Mayor for a New America

by Thomas M. Menino

  —from the “Boston Police Department’s Strategic Planning Process: Phase One, Final Report”

  “Now we’re going into the neighborhoods, meeting with residents and making them feel like they have a part in the crime issue,” I told USA Today in 1996. We asked people to take responsibility for their neighborhoods—for each other—and they stepped up.

  To draw attention to a spike in nighttime disorder in the Back Bay, neighbors held a camp-out in a park. Jamaica Plain residents requested that one team meeting a month be conducted in Spanish to allow their Spanish-speaking neighbors to attend. Because meetings were held after work, some folks didn’t have time for supper. So those who could brought potluck dishes to meetings and fed their neighbors.

  There was pushback from civilians. Under 911 policing, you reported something stolen from your house, within a few hours a cop would be at your door. Under the new strategy, if the officer assigned to your neighborhood was on vacation, you might wait several days.

  There was pushback from the police. “This isn’t why I became a cop. If I wanted to become a social worker, I wouldn’t have gone through the academy.” That view was out there.

  The department figured that young cops would adapt to the new strategy easier than old-timers, but some veteran cops liked its back-to-the-future flavor. “I’ve been on the job for 32 years now,” said one. “I came on the job when cops did what we’re trying to get back to doing. I believe in this neighborhood policing. . . . It gives people a sense of safety, of control. They can approach us, we’re a sounding board. If you take care of the little things the bigger things take care of themselves.”

  That veteran was among the first cops to practice neighborhood policing. He and his partner worked a pilot program in Roxbury’s Academy Homes. They befriended nine-year-old Jermaine Goffigan. He invited the two officers to his ninth birthday party on Halloween. They stopped by and wished him well.

  Twenty minutes after they left the party, Jermaine was dead, gunned down in a gang crossfire as he stood in front of his home.

  Jermaine Goffigan. I named a park after him.* He was out trick-or-treating in a Dracula mask. Police found five Tootsie Rolls and a lemon drop in his pockets. Who could have guessed that Boston was about to go two and a half years without losing another Jermaine? Not a single kid killed in twenty-nine months.

  That was the “Boston miracle” celebrated by the national media and saluted by President Clinton.

  That, and this: In 1995 there were ninety-six homicides in Boston, fifty-nine in 1996, forty-three in 1997, and thirty-five in 1998.

  And this: In 1995 Boston’s crime rate ranked it twenty-eighth lowest among the fifty largest cities, twenty-second in 1996, and twelfth in 1997.

  So crime was down. One of the objectives laid out in the 1995 Boston Neighborhood Policing Initiative was met.

  A second objective was to reduce fear of crime. In a 1997 BPD survey, 75 percent of Boston residents said they felt “very safe” at home at night. Nationally, only 43 percent of city dwellers felt “very safe.”

  The third objective was to improve the quality of life in the neighborhoods. Here the results were less impressive but still encouraging. The proportion of Bostonians calling graffiti a serious neighborhood problem was “significantly lower than the national sample,” and “a smaller portion of Bostonians than Chicagoans believe that graffiti, drug dealing, public drinking, and abandoned cars are a serious problem in their neighborhood.”

  Crime fell everywhere in the 90s, but faster and lower in practically every category in Boston. A puzzling exception: Triple the percentage of Bostonians than city residents nationwide said “dogs running loose” was a serious neighborhood problem.

  The St. Clair Commission advocated neighborhood policing to restore public confidence in a Roache-era BPD that ranked twenty-eighth out of thirty major cities in solving murders and twenty-seventh in arrests for felonies like rape and robbery. Two years into the new strategy, 84 percent of Boston residents had a “great deal” or “some” confidence that the police could prevent crime, compared to 58 percent of the national sample.

  Perhaps surprisingly, the police had embraced neighborhood policing. Whereas only 17 percent listed arresting criminals or reducing crime as their prime goal, 68 percent listed goals like “helping people/making them feel safe.”

  Except for those wild dogs, all the trends were good.

  “We’re working together for the first time,” I said, referring generally to police-community cooperation and specifically to a partnership between Boston police and state agencies.

  Between 1990 and 1995, a quarter of offenders in murder cases were on parole at the time of their offense. Parolees bore watching, but no one was watching them. Under Operation Nightlight, Boston police officers teamed with Massachusetts probation officers to make nightly visits to the homes of high-risk offenders to see if they were observing the terms of their parole—2,500 visits in 1996. These bed checks gave parents and grandparents welcome leverage to keep their young men off the streets. Cooperation from families helped make Nightlight work. According to the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, “Going from zero supervisory visits to thousands each year made a substantial impact on the comparatively small number of offenders causing the most problems.”

  Representatives from eighty cities visited Boston to see how we did it. “We’re stealing every idea that Boston hasn’t locked down,” said a Minneapolis police lieutenant after his visit. “Look what happened to your body count. . . . You’re doing something right.”

  Then the police union and Democratic politicians set progress back.

  I believe in unions. They put the American Dream within reach of men like my dad, a member of the Machinists Union.

