The City Council President Ed Flynn on Sunday called for the camps at Mass and Cass to be cleared ‘immediately’ due to rampant public law breaking. (Matt Stone/Boston Herald, file)
A group of city councilors have redoubled their efforts to get the city’s health commission to declare a state of emergency in response to the crime and addiction crisis at the Mass and Cass area in the South End.
“There are matters within the purview of the Boston Public Health Commission that could help ameliorate the unacceptable conditions in the area of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, such as declaring the State of Emergency rather than continued delay,” said Council President Ed Flynn along with Councilors Erin Murphy, Frank Baker, and Michael Flaherty in a letter Sunday.
The letter appeared hours after Flynn spoke on the airwaves declaring that the tents in the addiction zone need to come down “immediately” while the city acts to address the humanitarian crisis there.
“What’s happening at Mass at Cass is violence is continuing, women are exploited, there is major drug dealing, there is someone that was killed recently — that was stabbed and pronounced dead — there was a woman attacked, sexually attacked,” Flynn told WCVB in an interview that aired Sunday. “The tents need to come down immediately.”
The Councilors renewed effort to prevail upon the Health Commission to act follows an initial letter sent on September 1. In the previous letter, citing city data, the same councilors said that the number of people receiving substance use related treatment services at the intersection jumped 57% from June to July. In one week of August alone police responded to the area 170 times, councilors wrote.
The commission has not responded to Flynn and the other city councilors’ initial letter despite more than a week passing, evidently because they see the situation differently than do the elected officials, the councilors wrote Sunday.
“We wrote in hopes of addressing a dire situation with ‘a sense of urgency’ – one your body, in light of the fact that we have received no response, evidently does not share,” they wrote. “We have no choice but to commence a series of public hearings on the issue since we have received no response from our letter.”
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu filed an ordinance in late August that would give police the authority to clear the intersection of “tents, tarps and other temporary structures which are shielding much of the dangerous activity in the area.”
“We are doubling down on the progress from our public health approach and taking new steps with partners across all levels of government to stabilize the area,” Wu said in a statement at the time. “With our housing and public health infrastructure in place, and as the state continues to expand housing sites in other cities based on Boston’s coordinated response model, we are focusing on boosting public safety to eliminate the violence and criminal activity that can undermine our service delivery.”
But the City Council Committee on Government Operations, chaired by Councilor Ricardo Arroyo, has scheduled a hearing on Wu’s legislation for September 28, a time frame that leaves the public safety issues at Mass and Cass alarmingly unresolved, the Councilors said Sunday.
“We believe it to be an urgent situation with a humanitarian toll. If the Commission does not believe its capacity equal to the task, we request that you apprise the Boston City Council of another agency to which we could direct our petition,” they wrote.
The councilors also cited a sequence of alleged crimes, including a fatal stabbing, that have happened at the area in recent weeks.
Just last week, Michael Bellanti, 33, a homeless man living in Boston, appeared in municipal court in Roxbury to face a charge of assault to murder with a knife. The charge stems from Aug. 18, when Bellanti allegedly stabbed a woman named Kimberly Webb in the midst of on Atkinson Street where it intersects with Southampton Street.
