There is no definite way to evaluate the relative safety of any city in the United States, including Boston, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is the first to admit it.
Several months ago, after being assaulted in Jamaica Plain, I took it upon myself to discover if Boston was safe as the proverbial “they” claimed it was. Beyond my life at Boston University, Boston appeared to be a safe playground comprised of 20 percent college students, a plethora of well-to-do elderly bankers and ample gentrification in every once-affordable neighborhood. I personally always felt safe around my Kenmore apartment, with my only scares being from inebriated Red Sox fans smelling my New York blood and thus offering me threats that I knew were as probable of being executed as the curse being reversed.
Every bit of propaganda I found regarding Boston safety referred to the 10 Point Coalition and Operation Ceasefire, two programs which have given Boston national respect and served as models for other cities. The 10 Point Coalition is a faith-based program which alternatively sentences violent youth to cultural enrichment programs. Operation Ceasefire, nicknamed the “Boston Miracle,” was a highly successful phenomenon where all portions of law enforcement worked together to drastically decrease firearm crime in Boston during the mid-1990s.
But according to the Morgan Quitno Press’s 10th annual “Safest City and Safest Metropolitan Area Awards,” Boston is still failing where public safety is concerned.
The Quitno award scores are based on crime rates for murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft in each city, derived from the FBI’s yearly “Crime in the United States” report. Quitno says Boston ranks the humiliating 289th safest U.S. city out of 350 municipalities with populations of 75,000 or more. Of cities with populations exceeding 500,000 people, Boston is far from making the top 10. Our neighbor, New York, ranks the sixth safest and is the only east coast city on the top-10 list.
Apparently, my assault was one out of too many.
Concerned with these numbers, I spoke with Boston City Counselor Rob Consalvo, chair of the Public Safety Committee in 2003.
“I absolutely see Boston as one of the safest cities in America,” he said, as he nervously tried to replace the statistics I found with the notion that Boston hardly had any murders last year. Although he could not find faults with my statistics, he did mention that the FBI’s crime report includes only voluntary information from urban precincts and that some cities do not send information into the reports in the first place. He went as far as to obtain a fax from an FBI spokesperson saying the assumptions may be false, since not all police departments choose to fully release their statistics.
What Consalvo did not realize was that these cities are all listed in the Quitno Report, and who’s to say Boston is more accurate in reporting crime than anywhere else? If the FBI doesn’t know for sure, where are our checks and balances? Is there any way to truly know what neighborhoods are safe?
The Quitno website mentions that they have not made many friends by releasing results that anger politicians and concern residents. Since there is no national database that confirms crime anywhere, I’d rather trust the suggestions of the FBI reflected in the Quitno rankings than any other form of evaluating my city’s safety level. Even my post-assault detectives told me I was näive to think that Boston was distinctly a safe city.
Wondering if I made an unsafe decision by abandoning the Elysian Fields of the Yankees for the mosh pit of the Red Sox, I went to www.bestplaces.net and used the crime comparison feature where I could pull up the FBI’s New York and Boston crime statistics side by side and compare the numbers to the national averages. As in the Quitno report, Boston did not fare too well: We rank above the national average crime rate in every category except burglary. New York only outnumbers our crime rate in homicide. Boston has more than twice New York’s crime rate for rape, larceny and motor vehicle theft.
New York has a zero-tolerance policy on crime that includes “quality of life crimes” as petty as fare-dodging and shoplifting, since officials believe that small crimes serve as gateways to larger ones. In contrast, according to the “Boston Foundation Indicators Report,” which was prepared by a local public research group, Boston has recently faced increases in white-collar crime (guess where Napster was invented?), heroin usage, violence on the MBTA and post-Sept. 11 racial profiling. Consalvo declined to comment on the report’s statements.
I truly love Boston for its charm and culture, but when it comes to safety, there is obviously room for improvement. The public has to be aware of crime realities in order to bring about constructive discussions between citizens, politicians and law enforcement officials. It is essential that we have a trustworthy national collection of crime data that allows Americans to know where our cities stand.
As for the information we do have, to me, it is significant that if we cannot even keep up with New York’s low crime rate, I don’t want to hear any more complaining about not sharing its baseball stats.