  So it pained me when the Boston police union impeded neighborhood policing.*

  I also believe in the values of the Democratic Party. However, I was ashamed of my party for a vote cast by the overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts state legislature.

  The vote repealed a century-old law allowing Boston’s police commissioner to make personnel decisions affecting public safety without negotiating with the police unions. Paul Evans needed that flexibility to implement the new strategy. In practice that could mean assigning younger officers to jobs veterans (wrongly) considered “RIP” (retired in place) and wanted as a benefit of their seniority. The Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association (BPPA) could not tolerate that. So its political action committee (PAC) donated heavily to the lawmakers’ campaigns, and the Democrats voted to forbid Evans from changing deployments without union approval.

  Citing Boston’s record in reducing crime, Governor Paul Cellucci, a Republican, vetoed the Democratic bill. “I do not believe that it is in the best interest of the Commonwealth,” he said, “and, in particular, the citizens of Boston, to change the existing relationship between management and labor when the public safety could suffer.”

  I lobbied state senators to sustain Cellucci’s veto. I argued these points:

  Neighborhood policing worked.

  Management flexibility made it work.

  A vote against management flexibility was therefore a vote against the “Boston miracle.”

  I was wasting my breath. Every Democrat voted to override the governor’s veto.

  One of my aides drew the moral: “Get me a PAC and a checkbook and I’ll get some votes too. What are we going to do, not give out any passes for the Marathon this year?”

  The override came in January 1998. That year, the miracle faded. Kids started killing other kids again. Boston’s crime rate ticked up. Was the legislature’s meddling in neighborhood policing the cause? No. Was it a cause? Undoubtedly.

  “Relations between City Hall and the police, frayed by contract negotiations and the police commissioner bill, have reached an all-time low,” the Globe observed. Shortly after the vote, free copies of Pax Centurion, the newspaper of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, were missing from their usual p
laces in City Hall and had to be restocked.

  I had a tough relationship with the BPPA. Every time the police contract was up for renewal, pickets dogged me. One year, a dozen officers showed up in front of the National Press Club in Washington, where I was speaking. “I’m laying off 1,700 people, and they’re asking for a raise,” I told the audience. “I just don’t have it.” And BPPA picket lines nearly stopped the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which, for the first time, was held in Boston.

  Ahead of the 2004 negotiations, the union played hardball. BPPA President Tom Nee promised that six-member squads of off-duty officers would follow me to all events. For parades, the contingent would be tripled. I increased my personal security just in case. A hell of a note: on-duty police protecting the mayor from their off-duty brothers.

  But it gets worse. Any BPPA member who refused to picket me, Nee announced, would lose dental coverage, life insurance, the right to legal services, and other benefits. Who was this threat aimed at? Nee said at slackers. I had my doubts. What cop, I wondered, wouldn’t picket me? I could think of only one—Officer Thomas M. Menino Jr. Was the union pressuring him to picket his father?

  Picketing policemen cursed me. Picketing firemen spat on Angela. Fire was that much worse than police.

  We die for you.

  —Captain John J. McKenna of the Boston Fire Department in an August 2002 letter to the editor of the Boston Globe

  Captain McKenna continued: “Now men and women who are willing to die for you are often unable to articulate the reasons why they undertake these risks for you except for their strong sense of duty. . . . Our strong points aren’t community relations.”

  Give me a break! Try negotiating with a union whose members die for you. Above the windows of Memorial Hall at BFD headquarters were two rows of photographs of firefighters killed in the line of duty. They extended around the room. People have mixed feelings about cops. Not about firefighters. Community heroes don’t need “community relations.”

  Policemen and firefighters can’t strike. The Boston Police Strike of 1919 settled that. “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time,” Governor Calvin Coolidge declared. He called out the National Guard to police the lawless streets and fired the striking cops.

  Police and firefighters can’t strike, but they can act like strikers—picketing, demonstrating, leafleting—to sway public opinion and move officials to agree to their demands. Making mayors squirm is smart tactics. In good economic times, mayors tend to yield. In bad times, that often means they’ll have to make layoffs in other city departments. Take 2010. To pay for the 19 percent raise (later reduced by the City Council) awarded the firefighters by a state arbitration panel, I laid off 250 workers, closed four libraries, and pulled staff out of community health centers.

  The economy runs in cycles. Suppose a mayor is generous to fire in an upswing. Then has to negotiate a new contract with the police in a downswing. Police will demand parity with fire. That is the dilemma I sowed with the firefighters’ contract I signed in 2001. Police fell behind fire and stayed there. A decade later, the average patrolman’s base pay was $15,000 less than a firefighter’s. (Though if you include overtime and details, police earned the same as firefighters.) Police leaped ahead in 2013 when a state arbitration panel awarded them a 25.4 percent raise over six years. To my disappointment, the City Council unanimously approved that unaffordable raise. “We’re going to have to brace ourselves for the firefighters,” a city councilor said. “They may use the same argument.” Right, parity. He should have thought of that before voting yes.

  I noticed a difference between the public safety unions on the picket line. Despite their higher pay, firefighters tend to be angrier. Policing is a more stable profession than firefighting. Human nature being what it is, criminals will never be in short supply, and cities will need police to handle them. But with fewer fires, we will need fewer firefighters. Welcome news, but not for them.

