MY CASE FOR MORE COPS

I am driving down Galen Street, and have come to a stop at the traffic light on Main Street. I am in the outside left turn lane. The inside left turn lane is the one closest to the delta.

I am sixth in line to take the turn onto Main Street, once the traffic arrow turns green.

I never want to be sixth or even fifth. I want to be first, second, third, fourth, or seventh, or eighth.

Because I am sixth, I will have an important decision to make in the next two minutes and only a few seconds to make that decision.

If each of the five drivers in front of me proceeds through the intersection onto Main Street at a normal speed, and I decide to follow them, I will be driving through a yellow traffic arrow that will turn red before I land on Main Street, which I would prefer not to do.

On several occasions, a sudden jam-up of cars and/or pedestrians crossing Main or Spring Street has left me stalled and blocking traffic coming into the Square from Mt. Auburn Street.

So as the driver of car number six, facing a yellow traffic arrow, and having a strong preference for stopping at the intersection, there is only one question on my mind:

What is the intention of the man or woman behind the wheel of car number seven? How determined is that driver to make it through that light? I check my rearview mirror and assess the odds of getting rear-ended if I don’t go through the light.

Should I stop at the yellow traffic arrow or should I go for it to avoid a collision? For me, it’s a fifty-fifty proposition.

When I’m further back in line, in the seventh or eighth position, I have the luxury of not having to make that decision and the additional advantage of being able to count the number of vehicles that take the left turn onto Main Street when the traffic arrow is a solid red.

I confess that I have become a compulsive counter of red-light runners.

During peak hours, which is most of any weekday, that number is rarely fewer than four and sometimes as high as eight. The number of red-light runners in the past few years seems to be higher than ever and it’s by no means confined to Watertown Square, but the Square has become my laboratory.

I would love to know the daily number of red-light runners in Watertown Square and city-wide, especially during peak driving hours. It could easily be 100. Could it be closer to 500?

And, why do they do it?

Should we just chalk it up to frustration with the increasing time it takes to drive from one place to another? Should we give in to those who preach to us drivers that we should all be riding bicycles and therefore deserve the cowboy drivers we are forced to deal with on our streets, especially at intersections?

I don’t think so.

I don’t think we have to accept the unacceptable even when the unacceptable is allowed to become the new normal.

The reason that drivers, frustrated or otherwise, ignore red lights is simple. It’s the extremely low probability of getting pulled over and ticketed. The only times I’ve seen absolute compliance with the traffic lights in Watertown Square were the few times a police patrol car was parked on the sidewalk in front of the medical building that sits between Mt. Auburn and Arsenal Streets.

But, currently, there are not enough cops to park one of them in Watertown Square for hours at a time. That condition can and should change.

Here’s my no-brainer of the day: There is no better prevention of unlawful behavior than the conspicuous presence of a cop.

Law and order are basic to a civilized society. How civilized we want to be is largely up to us. Running red lights, cutting in front of the driver in the next lane without ample warning, making illegal U-turns, and passing cars on streets where there is no passing lane (Church, Orchard, Pleasant, to name a few) have become bad habits for too many drivers.

As we all know, bad habits can be tough to break without an adequate incentive. In this case, police presence is exactly what the doctor would order. The visibility of the blue uniform sends a preventive message that is universally understood.

Yes, the gang, from a few years ago, that warned us that all police are inherently racist and that the presence of blue uniforms is traumatizing to racial minorities, and that Watertown cops have historically preyed on non-white drivers is still around. Thankfully, they are a lot quieter now that they have their Human Rights Commission to protect the many invisible victims who live among us.

For those who advocate for twenty-four cameras on every street corner, I would argue that spying on everyone is not a satisfactory solution in a free society. Spy cameras may be cost-effective, but they take from us a basic freedom and they send a lousy message.

Speaking of lousy messages, what message does it send that certain individuals routinely steal merchandise at Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and several retail stores at Arsenal Yards?

Check out the police reports over the past few years and you will see that they have one thing in common. They are dominated by incidents of shoplifting. A fraction of those incidents mention the arrest of the perpetrator. And it’s little comfort when they do because we know that they will soon be back in business.

From the police reports, we know that some brazen thieves have repeatedly stolen hundreds of dollars of merchandise from the same store. It’s like having their very own ATM.

So, who are the victims? The easy answer would be that it’s just the retailers and they should be doing more to protect their merchandise. Should we, the general public, even care? After all, isn’t rampant shoplifting a fact of life everywhere these days – essentially the new normal?

Shouldn’t we all be happy that these are nonviolent crimes and that they are crimes against businesses and not individuals?

Or, should we consider these crimes to be crimes against the community? Many of us feel a sense of outrage when we read those reports in Watertown News, especially when the culprits who are caught are shown to have out-of-town addresses. Our tolerance must be sending a loud and clear message that Watertown is easy prey.

