'This isn't us': How a shooting in Mattapan retraumatized a neglected community

As fireworks thundered from the streets of Mattapan into the early morning sky on Wednesday, police responded to reports of multiple people shot in the area of Edgewater Drive and River Street. Five victims were transported to area hospitals with non–life threatening injuries, according to a Boston Police spokesperson, and three suspects were arrested on gun charges.

Residents and leaders in Mattapan immediately reeled in shock and frustration, anticipating the inevitable consequential narrative.

“The only time Roxbury, Dorchester or Mattapan get attention is when there’s a shooting,” said the Rev. Clementina Chéry, president of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute.

Despite generations of anti-violence strategies and often-overlooked community initiatives, Chéry said every incident of violence adds to the prevailing narrative about these neighborhoods being "dangerous." And, she said, the city has not done enough to intervene.

“What else do we as a community need to do? Because I am tired of you telling me that my neighborhood is a neighborhood where bad things happen,” she said. “It is so painful, and it's very dehumanizing, and it's very disrespectful. It's not who we are.”

Chéry said incidents like the Fourth of July mass shooting capture more attention than others, but the violence — and the response to it — is not new.

According to data from the Boston Police Department, violent crime in the city is primarily concentrated in three neighborhoods: Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan. The city has seen 56 shootings since January of this year, just under the 63 that occurred during the same period last year. But this year there have been more than double the fatalities: 16 people killed, compared to seven last year during the same time period.

“People are afraid and concerned, and they say it all the time, but we are dismissed,” Chéry said. “We have plenty of programs to help, but they aren’t working. There is no accountability.”

In 2011, then Mayor Thomas Menino launched a youth violence prevention plan aimed at "long term reduction" in violent crime involving young people. Former Mayor Marty Walsh declared violence prevention a "top priority" of his administration in 2014 and was invited to speak about his efforts two years later at the White House. During her brief stint as mayor in 2021, Kim Janey rolled out a summer violence prevention plan aimed at increasing services while "highlighting the existing gaps in services and funding within Boston’s current reality in the neighborhoods."

"All of these plans are not sustainable, because whoever comes in starts all over again and just calls it something different," Chéry said. "I trust [Mayor Wu], and will I believe in her. I believe in this commission. But we just have work to do, to dig a little deeper and ask ourselves what success really looks like."

In May, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced a Summer Safety prevention program aimed at expanding summer youth programs and connecting communities to trauma resources, including a $100,000 investment in “Save R Streets” grants to prevent an uptick of violence over the summer. Isaac Yablo, the city’s senior advisor for community safety, will award the grants to community organizations, and is working on a larger “violence prevention framework” to reduce violent incidents across the city. Through the city’s involvement in a new cohort program with the University of Maryland’s Violence Reduction Center, Wu announced a goal to reduce homicides by 20% in Boston within the next three years.

While many of the city's efforts are focused on warm-weather months, during an episode of "Java With Jimmy" with host James Hills on Wednesday, Wu cited a report from the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute that debunked the belief that crime only spikes in the summer.

“Yes, each season has different challenges and different factors and stressors, but this really has to be a year-round effort of all-hands-on-deck to eliminate violence in our communities,” Wu said.

Programs are great, says Chéry, who partners directly with the city and says she’s “hopeful” about future change. But she wants more follow-up to assess if the city's efforts are actually working.

In order to genuinely address violence in Boston’s most affected neighborhoods, city and state leaders need to address larger systemic issues that lead to crime, says Greater Mattapan Neighborhood Council chair Fatima Ali-Salaam.

That means dedicating resources to issues like poverty, access to food, housing insecurity, homelessness, accountability for illegal gun activity and access to dependable public transportation.

“We know it doesn't happen in a vacuum, but it’s taken almost 100 years for somebody to decide that they’re going to fix Blue Hill Avenue,” she said, referencing a project that has undergone years of deliberation and debate. “We have huge systemic failures at every level, and we have to deal with it. No more kicking the can down the road.”

Ali-Salaam has lived in Mattapan for 50 years, where she says she’s always felt safe as a part of a neighborhood that works together in community gardens, conducts regular cleanups along the Neponset River and looks out for one another as a collective.

A stroll through Mattapan leads to multiple garden plots operated by the Urban Farming Institute, an historic nonprofit that provides discounted or free fresh produce to the community. Through a partnership with the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation, members of Mattapan’s Edgewater Neighborhood Association are working to create a walking path along the Neponset River. In April, the Boston Food Forest Coalition launched a program to convert vacant lots into public gardens, opening a Mattapan site on Edgewater street, a few blocks from the site of Wednesday morning’s shooting.

“This work is overshadowed by violent incidents that happen, and it’s extremely frustrating how it paints this broad brush that has a long-lasting, negative impact," said Ali-Salaam. “But we do have to realize that no one group, no one agency is going to be able to solve it singularly. It will have to be a collective push and a will to just do it, because a lot of things are falling apart around us and no one can do it alone."

Vivien Morris, chairperson of the Edgewater Neighborhood Association, said community organizations need more resources to develop “a deeper understanding of the difficulties that are being faced by families in a community” and work to address them.

“We want people to continue to be outside with one another and build relationships so that we can be stronger together,” she said. When violent incidents occur, “there’s always an impact on people who live here, whether it’s sadness, fear, depression or impacts on our mental health … people become afraid to go outside and be in community.”

The fight against normalization and social nihilism around crime requires a meaningful and financial response from city leadership, Morris says, and a community that stands together and won’t be ignored.

“We need better plans to address the impact so this doesn’t happen again, so that we can make even better changes as a neighborhood,” she said. “Those things build both a stronger community and a stronger city.”