Man robbed at knifepoint in Allston park

Have to agree the method of policing is far too responsive rather than preventive. Sadly the concept of the beat cop seems to have vanished, with patrol cars not meeting the needs of the community.

They should divide D-14 [and other districts or precincts] into evenly sized chunks based on the number of on-duty officers they have during a shift. Then said police should patrol those zones, on foot if possible. I have no idea how many officers are on duty in a shift in a given district, but surely there are enough that no one officer need cover more than a half dozen to a dozen blocks. They could make the assignments static if they feel one person the community would get to know is of more use. Or they could rotate assignments to keep down issues of complacency or corruption. Then have a small number of armed response units that can be called in to bolster or respond as back up where needed.

Instead one typically sees almost no police on the street until after something occurs then they all come running and you see 20 cars in one block, while meanwhile the rest of the precinct goes unwatched.

The point is to use a mix of foot or bike patrolmen that have set beats in problematic areas - if not all areas, supported by a small number of motorized response teams for when backup or 911 calls come in. When you are driving in traffic you don't have the ability to look all over the place, down every side street and alley and yard they way you can when walking.
For example, Ringer park is impossible to patrol by car. The few street facing ends of the park are about 10 feet wide, with the vast majority of the park hidden behind buildings from the street. You need to go on foot to patrol the park. Crimes don't rarely occur there. They occur there every day, every night. If not a mugging then heroin sales and use.

Cameras are not an effective crime deterrent. A savvy criminal would just find the blind spots and even when filmed a crime can only be followed up on, not prevented in the first place. And from the CCTV views police always show when seeking a suspect, they're pretty undecipherable. If CCTV prevents crimes from occurring in the first place, why are there so many bank and store robberies?

By placing foot patrols in areas that have high incidences of crime, such that the criminals know the police may be present at any given moment or are just a shout away, they know they will not get away with committing a crime. You state this would just mean they go elsewhere, but the point is to cover everywhere so there is no where for them to go. Instead of giving the police money for more assault rifles, which thankfully Walsh seems to be disinclined to do, use that same money for hiring if more police are needed to cover our geographically tiny city. But the ones we have now cluster and isolate themselves too much. They should spread out and get out of their cars more so they can actually be a presence.

around doing nothing/watching people fill potholes? Please.

I think it's kind of funny that whenever the question of police details come up, the police claim that this increases public safety by having officers out in the streets where they can (occasionally) respond to some crime that's happening in the immediate vicinity of the work site they're assigned to. And, yes, anecdotally, this does happen occasionally, although I suspect that the overall percentage of traffic details that result in incidental arrests is probably pretty small.

Yet, when it's suggested that officers walk the streets as part of their *job*, this is completely useless, and won't contribute to public safety in any possible way.

I DON'T KNOW DID YOU GOOGLE IT??