This Caught Me By Surprise

POP QUIZ: Can anyone guess the number of homicides that took place in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts in the year 2005?

Homicides reduced to zero in Lawrence

I definitely would have flunked this one.

Now, if the gun laws of New Hampshire are to blame for the rise in homicides in the city of Boston, as our chickenshit mayor would have you believe, why are the streets of Lawrence (a stone's throw from the NH border) not running red with blood today? Why, you'd think there's be Uzi's and AK-47's piled up high in the middle of the sidewalks up there.

LAWRENCE -- Rafael Castro had just returned from Logan Airport to his sixth-floor apartment when intruders looking for drugs grabbed the 36-year-old man, bound him with duct tape, and shot him in the head. The August 2004 slaying was the fourth of the year in a working-class city whose toughness and poverty rival those in some of Boston's roughest neighborhoods.

Since then, Lawrence hasn't recorded a single homicide. In fact, 2005 was the first year since 1972 that the city went without a homicide. Police cannot recall, at 18 months and counting, a longer period without a slaying.

Meanwhile, in the enlightened city of Boston, our mayor marches on with his newly-adopted "crime-fighting" strategy of sticking his head up his ass and cowardly blaming the gun laws of New Hampshire and Vermont, that respect (more or less) their law-abiding citizens' right to bear arms, for his city's gross incompetence at dealing with the CRIMINALS who are COMMITTING THE CRIME on the streets of Boston.

During that same period, Boston has seen its homicide rate soar to its highest level in a decade.

Lawrence officials are reluctant to compare their city with Boston.

I'm not.

In trying to explain the trend, officials point to a strategy used in big cities nationwide: aggressive community policing, which they say is particularly effective in compact cities such as Lawrence. At a time when Boston has seen a reluctance by some witnesses to cooperate with authorities, Lawrence has seen an uptick in such cooperation, partially prompted by the high-profile shooting of a high school basketball star and the death of a woman in an out-of-control auto insurance fraud scheme.

[snip]

[Police Chief John J.] Romero, a Bronx native, has focused on gaining community support.

"I go to all the community meetings in the city," Romero said. "My officers go as well. I think that trust is there. People see us, and they see that there are results."

The year he took over, the city, one of the poorest in the Commonwealth, had eight homicides among nearly 4,000 reported crimes. That overall crime figure dropped to about 1,700 in 2004...

So much for the "Poverty causes crime!" rallying cry of the left.

...and that includes steady declines in auto theft, aggravated assault, burglary, and felony larceny, according to the police and the FBI's annual report on crime.

Why is it, pray tell, that I've never seen the mayor of Lawrence or Chief Romero issue a press releases or appear on TV blaming other city's or state's elected officials for the presence of crime in their community?

And, how could this drop in their crime rate occur without New Hampshire's having first enacted Massachusetts-style gun laws, per the advice of Mayors Menino and Bloomberg?

What I do see here are the direct results of the people of Lawrence, the police, and the local government working together, standing up to the violent crime in their community and doing something about it.

Soon after becoming chief, Romero created a domestic violence unit and expanded the department's antigang efforts. In this majority Latino city of 72,000, Romero also recruited more bilingual officers, many of whom attended community meetings to try to gain the trust of residents.

Romero said that besides fighting domestic violence, he also had to focus on drugs and gangs. "Those are the three things, I think, [that] contribute to homicides," he said.

But, Chief, you left out t-shirts and pay phones! Everyone knows they're the real culprits here.

Menino said so.