A warning shot
Gun charges against 14-year-old may be a harbinger of what’s to come, some say
A 14-year-old Roxbury boy was arrested this week on gun charges — a potential harbinger, experts said, of a tense summer to come.
The boy was seen shooting a gun in the area of Tremont and Lenox streets in Roxbury on Wednesday before getting into the passenger seat of a black sedan, Boston Police said.
Just before 9 p.m., officers saw the car and stopped it on Annunciation Road, where the boy got out and ran into a building but was stopped and arrested after police found a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver on a window ledge, police said.
During the booking process, they said, officers found a plastic bag containing crack cocaine. They also obtained a search warrant for a building, where they found 101 rounds of ammunition, police said.
Both the 14-year-old and the car’s driver, Josman Romero Delgado, 19, of East Boston, were charged with unlawful possession of a firearm and unlawful possession of ammunition. The boy also was charged with possession of Class B drugs, police said.
Delgado was wanted on charges including assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon, aggravated assault and battery, breaking and entering, wanton destruction of property and threatening to commit a crime, police said.
While violent crime is down 30% in Boston, guns remain a persistent problem. As of Thursday, police received 185 calls reporting shots fired, compared to 157 over the same period in 2020. And so far this year, officers have made 108 firearm arrests, compared to 85 by this time last year.
“It’s always troubling when you see a young person using a firearm, but tragically, it’s not that unusual,” said former Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis, who now has his own security consulting company. “You need to punish them, but you also need to support them and surround them with services to get them away from the influences that caused them to pick up that gun.”
That will become increasingly more important, Davis said, as the weather warms up and more people are vaccinated and no longer holed up at home.
“One of the big red flags is the unemployment rate,” he said. “When people are unemployed or underemployed, the crime rate tends to go up.”
Domestic terrorism also is such a concern, Davis said, that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has called it a priority.
Police could also see more violence, he said, depending on the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis Police officer who killed George Floyd while a bystander videotaped it on her phone. Jury selection began on March 9.
Low morale in the wake of that killing and of calls to defund police departments, as well as fears about contracting the coronavirus, all have contributed to many officers taking a hands-off approach to crime, which has only contributed to its proliferation in some areas, particularly major cities, said Christopher Herrmann, a retired New York City Police Department crime analyst supervisor who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“When police have lower morale, we have lower police productivity,” Herrmann said. “All of that will lead to more crime.”