BPD

The Boston Police Department’s overtime budget is on track to reach a record-breaking $100 million this year, city officials say, despite several years of focused attention on reducing police spending.

Hundreds of residents, community leaders and local elected officials gathered Wednesday night in the muggy basement of Roxbury’s Twelfth Baptist Church to demand the Boston Police Department and Mayor Michelle Wu provide transparency around the demotion of a veteran police officer.

Homicides across the city of Boston declined by over 80% compared to the same time last year, according to statistics posted on the Boston Police Department’s website.

Deal includes ability to fire officers convicted of crimes and a 21% raise in police salaries over five years

On the campaign trail in 2021, a majority of candidates for city offices supported shuttering the Boston Police Department’s controversial gang database and ending the department’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

The Boston Police Department recently announced that it has joined the 30x30 Initiative, a commitment to have women make up 30% of sworn recruits by 2030. But officials did not say how much of that figure would include Black women and other women of color.

In a departure from prior years, senior members of the mayor’s administration appeared before Boston City Council members, as well as members of the public, to discuss in broad strokes the city’s ongoing process in negotiating new contracts with police unions.

Michael Cox, who grew up in Roxbury, was sworn in as Boston’s 44th police commissioner Monday, completing a remarkable return to a department whose strengths and weaknesses he understands from deep and sometimes painful personal experience.

After more than 100 white supremacists gathered in Boston and marched through the city over Independence Day weekend, city and law enforcement officials said they “did not have intelligence” that the nationally-known Patriot Front group was coming to the Hub — despite paying a government contractor with CIA ties millions of dollars for exactly that kind of information.

After nearly 100 white supremacists marched through downtown Boston, resulting in brief violence, city councilors and activists have called into question the Boston Police Department’s response and the effectiveness of the city’s counterterrorism and intelligence agency.

Mayor Michelle Wu’s neighborhood coffee hour at Roxbury’s Horatio Harris Park was met with members of the Defund BosCops coalition, who pressed the mayor to adopt a $10 million cut to the Boston Police Department’s overtime budget.

Criticism of the police that gets the greatest attention is over police violence, particularly against Blacks. But there has been another long-standing accusation that the police are intentionally inefficient. Exorbitant police salaries are customarily increased by fictitious overtime payments. However, the Boston Police Department has been able to reduce overtime payments by almost $6 million in 2021.