BOSTON (WHDH) - Boston residents, business owners, and city leaders came together for a public safety summit Wednesday to address the recent uptick in crime in the Downtown Crossing area.
On Friday, police said a fight between two men turned into a stabbing near the Park Street MBTA Station. A week before that, a Bedford man was charged in connection with a deadly attack near the Boylston Street MBTA Station. Hours later, police said that same man assaulted a Boston University student with a metal pole near Chinatown.
In June, three people were shot along Tremont Street in Downtown Crossing.
“It’s not easy when you see homicide red tape on the way to camp, it’s not a pleasant conversation to have with your kids,” said Rishi Shukla, Co-founder of the Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association.
“We need to address this now. We need to have a safe place for our businesses to operate. We need a safe place for consumers to shop. We need a safe place for our associates to come and work,” said Ryan Kearney, General Counsel for the Retailers Association of Massachusetts.
The violent activity comes just after the conclusion of World Cup games in Foxboro, where businesses felt the city thrived.
“The city felt safe and alive, and I feel like we gave back some of those gains for the last month. Sometimes that’s just because of a couple of one off issues, and I think any one incident is too many,” said Michael Nichols, President of the Downtown Boston Alliance.
During the meeting, city leaders said they covered the Downtown Crossing and Boston Common areas, identifying tactical changes that can be made block by block.
“We have to acknowledge those problems, address them with a zero tolerance policy for criminal activity,” said Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn. “People will leave Boston if we don’t deal with public safety issues.”
“We’re going to continue to meet and work on them on a daily basis, so excited to see what we can do and make progress on,” said Boston Police Deputy Sean Martin.
City leaders said they promise more police enforcement and a larger security presence to put residents’ and business owners’ minds at ease.
“If you ask residents randomly over the next two, three, four weeks, ‘do you feel more safe than you did today?’ I hope the answer is yes, and so our job is to get to that spot,” said Shukla said.
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