The Associated Press
BOSTON (AP) - The Boston Police Department will beef up its homicide unit to try to reverse a decline in the number of homicide arrests this year, the lowest in a decade.
With the city on its way to a 10-year high in homicides, the department has “cleared” 38 percent of its 60 cases, meaning that there have been arrests made, warrants issued, or suspects identified.
Last year, police cleared 64 percent of cases, and 53 percent from 1994 through last year.
Deputy Superintendent Daniel Coleman said he is discussing with Commissioner Kathleen M. O’Toole adding detectives to the unit’s staff of 18 investigators, and enhancing computer technology to make it easier to integrate information gathered by the homicide, drug, and gang units.
“The idea is to improve some of these things,” Coleman said. “We’re not going to stay stagnant and status quo.”
Since Coleman took over the homicide unit in April, the unit has already added three investigators and one supervisor, and includes investigators who speak Spanish and are familiar with high-crime areas of the city, Coleman said.
The homicide unit is smaller than other cities’. In Baltimore, where 271 people have been murdered this year, the police have 80 people on their homicide unit.
Cliff Karchmer, director of program development at the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit research group, said Boston’s problems clearing cases are not unusual.
“Thirty-eight percent in the middle of a gang war and gang retaliatory violence is not really unusual,” he said. “The District (of Columbia) went through it. Recently, other jurisdictions like Kansas City and Minneapolis went through it.”
Karchmer, who coordinated criminal justice planning during the administration of Democrat Mike Dukakis, said that cities with street violence and gang problems often cannot protect witnesses in high-crime neighborhoods.
David Meier, the assistant district attorney in charge of homicide prosecution, said the decline in the clearance rate isn’t as important as building cases that will end with convictions.
Bobbie Gaines, the mother of 23-year-old William “Biggie” Gaines, who was killed in July in Roxbury, said she believes police are doing all they can to solve her sons murder, but said police should have more investigators working on cases like her son’s.
“They need to have more people to work with them in their case, investigating their police, and they need people out in the community to help them more,” she said.