Amidst calls for increased policing from Mayor Michelle Wu and some Boston City Council members in response to what Boston police have said is a seven-year high in crime downtown, some Emerson students and experts don’t see more police as a solution.
On Feb. 26, Boston officials held a closed door meeting in response to the rise in crime to address safety concerns of downtown residents. A November 2024 poll of 320 downtown Boston residents conducted by the Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association found approximately 70% felt safer at the beginning of 2024 than at the time of polling.
Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn has consistently advocated for increased policing downtown, the area he represents. In a Feb 23. Boston Globe article, Flynn said he often receives calls from residents and workers uncomfortable walking around the Boston Common area, including from Emerson College.
In an interview with The Beacon, Flynn said he received calls from Emerson that were coming from students.
“When I’m in the downtown area, I do see a lot of Emerson students, and they come up to me and talk to me about public safety issues,” Flynn said. “They were concerned about the drug dealing, also the violence that’s taking place. There’s been several random attacks, especially on women, that have been very concerning.”
Annabelle Adams, a senior writing, literature, and publishing major at Emerson College, who has lived, worked, and studied in the area for the last four years said she did not feel unsafe walking on and around campus.
“I don’t necessarily feel more unsafe,” Adams said. “I have a 20-minute walk [to campus] that I do most days, and I feel pretty confident doing it on my own.”
However, she does sometimes feel the need to pay more attention at night when walking near certain parts of Downtown Crossing and the Common.
“I don’t think about these things until I’m confronted by it. It’s something I should be more alert of, but overall, especially on-campus, I do feel pretty safe.”
Jaydon Aldridge, a junior interdisciplinary major at Emerson College, said that he doesn’t feel particularly unsafe walking around Boston either.
“I can’t say I’ve ever really felt some type of way, but I’m also coming from Bankhead in Atlanta,” Aldridge said. “It’s way more lit down there in general.”
Both Aldridge and Adams said more policing and arrests is not the answer to the problem regardless.
“I’m very anti-overpolicing,” Aldridge said. “I feel like that definitely just makes things worse.”
“More policing definitely isn’t the solution. We need more social infrastructure, safe injection sites. Get people off the street and house them where they can be safe,” Adams said. “I feel like more policing is a very reactive action, and when it comes to a city that we all share, you need to be proactive. Obviously, things aren’t working if we need to keep arresting people.”
An October 2024 report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found increased police staffing and funding over the decades had seen a worsening in crime-solving numbers, not an improvement. The CJCJ is a California-based nonprofit that studies the social effects of crime and incarceration.
In an interview with The Beacon, Mike Males, author of the report and senior research fellow at the organization, said he’s as stumped as anyone else on why.
“We should be able to agree that if you put more officers on the street, you’re likely to get more arrests and more crimes solved,” Males said. “When we found exactly the opposite, it really is a puzzle that we’ve been unable to get an answer to.”
Boston city officials have said Boston is the safest major city in regards to violent crime in the country. But new calls for increased policing downtown from Wu, Flynn, and Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox are targeting what police say is mainly an uptick in petty crime, such as shoplifting and drug use.
Males said this concept of cleaning up petty crime to dispel more violent crime is a decades-old conservative criminology called broken windows theory, and it is not supported by consensus as an effective deterrent to violent crime.
“It really drove a lot of the Reagan-era policies, the war on drugs, things that I think everyone agrees were not successful,” Males said. “Having said that, the optics are in favor of crackdowns. The fact that it’s used very effectively against liberal and progressive politicians has made them very fearful of not appearing tough on crime.”
Males said reforms that have worked to bring down crime are not prison and law-enforcement oriented, despite how politically unpopular it may be to say it.
“They tend to be things like drug treatment and community-based programs to get people back into the system,” he said. “Simply reducing poverty and income inequality is one of the most effective things you can do to reduce crime based on socioeconomic conditions.”
Aldridge and Adams both agreed with Males’s sentiments, telling The Beacon that they believed that addressing underlying socioeconomic concerns is the best way forward.
“I believe crime is a byproduct of, most of the time, unmet needs of a community,” Aldridge said. “So definitely better investments in programs, like feeding people and extracurriculars for kids. That’s what I think.”
“If you look at the social patterns, it just makes more sense to help people where they need it,” Adams said, “It’s not gonna be in the jails, it’s never in the jails, no one gets help in the jails. You need to rehabilitate and be preventative.”
