A big city. A big drop in murders. Our reporter wanted to know why.
A credible counternarrative on crime is worth probing. It can undercut misperceptions, including ones promoted for political purposes. It can suggest reasons for progress. It can validate community action. We found one such story in our Boston backyard.
Troy Aidan Sambajon is relatively new to reporting, but he’s already up to speed on some old-school best practices. A new Monitor writing fellow just last year, he has learned the value of getting immersed in the communities he covers.
That served Troy back when he reported, from a wealthy Boston enclave, the story of a community finding its own solutions to homelessness. It served him again when he dived into a story on what was behind Boston’s falling murder rate.
“I was looking for examples on any scale of how trust, or [what goes] into building trust, like accountability, transparency, and communication … [factors] into the working models between the community and the police today,” he says on our “Why We Wrote This” podcast.
In a city where old distrust still looms, Troy saw at least a nascent sense of trust. There’s more to do. He saw the community reach for better representation in, for example, an inspiring mural of Black civil rights leaders, national and local.
“The paint was still fresh,” Troy says, “and I think that’s kind of ... symbolic of how community policing and trust-building exercises are in the city, too.”
Episode transcript
Clay Collins: Everyone likes a good counternarrative, especially when the prevailing narrative is dire and the counter, a better story, can be statistically validated.
The persistence of big city crime, for example, is something that can be useful for politicians to claim. Doing so can back up a lot of insidious sub-narratives.
The Monitor’s Troy Aiden Sambajon noted a promising trend right in the Monitor’s backyard. Crime in Boston – the murder rate, in particular – has been trending downward since the 1980s and ’90s. He started reporting to find out why.
This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Troy joins me today to talk about his story.
Hey, Troy.
Troy Sambajon: Hi, Clay.
Collins: So, as we know and we just said, counternarratives on issues like murder rates clearly work well for the Monitor. It’s that deeper kind of story. And sometimes it’s all about how you view the data. Our graphics whiz, Jake Turcotte, was on this show about a year ago talking about taking slightly longer views in order to recognize real long-term trends versus short-term fluctuations.
How much of your story involved performing new data journalism or verifying data work that had been done?
Sambajon: When I first started reporting this story to better understand community police relations, I turned to the data first to guide my understanding of where things were. I had a WBUR poll from 2021 which told me that only 31 percent of Bostonians believe the police treat everyone equally regardless of race. And among Black respondents, that number was 17 percent. I used that as a first starting point to see where this story would take me. [On the murder rate itself: As of June 10, there have been four homicides in Boston this year, compared with 18 this time last year.]
Collins: Once you got on the ground and started reporting, you learned about “true partnerships,” as you called them. The president of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston told you, quote, “our social workers are working out of the clubs and building trusting relationships because people see them as who they are and not just as social workers.”
So how early in your reporting did that sense of an authentic community effort emerge?
Sambajon: Almost immediately. As I went out into the community, I remember one instance where I went to the YMCA Roxbury Yawkey Club, where they were watching a documentary about gang violence in Boston in the early 2010s, and how those same sentiments, almost 10 years later, still persist today. The same man who you quoted, Robert Lewis, president of the Boys and Girls Club of Boston, told the people in the crowd there that Boston has no shortage of philanthropy, but it’s the coordination of these efforts where they’re struggling to have real impact on the ground.
Having only lived in Boston for less than two years, to prepare for this story, I really immersed myself in the community. I would take public transportation everywhere, eat alone, talk to people on the street, talk to familiar faces, faces I didn’t know.
I would talk to professors at universities or even nonprofits who are doing real work in the community. The one thing I found, above all else, is that people really do care and want to see change, but the approaches aren’t coordinated enough. To see any way of building trust in one definite way. And as I learned about the different neighborhoods in Boston, and how each approach to policing is different, I started to think, maybe they shouldn’t all be uniform.
Maybe each approach to each neighborhood should be unique. And that’s what I learned from some professors as well too, to back up what I had already learned in the field. Boston has so many different neighborhoods, so it’s impossible to characterize them as one big unified city. When the city really is just made up of a vibrant network of different communities.
Collins: We’ll get to the sort of history of Boston Police [and] community relations in a minute, but talk about trust as a framing device, because the Monitor has been using that and other values over the course of the last year or so to frame stories.
Sambajon: The value of trust was not lost on me in this reporting story, knowing that trust had been broken before. I was looking for examples on any scale of how trust, or the many facets of it which go into building trust, like accountability, transparency, and communication … how that factors into the working models between the community and the police today. I looked into the Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, which was made in 2021 so that the public could input requests for accountability in their police officers.
But when I looked further, only six of the complaints had actually been formally submitted out of 148 in the last three years. There was still a long way to go.
Collins: We should note that trust between some Boston communities and the city’s police has been historically strained. There’s this sense that justice hasn’t been equally distributed. And as you say, some of that persists, you wrote, “Boston is at once a prime example of what is going right in policing and of how much remains to be done.”
