Tearing down Mass and Cass encampment only spread its problems into surrounding neighborhoods, residents, business owners say

In the year since city police and public-works crews cleared out a growing encampment of homeless people and drug users on Atkinson Street, Mass and Cass has seen a significant decrease in crime and quality-of-life problems, officials from Boston's police and public-health departments told city councilors at a hearing by the council's committee on public safety and criminal justice.

But from parents on Beacon Hill and in the South End, to the owner of the South Bay Mall and down to Andrew Square, people say the city only pushed all of the intersection's problems onto them.

Needles are still showing up in such great quantity at Clifford Park that the local Pop Warner program continues to have problems completing a season there. An executive at the company that owns the South Bay Mall says it's been forced to spend millions of extra dollars on police overtime and security - even as it pulls out benches and water fountains and its tenants bar public use of their restrooms.

City Councilor Ed Flynn, who lives in Andrew Square, said it's time to add "federal involvement in law enforcement" to help a beleaguered BPD deal with the ongoing crisis. He did not specify just what sort of federal boots on the ground he meant.

Several people who testified at a hearing said it's time to abandon the city's current policy of merely offering services to addicts who roam the streets, leaving behind needles, stealing packages and breaking into homes and moving towards a sterner "mandated treatment" system in which people could be forced into treatment programs - not prisons but recovery campuses, like the one long promised to be returned to Long Island - because as awful as those people's own personal hells might be, residents have a right to clean, safe streets.

David Stone, a longtime South End resident, says he now notices the effect of the end of the Mass and Campus encampment daily on his East Blackstone Street block - including the de facto conversion of an underutilized garage into a "a place to take a break while shuffling around the neighborhood" that is now littered with drug paraphernalia, the remnants of stolen packages, clothing and sometimes human waste.

And increasingly, he said, he sees somebody "rough sleeping" on a Harrison Avenue sidewalk, "flat on his back or face."

"It didn't used to be this way" and was rare even just two or three years ago, he said. "Now, everyone just walks on by, including me, quite frankly, but realistically, what can we do?" he asked, adding that by the time help might arrive from a 311 call, the person might have stumbled awake and left.

Stone said that other places, which consider themselves as progressive and enlightened as Boston, are stepping back from the "harm reduction philosophy," which offers but does not require treatment and moving to an "intervention first model" - even British Columbia, which pioneered centers where addicts could shoot up under the eye of medical professionals.

Stone acknowledged he has "a privileged life," one that has nothing like the pain and suffering of people in the throes of addiction. But at the same time, one can't say that "large amounts of drug use" and the property crimes and other problems it brings isn't harming the community, because it is."

Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, and BPD Deputy Superintendent Dan Humphries, both said statistics show that the encampment break-up worked at Mass and Cass - overall crime in that area is down 27%, and robberies down 25%, Humphries said.

But Ojikutu acknowledged that while the city has stepped up its overall work getting addicts into treatment, it's still falling short on long-term programs to get them into recovery that will help them stay off drugs once they've gone through detox. And Humphpries acknowledged that "if people don't feel safe, [a statistic] doesn't mean anything."

Both also said they recognize the spreading out of the problem and that the city is shifting to deal with it.

Humphries said that BPD now sends extra patrols into areas where new, smaller encampments or just groups of roaming addicts have sprung up. As an example, he pointed to West Cottage Street into Nubian Square - where people have reported an increase in drug use and trafficking.

"The work is ongoing," he said. "We see clear progress from where we were a year ago."

BPHC's Coordinated Response Team, which oversees overall city efforts for the homeless and the addicted, is shifting its focus from Mass and Cass to areas across the city.

Domingos DaRosa, who runs the Boston Bengals youth-football program and has long been active in efforts to clean up Clifford Park, near Mass and Cass, praised city workers as doing the best they can to deal with problems, but demanded to know what councilors and other city officials would actually do, because from his perspective, things haven't gotten any better. He noted that the city officials who spoke first at the hearing all left before residents actually testified - and that the council scheduled its hearing for 10 a.m., when few working people could attend or watch.

"Nothing has changed in two years," said Marla Murphy Smith, part of a family that has now lived on Shirley Street, near Clifford Park, for 100 years. She said her daily commute on foot still includes "blood urine, feces, vomit, trash, food waste and so on" and that Clifford Park has become "a lawless no man's land" full of addicts using and selling drugs, having knife fights and open sex, including with prostitutes.

