas. . . . We've got people shooting folks in broad daylight right now. They're not going to do some of these brazen shootings if there are police officers in sight."

Menino has also pledged to add 140 police officers to the force over the next year.

Suzanne Smalley can be reached at [email protected].

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