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Date: 11/7/2023
HOLYOKE — Mayor Joshua Garcia has announced and released a public safety plan — “Ezekiel’s Plan / Operation Safe Streets” — named after the unborn child who died Oct. 4 in a shooting incident on Maple and Sergeant Streets.
Ezekiel’s mother, who was eight months pregnant, was struck by a bullet fired during a shooting incident in Holyoke. The mother is now recovering from her injuries and has returned home with Ezekiel’s father.
“Holyoke is a compassionate city but that commitment to compassion and social justice must be balanced against our responsibility to provide for the safety and well-being of our citizens,” Garcia stated in the plan’s Executive Summary. “As mayor, I have an obligation to address issues such as violence, illegal activity, and health and safety disparities that have a negative impact on neighborhoods.”
The mayor’s comprehensive plan calls for $1 million in new spending, “to launch a comprehensive approach” that focuses on police enforcement, foot and bike patrols, hiring 13 additional police officers, installing a citywide surveillance camera system that functions in conjunction with ShotSpotter, increasing inspection of rental properties, tenant and neighborhood protection strategies, creating the post of Homeless Liaison/Housing Navigator, and strengthening neighborhood outreach and engagement.
Garcia spoke with Reminder Publishing about the plan and how he hopes it will work to combat violent crime in the city and improve quality of life concerns in neighborhoods. The mayor noted that this plan had been in the works, but with the recent tragedy it was time to officially get it out into motion.
Garcia said efforts were already being made in terms of bringing the Police Department to capacity, establishing what a community response model would look like as far as tenant protection and rights, as well as the upgrading of the citywide camera surveillance system. This new plan brings these efforts together as well as additional resources to law enforcement in direct response to the Oct. 4 incident.
“A lot of the proactive strategies that the community has been talking about, what will it take to jump start it? So that’s where Ezekiel’s Plan came forward where we said we can take a million dollars to have the flexibility we need to get these things off the ground as other funding sources become available in the near future,” Garcia explained.
Garcia explained one example of a direct response to the most recent incident is the State Street Task Force division on the Police Department will become a special assigned unit within the department focused on targeting violent crime in different neighborhoods throughout the city. He added it would be a supplemental group to the regional task force work already ongoing in the city in conjunction with the District Attorney’s office.
Garcia said this group being formed is solely focused on Holyoke borders and will work hand in hand with other partners and law enforcement through its work.
While the mayor said the plan is heavily on the enforcement side of things, community policing is still a part of it. Garcia said that currently the law enforcement system is designed to be reactive and it is a reactive service when it comes to police response. In budgeting, the police are covered for general coverage and response, but in order to add additional officers on staff and doing detail work in the streets, funding from this plan is needed.
“This fusion of cash for 12 months is going to give us the flexibility we need to actually do the proactive preventative work. Right now, we are reactionary, we respond when the incident happens, but this plan is going to help us avoid incidents from happening to begin with at minimum,” Garcia said. “Issues are going to happen one way or another, but I want to do as much as I can to avoid as much of them as possible from happening to begin with.”
Garcia added he hopes the plan, while heavy on law enforcement, can also introduce proactive strategies that can help resolve blight and other issues before they become bigger problems that often lead to or attract illegal activity, violence and homelessness.
The mayor also explained when it comes to bringing in a new and updated citywide surveillance camera system it was “not aimed at, nor is it intended to, abridge the Constitutional rights of any citizen,” and any new resources for the city coming out of this plan were to address the problems associated with drug trafficking and associated violence throughout the city as well as to improve housing and neighborhood conditions.
Garcia said the updating and adding of more cameras was being used as a deterrent and catching up with modern tech where they can. He explained the city already has 30 citywide cameras but only a handful are still operational and the system all together was over 20 years old, according to Garcia.
“What we’re going to be doing is upgrading and replacing all of those cameras with newer technology and then we’re adding 10 additional,” Garcia said.
Garcia said he sat down with the Police Department and looked at a city map to identify which areas need upgrades, which areas could use new cameras and to make sure they add a camera to every entry point in and out of the city. He added the new tech would not be anything related to facial recognition technology and does not read license plates, it would just be an improved system to find surveillance of where an incident might have happened and have a better way of tracking involved parties to a crime throughout the city.
