The Boston Police Department is carrying a grim ledger of 336 unsolved murder cases from the past 10 years — a period that saw the city consistently lagging behind the national average for cracking slay cases despite repeated changes in strategies and leadership, a Herald review found. The stunning total of unsolved cases encompasses 2004 to 2013, when gun-toting gangbangers, thieves and trigger-happy teens, among others, killed 628 people across the dozen neighborhoods patrolled by Boston cops. During those years, police arrested, charged or formally identified suspects in 47 percent of the homicides. Their success varied wildly according to the race, gender and neighborhood of the victim — even as they managed to dramatically lower the murder rate in the process. Boston recorded only 40 hom-icides last year, a one-third drop from 2012. The review of year-by-year data provided by the BPD shows: • Black men were slain at 10 times the rate of white men. Of the city’s 628 victims, 410 were black males and 38 were white males. But police solved only 38 percent of the murders of black males compared to 79 percent for the slayings of white men; • Guns, not surprisingly, were killers’ weapon of choice in the Hub, used 469 times to commit — and often get away with — murder. Despite vast investments in technology, the shooter was caught only 37 percent of the time; and • More than two-thirds of the city’s murders were committed in Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester; yet the rate those homicides were cleared by police — that is, a suspect was arrested or identified — trailed the rest of the city: 43 percent in Roxbury, 42 percent in Dorchester and just 34 percent in Mattapan. Meanwhile, 13 of the 15 hom-icides in Brighton have been solved, a citywide best of 87 percent. Michael C. Walker, who sits on the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Uniform Crime Reporting Subcommittee and is the former police commissioner of Patterson, N.J., found Boston’s clearance rates surprisingly low. “If you look at the national average, in the larger cites it’s 62 percent. It’s a little less than I expected,” Walker said. “In a city that size, to have only 40 homicides (the 2013 total), you’re lucky. You have a good-size police department. I think you have a pretty good tax base up there, so you have resources. I really don’t see why more aren’t cleared.” The vast disparities in murder and clearance rates in the neighborhoods where the city’s minorities live has long generated outrage in those communities. “What we tell our friends who visit, if you desperately need a police officer, look for a construction site. They’ll be there. They won’t be patrolling your neighborhood but they’ll be standing over that hole,” said Horace Small, of the Union of the Minority Neighborhoods in Jamaica Plain. “And try not to get killed here, because they’ll never figure it out.” Former Boston police Commissioner Edward F. Davis, who oversaw the department from 2006 to 2013, noted that in Massachusetts, it’s the district attorney’s office — not the police — that acts to charge a suspect, and thus decides when a case is cleared. That lends itself to a more “conservative environment” compared to other cities where police make the call, Davis said. “Despite all that, the clearance rate is still low and we fought to improve it while I was there,” Davis said, noting in 2011 Boston police turned to the British model for solving murders, flooding crime scenes with police resources. In each of the following two years, police cleared more than 50 percent of cases — the only two-year success streak for the department during the 10-year period. That was one of a range of initiatives police undertook during the period, including arranging a gang truce, walking beats, a focusing on so-called “impact players” behind most of the city’s violence and launching new technologies such as ShotSpotter. “The experiment hasn’t been completed yet, but we’re optimistic those (rates) will improve,” Davis said. “There are some that are just gang-related, there are others that are connected to the drug business. Anytime you have homicide with people who are operating illegal businesses outside the law, the culture of not speaking to police plays a role there.” The murder clearance rate numbers reported by Boston to the FBI were lower than the average for similar-sized cities for eight of the nine years between 2004 and 2012. Boston Police Superintendent Robert Merner, who is in charge of all investigations in the city, said the department tracks homicide statistics differently than the FBI does. “I’m very happy with our numbers because in most states, by the more liberal FBI standards, if someone gets murdered and I know who did it, I can identify him as a suspect but I know I don’t have enough to make an arrest and get a conviction. Most jurisdictions would take that as a clearance but we don’t do that. There’s very few homicides where we don’t know who did it.” Merner also pointed out that the city has a high conviction rate, which he says ranges between 92 and 98 percent per year. District Attorney Daniel F. Conley agreed. “The way we investigate and prosecute homicides in Suffolk County is a model for the country,” he said in a statement. “Because we only have one chance to get it right, we charge someone with murder only if we have a good faith belief that we can prove the charge beyond a reasonable doubt based on the evidence we’ve developed. Anything less is unethical and unfair, especially to victims and their families. For this reason, our actual clearance rate — which reflects cases that are bound for indictment and not simply dismissed for lack of evidence at a later stage ... is better than most major cities.” bostonherald/news_opinion/local_coverage/2014/07/boston_lags_behind_us_in_solving_murders
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 23:34:35 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015