Change Management ( Kaisen, CAT and NYPD)

Marty Walsh: 336 unsolved Boston homicides ‘alarming’

Photo by:

Ted Fitzgerald

1

Friday, August 1, 2014

By: Matt Stout, O’Ryan Johnson and Antonio Planas

Mayor Martin J. Walsh, facing a grim ledger of 336 unsolved murders from the past decade, said

yesterday he will ask police to review the way they probe 
homicides while the city explores new

strategies to break the code of silence in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, to make witnesses feel safe and

to bring long-overdue justice to the families of victims.

“I think we have to come up with new techniques on how to get information and new ways of solving

murders,” Walsh said in a City Hall interview with the Herald, even as he expressed confidence cops are

striving to track down the murderers.

“That’s the most alarming thing to me ... the number of 
homicides,” Walsh said of the police

department’s murder clearance rates from 2004 to last year, which lag behind the 
national average.

“Even though it didn’t happen under my watch, it’s a big number,” said Walsh, who took office in

January. “If it was my brother, I would want to know who killed my brother. You go to bed every night

thinking, ‘What happened there?’ No one knows. And 336 families are going to bed at night not

knowing.”

Walsh said he intends to have an in-depth discussion with Boston police Commissioner William Evans,

noting that specific initiatives are best left to him and his command staff, particularly the ins and outs of

how they work a murder.

“I don’t know police work enough to be able to say, ‘This is the model we should use.’ But I know we

have to take a look at this,” he said.

Among the mayor’s proposed initiatives:

• Convening cops, prosecutors and community groups to build deeper ties in neighborhoods such

as Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, which have seen the most murders and some of the

lowest clearance rates — and where mistrust of police and fear of gang retaliation are rampant.

“I think in some community groups, there is some trust. I think with some reverends, there is trust. And I

think some people made reference that there is no trust across the board. That’s probably true in some

cases,” Walsh said. “I think we have to build that trust.”

• Looking at new technologies and installing more surveillance cameras on city streets.

• Possibly pouring more 
resources into the city’s homicide unit.

• Sending a crime-stopping “legislative package” to Beacon Hill that would toughen penalties in

the state’s witness-intimidation law, among other actions.

“I have to work with the commissioner, and say, ‘Do you need additional tools? Do we need 
additional

resources?’ ” Walsh said. “What do we need to make that step?”

A Herald special report this week found that more than half of the city’s 628 homicides over the 10-year

span remain unsolved and that murder clearance rates are marked by disparities in 
everything from

neighborhood to race of the victim. Black males, for example, were 10 times more likely to be murdered

than white males — but their killers were caught at a 38 percent rate compared with a 79 percent rate

for whites.

Police and prosecutors have defended the nearly 47 percent clearance rate over that time, noting the

longstanding practice of Suffolk prosecutors to charge suspects only if they believe they can win a

conviction — a strict standard other cities don’t follow. That practice has helped prosecutors win

convictions in 86 percent of their murder cases over the decade, but it has also left hundreds of

unsolved slayings on the books.

“The way they do it is the way to do it,” Walsh said of police and Suffolk prosecutors. “Now we have to

figure out, how do we get more prosecutions? How do we increase that number?”