"The system that has failed the Black and Brown community yet again," she said, adding she and her neighbors have to put up with bicycles and even patio cushions constantly being stolen and watching their insurance rates go up because their cars keep getting broken into.

"How much more is Roxbury going to be asked to shoulder so more affluent Zip codes can pretend this is not also their problem?" she asked. "What happened to 'one Boston?' "

But one Beacon Hill resident said the problem has spread there as well.

Catherine Kennedy, who has lived on Beacon Hill for ten years and now has two children, one just six months old, said Cambridge Street, the Esplanade and the Common are now "overrun with drug paraphernalia or folks in crisis" and that she now goes outside with "a sharps container in my diaper bag.

"Average citizens need their homes and public spaces to be safe, she said. Those addicted to drugs need "high-support environments with guardrails," and letting them mix with families, seniors and others "is failing both groups."

Ryan Leeming, vice president of development of Edens, which owns South Bay, says the mall - which grew from the original big-box center to include a collection of smaller stores and restaurants - has been having an "ongoing issue" ever since the Long Island Bridge was shut for safety reasons in 2014, and that things have gotten way worse since last year's Mass and Cass tent removal, as people forced out of that area migrated down to the mall, "people looking for refuge, looking to hide or evade, to maybe just sleep, to simply find rest, or maybe, drug use."

He said in the past year, the mall has seen an increase in everything from loitering to altercations and other crimes. Just last night, a man was stabbed in the parking lot between the Applebee's and the Stop & Shop.

To try to stem problems, he said, the mall and its tenants have been forced to do things that reduce Edens' goal of making the mall "a safe community space" for the surrounding area. The mall has removed furniture, power outlets and access to water, while tenants have locked bathrooms, he said.

He added Edens has had to increase its operating budget "by millions of dollars annually" to pay for extra security. "We take as much overtime as BPD will give us," he said.

Linda Zablocki, president of the Andrew Square Civic Association, said her neighborhood has been seeing way more issues and crimes involving addicts - they're hanging out on people's stairs, breaking into garages and leaving behind litter, food waste and ripped-open packages she said.

She said it's vital for the city to invest more in long-term answers, because addiction is a disease, one that doesn't go away after just 30 days in detox - and to get people into these programs even if they don't want to go.

"We as a civilized society have an obligation to make choice for those who are not physically and mentally able to do so," she said.

Peter Barbuto, head of the Gavin Foundation, which provides substance-abuse programs, said he's a a strong believer in Section 35 - the Massachusetts legal provision that lets a judge commit somebody to a treatment program. "We need to make decisions for them," because addicts are often "just not thinking right" and actively resist something that could help them,

Sue Sullivan, president of the Newmarket Business Association, whose commercial members have long borne the brunt of Mass and Cass issues, praised Mayor Wu's decision to try to end encampments there.

She said that in addition to removing the people who were causing problems for her members, the dispersal of people with substance-abuse problems into the rest of the city actually had a couple of benefits, starting with making it easier for city outreach workers to get people into detox, because people in the smaller groups now wandering nearby neighborhoods are simply easier to convince to get help, "not like in groups of 20 or 30 or 50."

And she said, the needle-pickup program her group has expanded from Newmarket Square to areas such as Nubian and Andrew squares and Ramsay Park has seen a 50% decrease in the number of needles over the past six weeks.

But like residents, she said the city simply has go get a "recovery campus" up and running, whether on Long Island, where the city of Quincy keeps losing court and regulatory battles to stop the bridge, or somewhere else.

"We don't need it six years from now, we need it today," she said, also calling for more of an emphasis on "mandatory recovery" programs.

BPD's Humphries got into a brief verbal tussle with City Councilor Erin Murphy (at large), who recounted getting called by a South Boston constitutent who was royally pissed that he was pulled over for a traffic infraction in the Old Colony Avenue rotary at 8 a.m. on Sunday even as he spotted at least five people shooting up around the rotary.

She said that when he asked the cop why he was getting cited for a traffic violation when there was actual drug use going on right there, the cop responded that the city has told officers to ignore drug use, but that in any case the DA and judges would just put them back on the street.

"We're not telling our people not to arrest people for open drug use, that's not happening," Humphries said.

Watch the hearing: