02.19.2025

Teachers union yanks links to antisemitic teacher “resources” | Boston mayoral race getting heated | Downtown Boston residents not buying mayor’s “safest city” boast | Answers sought in probe of yet another Massachusetts State Police scandal | Newton takes a stand on MCAS |

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Rising frustration: Boston’s mayor touts the city’s low crime rates, but downtown residents aren’t feeling it

Up for reelection, Mayor Michelle Wu boasts that Boston is the nation’s safest major city.

But residents of downtown Boston, frustrated with brazen open-air drug dealing, violent street crime, and rampant shoplifting, would beg to differ.

In a survey last fall, 71 percent of downtown residents polled said they felt less safe than they did at the start of 2024.

Almost all of the 320 people surveyed - 92 percent - described public safety in downtown Boston as an issue that is “very urgent” for City Hall to address, according to the survey by the Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association.

“It was a shocking finding - I didn’t expect it to be that high,” Rishi Shukla, the neighborhood association’s co-founder, told Contrarian Boston.

Rishi Shukla

The good news is that downtown residents and neighborhood leaders appear to have gotten the attention of city and state officials, with a big meeting set for next Thursday to brainstorm potential solutions.

Boston police have also shifted tactics and devoted more officers to dealing with some of these issues, Shukla said.

That said, the crime problem in downtown Boston is a serious one, with concerted attention from police, prosecutors and state and local elected leaders needed make progress, he said.

In the survey, downtown residents cited a number of specific concerns, from a vacant store on Winter Street that is apparently a magnet for trouble to a “general undercurrent of lawlessness.”

Downtown Crossing/by Soe Lin

“Cars ignore traffic lights,” noted one downtown resident in a survey comment. “Homeless are getting more and more aggressive. Routinely find crack pipes and needles at the front door or around the area. Nobody seems to care because laws are not enforced.”

Shukla, head of the downtown neighborhood association, said Boston’s progress in reducing homicides and other major violent crimes is real, adding it’s “healthy to celebrate all time lows in homicides and violent crime.”

But, the city’s crime statistics aren’t capturing all that is happening downtown.

“You can’t have a neighborhood without safety,” Shukla said. “You can build buildings, but nobody is going to live here or do business here if they don’t feel safe.”

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