City Council President Ed Flynn said he plans to spend his time as acting mayor of Boston addressing the squalid conditions around Melnea Cass Boulevard and Massachusetts Avenue, amid reports of increased violence and drug trafficking.
Flynn, who stepped into his new role when Mayor Michelle Wu left Boston for a family vacation on Thursday, said he has met with “city, state and federal officials, business leaders and nonprofit partners on issues related to public safety, public health and quality of life at Mass and Cass.”
“As acting mayor and city council president, I will continue to work closely with Mayor Wu and our colleagues in government to address this, as well as other pressing issues in our city, such as transportation, public education and services for seniors and persons with disabilities,” Flynn told the Herald in a Friday text message.
He declined to elaborate further, when asked whether he plans to take any action to address the deteriorating situation at Mass and Cass, during his 10-day stint as acting mayor. Wu returns to Boston next Saturday, Aug. 12 at 10 p.m.
Flynn did sign onto a Thursday letter with three other conservative-leaning city councilors, two state lawmakers and a U.S. congressman, calling for police to conduct a warrant sweep in the area, “specifically targeting those individuals with a history of violence, drug and human trafficking.”
While Wu is not physically present, her spokesperson, Ricardo Patrón, insists that she’s still very much in charge of the day-to-day operations of the city.
“The mayor checks in multiple times a day with the team and is available by phone and zoom to address any major decisions that need to be made,” Patrón told the Herald on Friday.
Wu left town a day after alluding to a new approach the city plans to take to address what she described as an “untenable” situation at Mass and Cass, an area long known for open-air drug dealing and homeless encampments.
She said on a Wednesday “Java with Jimmy” podcast that the increased danger has led all non-city teams to pull their outreach workers from the area, but didn’t elaborate on what “major step” the city plans to take to address the matter.
A Wu administration official told the Herald on Friday that the city plans to take a more safety-enforcement oriented approach at Mass and Cass, with a focus on targeting the criminal activity that occurs there on a daily basis. Details about the new approach were first reported by the Boston Globe on Thursday.
The official said roughly 200 people are descending on the area each day to buy or sell drugs, take part in human trafficking and commit violence. By comparison, the number of unhoused individuals seeking shelter is much lower, at between 40 to 75 on any given day.
This has caused the city to shift its strategy, the official noted. The Wu administration saw success in connecting about “half of the people who were living in encampments in January 2022” with permanent housing, the official said.
Since that time, however, hundreds more people have arrived from across the state and region. The focus now, the official said, is on addressing the criminal aspect, by “eliminating the drug trafficking and violence, reducing the crowding and allowing Atkinson and Southampton to operate as regular streets.”
Law enforcement will be part of the new approach, according to the administration official, who declined to get into specifics about the planned strategy.
Mariellen Burns, a spokesperson for the Boston Police Department, said BPD continues “to extend a tremendous amount of resources in the area of Mass and Cass daily.”
“We have had increased presence over the past month or two as the weather has improved and violence and other incidents of dangerous activity have increased,” Burns said in a Friday email.
The Wu official pointed to problems created by tents pitched in the area, which “pose both a public health and safety risk because they facilitate those criminal behaviors.”
The mayor tried to ban the tents in May, but the order didn’t carry much weight with people in the area, who continued to set up their makeshift shelters.