So given that and what you were seeing in those submissions from the community, what did the reporting tell you about whether trust now stands a chance of growing and what are the real challenges around sustaining it?
Sambajon: I got anyone and everyone to talk to me. I would even talk to my taxi and Uber drivers and be like, “what do you think about this story I’m trying to write?” And some people would be like, “oh yeah, I just came here and the police here are so much more friendly than my home country. “And then I’d have other people who are like, “I’ve lived here my whole life and they’ve never looked me in the eye.”
So, I got like a wide array of responses and I used all of them as breadcrumbs on trying to find the truth.
Sambajon: When I went to go visit the Mothers for Justice and Equality (MJE) offices in Roxbury, as I got off the bus, the first thing I saw was the Office of Police Accountability and Transparency (OPAT) located on the first floor. The nonprofit’s offices were located on the second.
The only thing which was shared by the two, in a sense, was this mural of Black heroes on the wall. And to me, I remember just watching it as, like, the bus went by, I missed it, and the rain kept going. But I stopped to take it in for a sec, because while it was a new mural. I don’t know if it was placed there after OPAT had moved in.
But for me, not being [from] here, and seeing the faces of, like, Malcolm X, MLK, Barack Obama, but even some black Boston civil rights leaders that I didn’t recognize before. It kind of, for me, represented the aim and vision that people want to see in their community. They want to see leaders like that in their community and have that type of representation.
The paint was still fresh, and I think that’s kind of … symbolic of how community policing and trust-building exercises are in the city, too.
When I asked them about their relation between the two, the nonprofit said that OPAT was basically invisible. When I asked why, [they said] it’s because not only is the agency new, but because it’s new, trust wasn’t there at all. I think the community is still waiting for the BPD to uphold its end of their bargain when protecting and serving their community.
That doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. In fact, I think what I learned from my reporting was that it has to be this consistent dedication to serving the public to rebuild trust. The memory of public mistrust still looms large over Boston and the Charles Stuart case of the late ’80s and even to the violence of the early ’90s is still at the forefront of thought when people think of reasons to not trust the police.
Collins: The Charles Stuart case was obviously when the Mission Hill neighborhood was sort of shaken down over suspects and it turned out to be the husband in the couple, the white couple, who had committed the crime.
So your story went deep on what we think of as community policing, which you read about in other places, and I have to ask: Boston Police Department Community and Media Relations Outreach would presumably be a piece of that by extension, but you couldn’t get the BPD to reply to your requests, even in person. How detailed were your queries, and were you surprised about that lack of access given that they kind of had a success story to tell?
Sambajon: Ironic, right? I was very surprised at first, because in the initial stages of reporting this project, it seemed like the BPD were on board. For a story about building trust with the community, you’d think they’d be the ones who’d want to provide the best examples.
But I had to find those myself, because like any other city, Boston doesn’t exist in a vacuum. And the criticisms that people have for their police department dating back to the murder of George Floyd. That even still came up today too, even though there was no uptick in violent crime at that time in Boston. So, I mean to say that people still have many criticisms of their police department, no matter what city you’re in. And I think that gives the police a very big hesitancy to let people in behind the curtain.
Collins: A question around solution stories, in general, is, typically: Is this success that’s transferable? Cities have different makeups in different ways, different histories. Is your sense coming out of this that the preconditions for this progress might be present in practically any city that has the will to make this work?
Sambajon: It’s no easy feat to try to rebuild trust when trust has already been broken, especially with the police. And that public memory can give a reason, a scar, really, to not trust again. And so while Boston has made great strides, especially with their innovative clinical model called Youth Connect, which helps connect social workers to struggling families, it’s honestly still not enough.
And so I think there is a sense that if police departments have the resources, commitment, and funding to have good policing in their city, they do have a chance. But like all other police departments across the nation, there are still staffing shortages, funding cuts, and other things that threaten the department internally before they can deal with the community first. It’s an uphill battle in more than one way.
Collins: So just a question on your Monitor role and how that played in. You’re a Budge Sperling Fellow. That’s typically a Washington, D.C., based role. You ended up sort of straddling Boston and D.C. for your tenure, kind of a first. Obviously, that had an effect for this story, but how else has that helped you develop as a Monitor reporter?
Sambajon: I think being based in Boston has allowed me to do what I feel I do best right now, which is to get to know people in the community and spend time with them enough so that I can like seep in the story and I can actually do my best version of telling theirs.
Collins: That’s great. Well, we’ve enjoyed having you in Boston, too. Thanks, Troy, for writing this story and for coming on to talk about it.
Sambajon: Thank you so much, Clay.
Collins: And thanks to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes with a link to the story that we just discussed and to all of Troy’s work at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus. Jingnan Peng is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt, produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2024.
