The City Council Committee on Public Safety held its first meeting since July to deliberate on months of hearing orders related to public safety initiatives and violence-prevention strategies with the Boston Police Department.

The room considered five separate hearing orders, including a collaborative citywide strategy for community safety, a Community-Based Summer Safety Plan, and a focus on the concentration of firearm violations in Roxbury, Mattapan, and North Dorchester. Discussion of the Summer Safety Plan comes months after the council called for a briefing following a series of shootings on Independence Day.

Despite its unanimous support, no briefing was held, and Committee Chair and Councilor At-Large Henry Santana scheduled this hearing for after Labor Day, weeks after a summer of high-profile violent crime.

BPD reported that crime is overall comparable to this time last year, with violent crime up only 2% but still lower than the five-year average. Reductions have been made in homicide, with slight decreases noted in sexual assault and robbery. Aggravated assault is up 5%.

Commercial and residential burglary fell by a combined 15% compared to 2025, with property crime down 1% overall.

Firearm violence is down 28% from last year despite only two fewer shooting victims than this time last year, but still down 19% from the five-year average. BPD officials shared that 40% of gun crimes now involve people on scooters – a term Deputy Superintendent of Investigative Services John Fitzgerald called a misnomer.

“More firearms are being taken off juveniles, because we’re doing more scooter enforcement,” he said. “We keep calling them scooters; they’re motorcycles. … It’s not a scooter problem, it’s a motorcycle problem.”

BPD reported that 289 of these vehicles and 515 guns were confiscated this summer.

Councilor Miniard Culpepper admonished BPD for relocating officers from their regular neighborhoods to provide security during World Cup Programming,

“Everybody’s down here for the World Cup, forgot all about the community, but that’s where the shootings were,” he said.

Fitzgerald said this was not the case and that district detectives were not moved from their neighborhoods.

The BPD Bureau of Community Engagement pushed back on claims made by Councilor Ed Flynn, who called himself “the only elected official in this city that advocates for the rank and file police officers,” said that officers were being forced to work mandatory 16 hour overtime.

“What I’m hearing from police officers is they’re struggling, and we just cannot sit here and not acknowledge that,” he said. “I don’t accept police officers working 16 hours a day. I don’t think residents do, either.”

Deputy Superintendent Nicole Grant responded that some officers have picked up double shifts, but doing so is mostly voluntary and officers are provided vacation and other time off during the summer months. Grant and the rest of the board said they did not have the number of BPD officers at this time.

Flynn held the line, saying officers increasingly feel pressured to work longer hours and that it is affecting their spouses and children.