HOLYOKE — Speaking to a crowd of almost 100 concerned community members packed into the cafeteria of the William G. Morgan Elementary School, Police Chief Manuel “Manny” Febo gave a candid assessment of the city’s violent beginning to 2020.
“It was alarming, it caught us off guard, it caught the community off guard, it was very, very unusual,” Febo told the audience on Jan. 24. “I’ve been on 25 years and it was probably the most violent 48 hours that we’ve seen here in Holyoke in a long time, if ever.”
Febo was referring to a string of at least six shootings, including two homicides, over the course of a week in mid-January. City police arrested two men who were charged with murder in connection with one of the shootings.
Several weeks after the shootings, it is still on the minds of city officials and local leaders wondering what can be done to prevent further violence.
At a Feb. 6 meeting of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, local leaders spent a long time discussing a topic overlooked in much of the news media coverage of the shootings: how it affects children and families in the neighborhoods where violence happened.
“My concern has been around what’s the leftover trauma for students and how they have to navigate on a day-to-day basis,” Morgan School Principal Steven Moguel told councilors.
Moguel was one of a range of community leaders at the meeting, including city councilors, Febo, state Rep. Aaron Vega, D-Holyoke, and schools Receiver Stephen Zrike. Others on hand were Edward Caisse of the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department, who heads the Holyoke Safe Neighborhood Initiative, and officials from OneHolyoke Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit that focuses on housing for low- and moderate-income city residents.
Moguel said that the main concern of school leaders was the safety of families walking to school. Inside the building, he said, people feel safe, though violence in the neighborhood and nearby also have ripple effects within Morgan’s walls, he noted.
“There is concern because there are 3- and 4-year-olds who know how to get into a lockdown procedure because they’ve been through it too many times,” he said.
After a lengthy discussion, including concerns about students walking to H.B. Lawrence Elementary School through areas hit hard by drug crime and violence, the committee decided to recommend that the city apply for a federal CORP grant to hire more officers for “community policing.”
The grant would cover 75% of the officers’ salaries for three years, with the expectation that the city would pay those full salaries and keep those officers on its force when the grant expires.
The committee also recommended that the city ask the district attorney for any funding available to provide additional activities for youth with an emphasis on programs for teens.
Increased programming for youth is something advocated by Israel Rivera, a community leader who grew up in the city’s Flats section and whose work mentoring young people in the city gained him an honor from the state Legislature’s Black and Latino Caucus in 2018.
Earlier in his life, Rivera spent time in prison and now works to counter stereotypes of ex-felons. He said he remembers what helped him as a young person — sports programs like open-gym nights and involvement in the Boys and Girls Club.
“We need to do more of that, have more kids involved in those types of programs with more mentors,” he said. “And the mentors don’t have to be college graduates.”
Rivera has helped lead many sports programs in the city and stressed that those kinds of activities bring the community together in a tighter bond.
“If they’re stronger, they know each other more, it’s easier to talk to each other, easier to have difficult conversations and easier to get past the political nonsense that causes issues sometimes,” he said.
Policing was also on the mind of city officials. During his meeting with community members at Morgan School in January, Febo told the group that the police department had “a pretty good handle” on the violence after he reached out to federal and state agencies, such as the FBI and the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department, to ramp up patrols.
“The rougher elements of the city, the gangs, (they) know that we’re out there,” he said, noting that some of the shootings were gang-related and that the city has a “gang problem.”
But Febo also noted that on the night when somebody fatally shot 21-year-old Jesus Otero Marrero on South Bridge Street, the department did not receive any calls from citizens in the area even though 10 shots were fired.
“That’s a problem,” Febo said. “I was certainly hoping as we went around the room to hear more community members here. It’s very, very important because it’s a partnership and we can’t do this alone.”
During the Public Safety Committee meeting on Feb. 6, Febo again noted the lack of calls after the shooting. One possible reason for the silence was offered by Michael Moriarty, the director of OneHolyoke CDC, which owns property near the recent shootings and whose staff member discovered the body of the second fatal shooting victim, Racquese Wright, 21, at 131 Sargeant St.