There is of course an argument, coming from a certain political sector, meant to quiet our outrage. It goes like this: Those who steal are victims, themselves. They have been driven to steal because they are unhoused or under-housed and food insecure. And if they are stealing to support a drug habit, it is because they have been deprived of mental health services.

Translation: It’s not their fault. It’s our fault.

Are you a hard-hearted S.O.B. if you believe that these petty crimes undermine our natural desire for law and order and erode our confidence in our local government? I can think of several Watertown city councilors who might think so.

There’s a solution for that. We are now at the beginning of an election year.

In the meantime, my solution for the new-normal level of shoplifting is once again police presence.

A great experiment would be to ramp up police presence at the malls where career shoplifters freely ply their trade. If that experiment were successful, which it of course would be, some of our residents and councilors would then argue that we are irresponsibly forcing our thieves to up their looting in other nearby communities, where police presence is lacking.

Truthfully, that works for me.

Our success can become a shining example for other communities to follow.

And one more thing.

Watertown is conveniently situated between Boston, Cambridge, Waltham, and Newton, close to Somerville, and right off the Mass Pike. This convenience serves residents, visitors, employers, and commuters. It also serves criminal enterprises.

 Unlike several of our neighboring communities, we do not have violent street gangs occupying neighborhoods within our city limits. But we do have them traveling through. Thankfully, our police have interrupted drug deals being conducted in our mall parking lots.

But how many drug deals, including those that involve fentanyl, go undetected? I doubt that anyone has any idea. What we don’t know can hurt us, especially as we are on track to become a lot more urbanized than we already are.

For those intent on radically reshaping Watertown, the rallying cry is: Density! Density! Density! Super-density has a hidden price tag that is conspicuously absent from public conversation.

For the moment, crimes that follow drug trafficking, such as armed robberies, muggings, carjackings, and gun violence, are not in our police reports. But that can change before we know it.

At what point will we realize that we are under-policed? As Watertown’s population growth takes a giant leap thanks to the steroidal rezoning of Watertown Square, how soon will we find that our 70-something department of sworn police officers is not just inadequate, but dangerously inadequate?

Those of us who pay attention to the police reports are aware of the success stories when drug traffickers were caught by the WPD and when the cooperative efforts of local, regional, and federal law enforcement agencies have resulted in momentarily disrupting the drug trafficking pipeline. These were undeniable wins for the community.

But the public safety questions of the day should begin with: How much criminal activity is flying under the radar? How many counterfeit painkillers spiked with fentanyl are being delivered from or to middlemen in our private and public parking lots and garages on any given day?

And how much of that supply ends up in the hands of Watertown teenagers? Those numbers are almost certainly unknowable.

Would dramatically enhanced police presence prompt traffickers to move their business operations to locations outside of our borders?

And if so, are we being irresponsible or simply setting an example for other communities to follow?

Some “experts” want us to believe that increased police presence does not prevent crime from happening. Common sense should tell us that those experts are wrong.

The time has arrived to find out for ourselves.

But there are two big problems.

Watertown, like police departments across the country, is struggling to recruit new cops. For a variety of reasons, too lengthy to delve into in this already lengthy blog post, the pipeline of applicants has dried up. Chief Hanrahan has shown exceptional resourcefulness in finding qualified candidates to replace his retiring police officers.

But, it will take more.

For over a year, our city government has been on an unprecedented hiring spree of high-paid middle managers. Some of us in the community, as well as some seasoned city employees, wonder if this bureaucratic expansion is both necessary and fiscally sustainable.

This election year brings us to a crossroads. We have the option of continuing business as usual or making a course correction that places public safety at the top of the city’s to-do list, where it belongs.

 Watertown’s current city council has a few common-sense pragmatists valiantly fighting to keep our legislative body from falling over the ideological cliff. Making a course correction would require the addition of one or two new like-minded councilors to join the fight.

How do we expand the WPD and send a loud, clear, and constant message of what Watertown will not tolerate? And how do we hang out the welcome sign for more good cops to come to Watertown and be a central part of that message?

It begins with us.

In our last city election, all city councilors, district and at-large, ran unopposed. Only the council president had a challenger. That sent a message that Watertown voters were happy with the status quo.

Were they? I don’t think so.     

Since that election, change has been happening at a dizzying pace. How happy are voters with what they’ve seen so far? It’s time to find out.

In advance of next November, Watertown needs a common-sense, roll-up-their-sleeves hero, or two, or three to step up and make the personal sacrifices necessary to run for city council and help turn this ship in the right direction, while the ship is still somewhat turnable.

Despite cynical claims to the contrary, I know that those potential candidates really do exist. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help find them, encourage them, and commit to supporting them through their campaigns and throughout their public service on the council.

If you accept this mission, then one day, when your children, grandchildren, nieces, or nephews ask you what you did to save Watertown from the dangerous gang of invading wackadoodles, you can go into your basement, attic, or closet, pull out your weather-beaten 2025 campaign sign, smile, and tell them:

I DID THIS!  

 

Bruce Coltin, The Battle For Watertown