I think Boston police chief Ed Davis likes community policing
I spent the evening at a RealTalk discussion held by MassINC with recently appointed Boston police chief at the Jurys hotel. The talk opened up with a moderated fire-side chat which was followed by a traditional Q&A with the audience. 90 people had registered for the meeting but I don’t there were more than 40 or maybe 50 people in attendance.
Before taking over in Boston, Davis was the police chief in Lowell. The obvious difference between Lowell and Boston is of course scale. The media scrutiny is more intense, explained the chief, and the level of violence much higher (even adjusting for the difference in population size, Boston has about two to three times as many murders a year as Lowell). But the chief claims to enjoy an “incredible internal acceptance” and an eagerness among the department’s officers to try new programs.
Davis said he’s spent much of his first two months on the job meeting with many different community groups, church groups, crime watch groups, and other civic actors, big and small (he somewhat awkwardly said he’d met with “everybody,” but I’m guessing most people in the room had never seen him before).
Chief Davis’s main message was that he believes in community policing, and he is going to push the Boston Police Department to adopt community policing tactics. Davis’s definition of community policing can fairly be described, I think, as proactive crime prevention through visible presence in a community and open communications with its members, as well as close cooperation with city agencies (but I’m not quoting, so don’t hold my description against your boss hog if you’re a Hub cop). He gave two examples of city agencies helping the police. One is using building inspectors to close buildings with high levels of crime and the other was the city’s graffiti-cleaning crew.
A lot of good questions were asked during the Q&A session and the chief did a pretty admirable job answering most of them, but I think he fumbled a question from an Allston-Brighton Crime Watch organizer who wondered how community policing might work in a neighborhood where many residents are transient and have little stake in the community (the Allston and Brighton neighborhoods are home to thousands of students, mainly from Boston College and Boston University). Davis’ answer focused on the importance of dorm residents to keep doors locked, and on co-eds to not get date-raped and other issues that are specific to college students but not directly central to the issue of a neighborhood with a transient population. I suspect the chief slipped into stump-speech mode, so to speak, and pulled out the campus crime talking points. Quite understandable considering his demanding schedule (light-hearted side note: Much like WRKO talk-show host Howie Carr is incapable of pronouncing “collapse” correctly, Davis kept referring to transient residents as “trangent”).
When asked about youth crime Davis responded that “we are swimming upstream” against a culture that glorifies gangs, gang culture, and gun possession. He expressed a wish that pop-culture producers would think about the images they put and the effect of those images on kids. He also said that kids now show off guns the way they used to show off cellphones (not sure whether he meant that literally or more figuratively). He acknowledged that people in Arizona debate guns differently than people in Boston but expressed hope that a common sense solution could be reached (judging from other comments he made throughout the evening strongly suggests he wants stricter federal gun laws).
A Boston public school teacher in the audience asked Davis to institute community policing throughout the schools and said that kids are becoming increasingly unwilling to talk about or report crime. Davis briefly explained how he hopes to use the department’s nine officers assigned to schools along with the city’s school police officers to turn the tide. He specifically mentioned that he wants the department officers assigned to schools to work in their uniforms rather than plain-clothes, as they apparently have been, as he thinks it’s “critical the kids learn to respect the uniform.” He also mentioned that keeping kids in school later in the day, not longer but later, would reduce crime.
One man in the audience asked the chief if he has an opinion about some strange non-police police force that the Brits introduced a couple of years ago or so. Davis, who mentioned that he had been in London when they launched the system there, didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic about it. One really can’t talk about policing in Chavistan without talking cameras, and Davis seemed rather upbeat about extensive use of surveillance cameras (it should be noted, however, that the way he described using them differs quite a bit from Britain’s system, which literally is an always-on Big Brother system with almost unlimited reach (bored control-room monitors have been caught zooming in on people having sex in their bedrooms). I personally don’t find anything about British policing particularly appealing, but I have seen Swedish casuals of different stripes mention on message boards that British cops are more courteous and easy-going than Swedish police.
All in all, Davis strikes me as a pretty promising police chief, but his department is facing several internal and external challenges.
