By Dalia Diaz
On Friday, March 23, 2019 a new Wikipedia page was added to the site. The page was a biography or autobiography of Mayor Dan Rivera. Usually, Wikipedia does not see biographies written for Mayors. Those biographies are mostly for Senators or Congresspersons. But there it was. I want to note that Wikipedia is very serious about people writing its own page. The site states that “that whitewashing is not allowed, and that the conflict of interest (COI) guideline limits your ability to edit out any negative material from an article about yourself.” It’s all there on Wikipedia’s page of nobility. But you can add to such page. We thought we include some of the things that were not into Mayor Rivera’s Wikipedia page in this article.
When he took over City Hall it was with a zero-tolerance undertaking. Mayor Rivera’s political group from Mount Vernon and the alliance of non-profits, were crying out for tougher policing, yet the crime-fighting tools he employed could potentially run the risk of alienating the very people he was seeking to help. He has implemented and stop-and-frisk searches for drugs or weapons by demanding that each police officer stop or run license plates as a quota, and in the process has cooperated with ICE even though the City of Lawrence is a sanctuary city. He has placed security cameras in places inside the City that have the potential to violate the resident’s privacy.
He has, for most of the last three years stated that he has taken over a Police Force that was seeking to drive down crime while transforming a department crippled by scarce and low morale. However, those same morale issues continue from officers that have department seniority and have lack of inclusion of training and assignments. Rivera tells you what you want to hear which is he is working to help solve or reduce crime for you, but he has taken drastic measures that violate your rights, privacy, and security by allowing implementation of programs that allow federal agents to piggy-back on the Lawrence Police departments strategy. He is a police monitor that has alienated the police union as they have had no contract for more than 46 months.
There is a failure in the LPD and that failure, in large part, is to a reliance on imperfect data, imperfect measures, that erroneously shows complaints going down. The only data that cannot be fixed is deaths and shootings. Every other data that is collected by LPD can, and is, minimize to show good or great numbers. Cutting crime and being seen as cutting crime, is two very different things.
Graffiti is still even more relevant that it was 8 years ago. Traffic violations are worse than ever, with vehicles blocking intersections, running red lights, trampling over pedestrians, speeding near school crosswalks, parking at the very near edge of corners, double parking on very busy streets, and the overwhelming amount of trash located on streets, parks, sidewalks, and dealing with the devastating amount of syringes in our parks and streets. These are some of the very basic crime reducing strategies that make a city clean, great and accommodating to its residents. I am not talking about the broken window policy, but about a policy and strategy of educating our residents (and children), creating groups to put a plan together and utilizing the city’s labor force smarter and strategic.
I can certainly see that community relations have improved. The approach on the streets is meant to be constructive. But it is also political. For some districts, the quality-of-life issue was the most important thing but the tactics are seen as fear mongering. The city, but mostly Mayor Rivera, is paying his way out of these problems with city funds, but not changing police tactics or union relations issues. He has been utilizing the city coffer to pay our settlements and/or lawsuits that could have otherwise gone to do better things for the budget and for its people.
Police dashboard cameras would have been a better fit. Cameras on Police Officers are a better fit. This way the people of Lawrence, its residents, could evaluate the law enforcement strategies. In a city where the police force still skewed whiter than the population, demands for an independent police monitor are ignored, even when there is a Public Safety Committee of the City Council. We, residents, don’t have a report card that we can grade the work of our law enforcement.
The LPD is still a department that is just devastated by a lack of resources, lack of investment, with a lack of professionalism in terms of the way politics ruled in the department. They deserve a 21st-century police station and a 21st-century police chief.
Mayor Rivera has taken over the practical detail of media-grabbing derring-do. He is (or his staff) is skilled at public relations, but the substance is not there.
What Lawrence requires is a citizen-led police oversight panel will help us to make Lawrence a model for police-community trust, respect, cooperation and, ultimately, safety. I don’t see that happening because Mayor Rivera does not feel Lawrence residents are smart enough to run a school committee and therefore are not smart to run a police oversight panel. So get your education people (college degrees) so you can fit snuggly into these politicians’ vision of who should be running these committees. After all, Rivera has the same vision for this city, as many of these non-profits: Gentrification.
U.S. unemployment is down and jobs are going unfilled, but not for Lawrencians. For people without much education, the real question is, when is Mayor Rivera going to ensure that MassHire prepares our residents with the skills that are necessary for Lawrencians to get jobs? He is not for a particular reason: Gentrification.
Mayor Rivera does not care about his people; he cares about his city’s reputation. There is a difference. This is evident when he and a group of his supporters kept stating how awful the Boston Magazine had written about Lawrence. If you take the first paragraph of that article: Crime is soaring, schools are failing, the government has lost control, and Lawrence, the most godforsaken place in Massachusetts, has never been in worse shape. And here’s the really bad news: it’s up to controversial Mayor William Lantigua to turn it all around.”
The same can be said that it has not turned around under Mayor Rivera (2nd term mayor). Schools are still under an oversight board, the government is still under an overseer, the city still in bad shape, a disaster occurred which left the city worse off that it was and its streets are infested with potholes or un-drivable streets and un-walkable sidewalks.
Nevertheless, Mayor Rivera still has time to pay someone to create his Wikipedia page like he is some sort of hero in this community. It’s like I stated earlier, he has a good public relations program but has no substance. He’s like a big fat bodega cat; looks pretty, but just sits there.
