BOYNTON GETS GRANT FOR ANTI-GANG TECHNOLOGY

Feds give city $465,860 to buy technology to track crime, share data.

BOYNTON BEACH — The federal government is giving Boynton Beach nearly a half million dollars to pay for police technology aimed at curbing the city’s rise in gang activity and drug overdoses, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced last month.

City police still are ironing out how they’ll use the $465,860, but spokeswoman Stephanie Slater said it will go toward buying technology to track crime in the city and allow the department to share that information with other police agencies.

In their application for the grant, police mentioned creating a realtime crime center to streamline information from their licenseplate readers and red-light cameras.

The city is one of 11 departments across the country — and the only one in Florida — to receive the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Technology Innovation for Public Safety grant, which awards millions of dollars to address “precipitous increases in crime.” Memphis, Tenn.; Houston; Toledo, Ohio; and Flint, Mich., are among the other cities that received money.

Though Boynton Beach saw a double-digit decrease in crime last year, the city saw homicides increase to 11 in 2017 from three in 2016, police pointed out in their grant application. That increase marked the highest reported homicide total Boynton Beach has seen since at least 2009, according to a Palm Beach Post database.

This year, two people have been killed in the city: Johnny Harp, 17; and Damas Ilceus, 21.

All of the killings since 2016 have involved guns.

Police blamed the “dramatic increase” in killings, in part, on a rise in gangs battling over who can sell drugs and where.

Those same reported gang members were involved in most of the gun-related calls officers fielded in late 2017, according to the application. Police counted nearly 90 such incidents from October 2017 to January.

Police would neither specify which gangs they were referencing in the application nor comment on how many gangs and members they have documented within the city limits. Slater cited “several ongoing criminal investigations involving various gang members” as to why they wouldn’t.

A man arrested last month told city police he was a member of

the Top 6 gang and threatened to send other members of the violent street gang to the officers’ homes. Slater wouldn’t comment on the man’s alleged ties to the gang, which law enforcement called the most dangerous street gang in Palm Beach County years ago.

Top 6 was among the gangs whose “wars” rocked the south-central part of the county about a decade ago with drugs and gun violence. On Christmas Eve 2006, gang feuds led to a fatal shooting at the Boynton Beach Mall, police say. Wilson Pierre Jr. is serving 40 years in prison for the incident.

In the years following that public killing, many top gang leaders were arrested on federal racketeering charges, quelling the groups’ hold on the area, at least for a time.

“I’m afraid now (gang violence is) maybe starting to trend back toward that,” said city Commissioner Joe Casello. “Hopefully, we can try to break that cycle.”

This year, officers focused on identifying and targeting those “known violent and armed offenders,” according to the grant application. They made 100 arrests, recovered 20 guns and seized 157 grams of heroin.

It didn’t make a dent.

Police said the number of opioid-related overdoses stayed steady. The drugs kept flowing into the city.

Police have explained that if a dealer is taken off the streets, someone will quickly take his place.

City leaders hope a more seamless distribution of crime data will help law enforcement across the county control the violence and influx of opioids.

“I definitely feel that this technology grant will help us move into the 21st century,” Mayor Steven Grant said. “I wish it were for better reasons.”