The Boston Strategy > Players > Police

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	Police Commissioner Paul Evans Supt. in Chief, Ret. Faherty Supt. Paul Joyce Lt. Det. Gary French Sgt. Robert Merner Det. Tito Whittington Ptl. Mark Buchanan Ptl. Greg Brown
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Ptl. Greg Brown
Boston Police Department
Youth Violence Strike Force

You know, we're used to being the Police Department, and if we're not serving our civilians, then we really don't serve a purpose. So we began to work with the community, instead of against it. Stopped looking at everyone that doesn't agree with our views as they're our enemies and trying to find out whether or not we can do something to make them see that, you know, they are working in their best interests. And that was basically it.

When I first started, crime was just my thing. I mean, I was intent on catching criminals, you know, arresting people with guns, drugs, or what have you. And then I started to see, "Well, you know, that's all good and fine and good, but that's after the crime had occurred." And I started to believe that, "Well, isn't there's something else I can do? Maybe I can get out here and start talking to these kids, find out what is it that's in their day that could cause them to do that?" You know, they never knew a policeman. They knew a cop as a person that arrested them, but they didn't see us as a person, you know what I mean? They were like, "I'm not talking to no cop," but they never knew one. So I started introducing myself, first-name basis, not "Officer Brown", asking their name, shaking their hand, you know, talking to them among their friends. Among their friends, so their friends wouldn't think, "Well, this guy is a snitch," you know what I mean? So soon the friends would come over and start talking, and they see that I'm an individual first and then a police officer, that's my job.

In the early '90s, to be honest with you, I thought they needed imprisonment. But I've learned that that's not really the answer, because they're going to come back eventually, and they're going to have an influence on younger kids. So what I think now is that you try and instill some type of positives in the youth now so that they won't have to go with other kids, and then I try to tell them, "Look at this person, that person, you can see what that type of lifestyle will lead to."

I don't think that we'll see the violence that we saw back in '91, '90, or '89, because we are identifying people a lot quicker. We have much better equipment now, we have an intelligence database, we have tracking, we have school police who are on our side, we have so much stuff now. See, the problem before was that the gang members were operating on anonymity so you know, until someone identified them, they think they can get away with anything they want. But we are identifying them now at 12, at 11, at 13. So we are tracking them, and I believe that's the best tool we have.

What I do is I find a young guy that's out there with gang members or being recruited, or he's just on the fringe of joining a gang. I like to put him in the back in my car and drive him home and sit down and talk with his parents. I ask them if they know his friends, if they know where he is, whether they know whether or not he's going to school, whether they know that we have outlets that he can become involved in and get him doing something different, and he can become a lot more positive. I try to explain that we have these alternatives there and we would like to include their kid in them.