The camera system getting upgraded will also assist in the city’s ShotSpotter system as the two are tied together. Garcia explained when a shot is fired, the nearest camera system, if within the visual path of the reported shot, will be activated and will follow a suspect through other city cameras as they leave the scene. This will assist in investigating and resolving reported shots from the ShotSpotter system.
“It helps so that law enforcement as they respond, they’re not going a different way,” Garcia explained. He added public knowledge of a new camera system in connection with ShotSpotter should also “hopefully” deter criminal activity in public.
Currently funding for the upgraded and new citywide cameras is in committee waiting for approval at a $256,000 price. This is included in the $1 million tag of the total plan.
Garcia plans to introduce his entire public safety plan to the Holyoke City Council at a special meeting to take place later this month. Funding for the plan’s initiatives will be drawn from a range of sources, including the city’s American Rescue Plan Act funds, Capital Stabilization, Opioid Settlement funds and local appropriation. The City Council will have to approve the plan and allocate funding for it following Garcia’s introduction of the plan at the future special City Council meeting.
The plan’s creation of a Homeless Liaison/Housing Navigator looks to strengthen neighborhood outreach and improving on quality of life concerns in different neighborhoods that often lead to criminal activity. Garcia explained often a solid portion of his work is focused on housing issues, a wide spectrum of issues from the lack of affordable housing to general homelessness issues.
“In the city of Holyoke, we have a lot of partners in the community doing the good work, and we don’t have a dedicated staff on the city side to help kind of cross coordinate with these partners and try and get a better handle on how we’re responding to needs,” Garcia said. “There are things like our Board of Health, our Fire Department, our Building Department, they’ll go into units and see certain conditions and so we’re reactionary. What we’re missing is kind of that middle guy to be the proactive one that helps people before they become problems. How do we create a system between the local government and property owners to better educate them on what their responsibilities are as far as conditions of units, before it gets to a point where they’re uninhabitable and we have to go in there and potentially displace that tenant.”
Garcia added they hope the implementation of a housing navigator would add to the efforts of being more proactive to the issues and concerns that lead to deterioration of quality of life within neighborhoods.
“What’s important for people to understand is the quality-of-life challenges and the criminal behavior that we face in a gateway city like Holyoke — We’re a compassionate city, and because of our compassion it does come with these challenges. These challenges are national and global problems,” Garcia said.
He added whether it is combating gun violence, the drug and opiate crisis, or the housing crisis, these are issues not unique to Holyoke but are on a state and national level. With that being said, Garcia said there is only so much a municipality like Holyoke can control themselves and that state or federal government intervention is needed to help addresses these issues.
“These are all issues that no local government on their own is going to be able to resolve by themselves, so I’m going to do what I can and just hope that our federal and state government really do a little more and try and help tackle these problems,” Garcia said. “I want at minimum the public to know that their local government does care about their safety and we are responding and we are doing everything in our power to help mitigate these issues from happening to begin with.”
Garcia continued, “I can only do so much on issues that have been a problem for a very long time, and there are issues I know we can do better as a country to resolve. It’s just our state and federal delegation taking a stronger position on these different issues. Whether its drug and opioids, or gun issues, housing issues, I think those are the three pillars right there that if we were doing a better job tackling, we might improve outcomes in gateway cities like Holyoke. But until then I’m limited, so I can only do so much. This plan is going to be one of my best attempts [at combating these issues] and hopefully we don’t come across another incident such as this one where you had someone riding on a publicly funded transportation system. It kills me every time thinking about it. That shouldn’t be happening on any street anywhere. So, it’s important that the public knows and understands that the local government here is responding and doing what we can but there’s a bigger callout here to people much bigger than me.”
Garcia added Holyoke is “more progressive than so-called progressive communities” as when others are saying no, Holyoke opens its doors with compassion.
“These are humans and people with issues that are going through some challenges, come over here,” Garcia said. “In a lot of ways, we’re strong partners with our state government. Every program and opportunity they’ve introduced to help people navigate problems, Holyoke says we’ll help. Because of that level of compassion its created different layers of challenges that we are having a hard time keeping up with.”
Garcia said he is always proud to be Holyoke’s mayor and to represent such a welcoming community but if the city is to continue this work, state or federal assistance will eventually be needed to close some gaps.
“That means keeping guns of our streets, helping us build more housing units for people that need market rate or workforce housing, and it also means giving us the resources we need to keep these drug and opiate problems off our streets,” Garcia said.