“We do have a sense that a lot of people in the neighborhood who are residents and have spoken to us about it, they’re desensitized to gunfire,” he said. “They don’t assume that that means somebody’s in grave danger and they hear it a lot. At some point, folks just disengage.”
In an interview with the Gazette, Febo said that although the city relies on federal and state authorities to help when there’s an uptick in violence, a longer-term solution would involve “building partnerships and relationships, not only with the community but other agencies.”
Programs like the Safe Neighborhood Task Force, he said, are an example of this relationship building and of community policing. On Tuesday, the City Council formally endorsed the recommendations of its Public Safety Committee, including to apply for federal funds for more officers to engage in community policing.
“It’s all really just building relationships with the community,” Febo said. “Really, it’s just different agencies coming together, to work together, to solve neighborhood crimes.”
Sitting at a table in his office on a recent morning at Holyoke City Hall, Mayor Alex Morse described the recent violence in the city as “incredibly unfortunate.” But Morse said he’s not lost on what he considers as “the big picture,” saying that city data shows Holyoke is the safest it’s been in nearly 20 years.
“It’s also important that we don’t lose sight of the progress we’ve made in public safety,” he said.
Morse commended the police department on its work but also said that a strategy of ramping up patrols in the wake of violence hardly addresses the many root causes of violence.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily effective to bombard the city and neighborhoods with additional police officers,” Morse said. “I don’t think there’s a direct correlation necessarily with putting a cop on every corner and crime going down.”
Morse highlighted the city’s work on preventative measures — for example, workforce development programs such as Roca, which provides jobs for at-risk young men in the city’s Department of Public Works, or foodWorks at Kate’s Kitchen, which gives culinary training.
He also pointed to a mobile community policing vehicle that police park in neighborhoods to pass out food and books in an attempt to change negative perceptions of police.
Morse said there is still progress to be made on the issues he said were “directly related” to the vast majority of crime: addiction and mental health.
Morse said his administration has invested grant money into opening an opioid overdose follow-up center on Race Street, and he mentioned a nearly $1 million grant over the next few years that will create a task force about opioid use while also expanding service and reaching out to community members with addiction.
“When I think about how we make our city safer and connect people with employment or education, other opportunities, those are the things that are going to make the most difference over time,” Morse said. “We live in a society where we want instant gratification — we want to be able to solve problems instantaneously. But this work is incredibly messy and difficult.”
According to Morse, the city had received $3 million in federal Community Development Block Grant funds in 1970 — money that is meant for affordable housing and anti-poverty work. But in 2020, that grant money has shrunk to $1 million, he said.
“We, as a country, haven’t prioritized programs and investments that will actually give people opportunity,” Morse said. “We spend a lot of time (thinking of) how do we invest in programs that react to the situations we have. And it gets played out in places like Holyoke.”
Vega, the city’s state representative, points to financial challenges neighborhoods and local governments face when trying to maintain community policing measures throughout the year. He said there needs to be a continued focus on including business leaders and city residents in places hit the hardest by the root causes of violence.
“People need to feel confident that if they do make a call they are going to be supported,” Vega said. “I think right now they don’t. I think right now there’s a lot of fear.”
Vega praised the Holyoke Safe Neighborhood Initiative and its focus on knocking on doors, saying that he thinks there’s been significant progress in South Holyoke. But in places like the Flats, there’s still work to be done, he said.
Vega also emphasized what he believes as the importance of continually educating people about addiction and mental health.
“It’s about getting those resources out to people,” he said. “If everyday people don’t have that information it doesn’t do any good.”
Some of those resources aren’t as plentiful or are not as readily available in the Valley as they are in eastern parts of the state, Vega said. One of the biggest challenges, he said, was continuing to legislate on Beacon Hill in a way that helps western cities like Holyoke. Vega pointed to the lack of detox beds in the region, as well as few bilingual therapists focused on children’s trauma, as examples of how money often does not trickle down to western Massachusetts.
“The Legislature puts forth good policies, but those resources don’t hit western Massachusetts enough,” he said.
Michael Connors can be reached at mconnors@gazettenet.com. Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.