  Increasingly, firefighters don’t fight fires. They respond to emergencies. In 2012, 60 percent of the 72,000 calls received by the BFD were for medical and other emergency services; 8 percent were for fires. Major fires fell from 417 in 1975 to 40 in 2012—a 90 percent decline. Yet the number of firefighters in Boston declined only 12.5 percent, from 1,600 in the 1980s to 1,400 today.

  The national picture is similar. Stricter enforcement of building codes, fireproof construction materials, smoke alarms, sprinkler systems, and the fall in the number of smokers have made cities safer. Of the 30 million calls made to fire departments in 2011, only 1.4 million were fire-related—down 50 percent since 1981. Yet the number of firefighters per capita has not changed in decades. “We’ve got a small army of firemen out there and no fires,” writes one expert.

  For its army Boston pays $185 million a year. Money well spent, you say. Reviving a man in cardiac arrest with a defibrillator is as much lifesaving work as rescuing a child from a burning house with a ladder. Somebody has to do it. Agreed. But does it have to be a firefighter?

  Because fire stations are spread across the city, firefighters are often the first to arrive at an emergency. But in about a third of calls, as soon as the ambulance shows up, the firefighters turn things over to Emergency Medical Service workers.

  Reviewing such evidence, Toronto in 2012 stopped dispatching firefighters to nearly fifty types of medical emergencies they used to respond to along with ambulances. Toronto firefighters claim the public is less safe; but stricken people are not being left to die on the streets. They are being treated by EMS workers. They have the same medical training as firefighters, but their benefits package—wages, health care, pensions—is lighter.

  Boston could follow Toronto and free resources from fire to fund education and crime prevention. Or Boston could follow New York and Washington and combine fire and EMS in one department, with fewer fire trucks and more ambulances.

  Big change like that awaits Boston’s next fiscal crisis, when necessity may force decision. But to any future mayor seeking to adjust the ratio of firefighters to fires, good luck. You’ll need it.

  The firefighters’ union fought me at every turn, and usually won. Firefighters were always admired, but 9/11 made them national icons. I was mayor during two recessions, and I laid off hundreds of city workers. But I didn’t dare touch the BFD’s budget. The issue was never how much to cut but how much more to spend.

  More progress was made in changing the culture of the firehouse. The St. Clair Commission of the Fire Department was the O’Toole Commission. I accepted salary increases higher than the city could afford, and the Fire Department accepted more women and minority firefighters. I traded money for diversity.

  150 YEARS UNIMPEDED BY PROGRESS. So boasted a banner carried by Chicago firefighters. It could be the motto of the Boston Fire Department. Listen to what a young firefighter told the O’Toole Commission: “Tradition is an anchor around our necks. Our fear of change is killing us.”

  In a department with roots in the eighteenth century, tradition dictated that firefighters were men. So in 2000, out of a force of 1,592 there were twelve women firefighters (something I called “outrageous”). None of the twelve held rank. When, in a deposition before the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, a district fire chief was asked why he had not promoted a qualified female firefighter, he replied, “Because people didn’t like her, and I think it should be a man’s job.”

  Some of the twelve women firefighters were treated well. Others were not. A woman assigned to the East Boston firehouse testified that her pillow was urinated on, marijuana was planted in her fire coat pocket, and she was physically threatened. When her fire gloves were stolen, she protested to her superior. He took action, telling his men to cut it out. For this, he said in a discrimination suit, headquarters ordered him to see a psychiatrist.

  Tradition dictated that the Boston Fire Department was an exclusive club for Irish American men who rode fire engines with sham
rocks on the doors. So in 2000, the percentage of minorities selected as superior officers stood at 3 percent. In Paul Evans’s Police Department, five times more minorities held rank.

  Following a wave of lawsuits against the BFD triggered by media exposés, I appointed a special commission of officials and academics led by former state public safety secretary Kathleen O’Toole, one of the four finalists on my list for police commissioner in 1994. Its fifty-eight-page report called for “radical changes to the command structure, promotional system, and department culture.”

  The O’Toole Commission made sixty-six recommendations, many aimed at easing gender and racial tensions. Some I could introduce myself. Others—curbing abuses in sick leave, ending the practice of working twenty-four-hour shifts, and introducing drug testing—had to be negotiated with the union.

  After negotiations stalled in December 2000, the firefighters turned up the heat. They demonstrated at my Christmas tree lighting ceremony, picketed me at a National League of Cities conference in Boston, and slapped a GRINCH bumper sticker on my Ford Expedition. Then came an X-rated shout-fest at my State of the City address in January.

  People arriving at John Hancock Hall were met by 2,200 picketers, including firefighters from across the state. A flying wedge of helmeted cops led my family and me through a side door. The crowd shouted “Shame on you!” and goons spat on Angela. My parks commissioner, Justine Liff, and a group of her co-workers got the same treatment.

  “I’ve been around a long, long time, and never do I remember anything like this happening,” remarked former city councilor Richard Iannella. “This is the mayor’s address to the people. In my view it’s shameful.”