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☀️ Sunny and very slightly warmer, with highs in the 30s. Sunset is at 4:12 p.m.
There have been 31 people killed in homicides in Boston so far in 2025. That’s the second-lowest total in 20 years, but higher than last year, when the city recorded 24 people killed.
“When crime goes up and spikes upward, it tends to drop following that,” James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, told GBH’s Adam Reilly. “And when you have particularly low points, like we did last year, the tendency is to go up a little bit.”
Mayor Michelle Wu has called Boston “the safest major city in the country.” Data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association show a few other cities with lower homicides per capita, including San Francisco, Honolulu, El Paso, Fresno, Omaha, Tampa, Orlando, Salt Lake City and Mesa. Fox said that, superlatives aside, Boston does have fewer homicides and other violent crimes than most major American cities.
“I would say [Boston] is one of the safest cities,” he said. “There are a few like us that are safe at that level, and we’re one of the safest, and some years we are the safest.”
Four Things to Know
1. Police officers in Providence are still searching for the person who killed two students and injured nine others at Brown University on Saturday. Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said they detained someone over the weekend but released him because there was “no basis to consider him a person of interest.”
The Associated Press identified the two students killed as MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, 18, who was born in Uzbekistan; and Ella Cook, 19, from Birmingham, Alabama.
2. A woman from Chelsea is filing a federal complaint against ICE saying they smashed a window on her car and violently apprehended her in September. She was only released after local police and fire officials arrived and asked agents to check her identification. You can watch video from that day here. Hilda Ramirez Sanan, 50, is a green card holder. She said agents also held her 13-year-old son — a U.S. citizen with autism — against a fence while questioning him.
“My son feels sad. He’s afraid to leave, afraid to get into the car, the same car, saying, ‘I don’t know if those people will come back and hurt you, Mom,’” Ramirez Sanan said. “He gets up from nightmares screaming, ‘Don’t kill Mom, don’t do it,’ and sometimes we have to wake him up.”
3. Workers at the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s Office are reviewing 150 boxes of signatures, going page by page and line by line to determine which of the 12 ballot question campaigns met the requirement of 74,574 valid voter signatures to qualify for the 2026 ballot.
It’s “incredibly tedious work,” Secretary of State’s office spokesperson Deb O’Malley told the State House News Service. Campaigns that meet the signature requirement will be sent to the legislature, where lawmakers can choose to pass laws addressing the issues without sending them to voters. If the legislature doesn’t act on an issue, campaigns will have to collect an additional 2,429 signatures by June 17 to get their question on the ballot.
4. There’s some turmoil at the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, the independent public agency that runs the Thomas Michael Menino Convention and Exhibition Center (formerly known as the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center), the Hynes Convention Center, and other facilities: CEO Marcel Vernon Sr. resigned last week after 14 months in the role. He will receive a $500,000 separation payment.
Vernon’s attorney sent the organization’s board a letter accusing board chair Emme Handy, who also serves as chief financial officer of the Broad Institute, of using her position to improperly secure a refund for a canceled Broad Institute event. A spokesperson for the Broad Institute denied the allegation.
The rental market is cooling in Worcester, but not for everyone
After years of rising average rents in Worcester and 1,100 new, mostly luxury apartment units coming onto the market, real estate agents are noticing something they have not seen in a while: vacancies and stagnant rents.
“We’ve been doing rentals for pretty much over 10 years,” real estate agent Andrea Castinetti told GBH’s Sam Turken, who found dozens of vacant units at several new apartment complexes. “I’ve never seen it like this.”
But while there are plenty of options for renters with more money, landlords haven’t lowered prices enough for people with lower incomes to afford them. The average rent in the city is $2,100, according to Zillow — the same as this time last year.
“There’s a leverage play for certain tenants that did not exist prior,” real estate agent Brian Allen told Turken. “It’s only certain tenants. The average person who’s making $80,000 and needs a three-bedroom apartment has no leverage.”
Case in point: Worcester resident Courtney Miller moved into a three-bedroom apartment near Kelley Square when the rent was $1,000 a month. But the building changed hands, and her new landlord nearly doubled the rent to pay for renovations. In March, her rent is going up again — to $2,300. She told Turken she will probably sign a short lease and then look for a new place.
“We don’t need a three-bedroom, when it comes down to it. So we would probably look to downsize to something cheaper,” Miller said.
You can read Turken’s full story here.
Dig deeper:
-Only 1 in 7 Greater Boston renters can afford a starter home, new report finds
-Feds investigate Boston’s housing policies for discrimination against white people
-Boston Housing Authority delays funds to Section 8 landlords after lag in federal funding
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