Combating poverty will reduce crime, residents say

Boston residents living in some of the city’s most violent neighborhoods say they are cautiously skeptical of Gov. Deval Patrick’s recent statement he is considering initiatives that he said will help combat black-on-black violence.

Patrick, in a meeting with Harvard University students last week, said he has three new anti-crime initiatives in mind, though he was scant on financial details, according to The Harvard Crimson.

“I don’t have a checkbook,” Patrick told The Crimson. “I have a legislature.”

Roxbury resident Michael West, a former Boston Police Department officer, said violence and crime rates could be better lowered through concentrated funding to improve troubled neighborhoods.

“I don’t think more external money, as in money spent to combat crime in dangerous areas, would necessarily solve the problem,” he said. “What I think we need is more internal money, so direct money flow in these areas – to local businesses, to local community centers and schools that will discourage poverty and gangs.”

John Gallo, a longtime Dorchester resident, moved temporarily after high school to Brooklyn’s notoriously tough Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where he opened a clothing store. He said onslaughts of shootings and stabbings he saw growing up in Dorchester, including once being robbed of his winter coat at knifepoint, has not gone away in either city.

“As long as we have a system where poor people are bunched together in housing projects and we have a media glorifying gang violence, we will have a vicious cycle of killings and retributions going on forever,” Gallo said. “In bad areas . . . like here in Dorchester, people don’t have much. All they have is the power that they can shoot you at any time because they have nothing to lose.

“We need to start fighting poverty instead of fighting crime, because in reality, poverty is the real enemy,” said Roxbury resident Tim Cavanaugh. “I mean, some people don’t have money to put food on the table, and that’s where much of the problems come from.”

Cavanaugh said he will remain skeptical of Patrick’s plans until he sees results.

“He is a politician. Of course he is going to promise more money, but actions speak louder than words,” he said. “If we stop poverty, we will stop a lot of the violence.

“Nothing like more anti-crime money is going to change the killings until we stop having ghettos and gangs – not in Boston, and not anywhere in the U.S.,” Cavanaugh added. “It’s like Tupac said, ‘There’s more war on the streets than there’s war in the Middle East.’ If we stop poverty, we will stop a lot of the violence.”