The spike in crime has startled Edgewood and Beaver Hills as much as any neighborhoods in town, with some people questioning whether community policing is dying. But the cops received nothing but love at a meeting with the area’s management team, and these two officers were part of the reason why. Meanwhile, Police Chief Cisco Ortiz announced that more cops would soon be on the street.
Ortiz got a hug from one of the women when he came in to Tuesday night’s meetings of ‚The Whalley, Edgewood, Beaver Hills (WEB) management team at the Whalley substation. When he, assistant chief Herman Badger (second from right in photo) and head of patrol Captain Steve Verrelli were introduced, they were applauded by several of the meeting-goers.
The love was directed especially at their district manager, Sgt. Steve Shea (pictured), who’d been sidelined all summer after a traffic accident. He was obviously happy to be back on the job. He said he pulled the crime data for the area and reported, “Some of the stats were kinda high: 22 burglaries and 9 robberies in July, and 12 burglaries, seven robberies, and nine reports of shots fired in August. It’s been a trying time, the past six months, kids with guns, kids killing kids. It’s rippin’ our hearts out of our chests, but we have made arrests in almost every case. There are challenges,” he concluded, “but I’m committed to working them out.”
The city as a whole has experienced a jump in the murder rate, with a total of 18 for the year already, three more than all of last year. Two of the victims were just 13 years old, and several of those charged with recent murders are teenagers. Click hereto listen to what Chief Ortiz had to say about crime in the city.
All the police personnel, from the chief to the district manager, reiterated their commitment to community policing. The residents expressed great relief to have two young cops, Gary Hammill and Ron Ferrante (pictured) back on a walking beat in their neighborhood. But one older resident said he lives at Whalley and Winthrop and that area needs more than a daytime beat cop. Click hereto listen.
Chief Ortiz announced that a class of new police recruits would be starting in January, and that he plans to put more resources on the street as soon as he can. In answer to one woman’s question, he said he currently has 35 officers on the street in the daytime, 55 in the evening, and 40 on the overnight shift. Of those numbers, he said two to four cops are on duty at any given time in the WEB neighborhood.
Captain Verrelli (pictured, on the right) said he’d been on the force for 25 years, more than half of it in management and most of that under the community policing model. “The management team is the backbone of community-based policing,” he said, “along with the cop on the beat.” To emphasize the importance of cops keeping lines of communication open, Verrelli said, “We think we know everything until we listen to people at the grassroots.” He met with Rabbi Daniel Greer, a community activist who has been outspoken in his criticism of what he sees as the lack of commitment to community policing. “Rabbi Greer said, ‘When there are police in the neighborhood, there are no problems. When there are no police in the neighborhood, there are problems.’ That’s about as clear-cut a statement as you can get.”