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Wu announces the city’s summer safety plan
“We know that safety is just as much about the proactive presence of community and resources, stability and opportunity.”
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, along with city officials, on Tuesday announced the city’s summer safety plan, which she said focuses on prioritizing public health and proactively creating opportunities for residents alongside deterring crime.
“We know that safety is just as much about the proactive presence of community and resources, stability and opportunity,” Wu said.
In Boston, she said, the goal is for “safety” to mean “a sense of belonging, excitement, connection, and community where you know you can go out and into part of your city and it is your home.”
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Weekly meetings are held year-round to coordinate the approach to violence prevention across city departments and in collaboration with community groups and other organizations, Wu said.
“The work of community safety is also community healing,” Wu said. “And that means ensuring that every member of our community is supported and whole.”
During a press conference in Dorchester Tuesday, officials stressed that the city’s “Plan for a Safe, Healthy, and Active Summer” focuses on a range of strategies including prevention, intervention, recovery, reinvestment, community-building, and empowerment. As part of the plan, which was developed with input from community leaders and neighborhood residents, the mayor’s Community Safety Team will be transitioned to the Boston Public Health Commission’s Office of Violence Prevention.
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The Cummings Foundation is also donating $1 million to support expanding violence prevention efforts in Boston. According to the city, the donation will go toward supporting city efforts like block parties, Boston after Dark, which provides free events for teens on Friday nights, and summer job opportunities for teens, among other year-round violence prevention efforts.
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New this year, the mayor’s office said the summer safety plan also focuses on creating “targeted opportunities for previously underserved groups, including young women.”
“Preventing violence is a year round priority, but we have short term work to do and have summer-specific challenges to strategize around,” Isaac Yablo, senior advisor for Community Safety and director of the Office of Violence Prevention, said in a statement. “This is why we worked hand-in-hand with the community to build this cross-departmental, data-driven, evidence-informed, humanity-centered plan that is truly, ‘for community, by community.'”
Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox stressed Tuesday that the department “can’t provide public safety without trust” of its community and pledged that officers are working every day to build and keep up trust through the summer. According to the city, police will continue working closely with other departments to “identify and focus violence reduction efforts in opportunity zones, areas that have historically experienced a higher rate of violence.”
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The department will also coordinate with other agencies to address “large-scale disturbances with a safe, preventative approach” with the aim of improving quality of life in the city’s neighborhoods.
The warmer months, Cox noted, present a challenge to public safety because of the higher temperatures, longer days, and increased number of people visiting the city.
“People are out and about and because there is more interaction with folks, sometimes these interactions lead to skirmishes and things of that nature,” Cox said. “We ask for the public’s support — and this is pretty important — if you’re out and about and there’s something that happens to you, you see something that may happen, please call us and get us involved. Because that is our responsibility — to prevent something that may occur.”
According to The Boston Globe, 43 people have been shot in the city so far this year, with eight of those incidents resulting in the death of a shooting victim. That number includes an incident Tuesday involving a man who, while apparently experiencing a mental health crisis, allegedly took a police officer’s gun near Mass. General Hospital and shot himself in the foot. By late May last year, 29 people had been shot, including four fatally, according to the Globe.
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