SITE OVERVIEW ♦ CHELSEA | MASSACHUSETTS
Target Area: Chelsea Police Department Sector 4 • Population: 16,594
Fiscal Agent: City of Chelsea Police Department
Research Partner: University of Massachusetts Lowell
Crime Concerns: Violent crime
BCJI Funding Year: 2017 Planning and Implementation
Neighborhood Profile
Chelsea, Massachusetts is a small city of 37,804, located just across the Mystic River from Boston. The BCJI’s target area in Chelsea is the City of Chelsea’s Police Department’s Sector 4, which encompasses the city’s busy and traditional downtown, including the Broadway Corridor with two key public squares, and an abutting dense residential neighborhood. Chelsea suffered from many foreclosures and a precipitous drop in home values during the recession, and the majority of the housing stock in Sector 4 is substandard. Vacancy rates in two target area Census tracts are higher than city norms.
While violent crime rates dropped citywide from 2014 to 2105 in Chelsea, in Sector 4 and the Broadway Corridor the rates have increased. In those two years, 55 percent of all crime citywide and 64 percent of violent crime occurred in Sector 4. Chelsea Thrives, a program launched in 2014 that coordinates a continuum of evidence-based and innovative strategies to address crime in the city, has identified four key drivers of crime in Chelsea:
- High incidences of substance abuse and trauma.
- Low social cohesion and civic engagement due to a transient population and many immigrant families who are unfamiliar with U.S. civic systems.
- A lack of positive youth opportunities to counter high levels of at-risk youth and gang engagement.
- A poor physical environment, including unsafe public spaces and aging, dense and overcrowded housing: In 2014, the City estimated that more than 500 apartment units had rooms rented to separate families or groups of adults.
Planning Process
The BCJI grant leverages an existing two-year Department of Justice investment in Chelsea: a $1 million OJJDP Safe and Thriving Communities grant that began in 2016 that focuses on building community capacity to increase youth protective factors. Chelsea Thrives also plans to use the resources of the BCJI grant with the City’s redesign and redevelopment of Bellingham Square, a notorious center city crime hot spot, to decrease loitering, deter drug trafficking and prostitution, and improve pedestrian safety and traffic flow. The BCJI grant can provide complementary problem-oriented policing and social service supports:
- Increase evidence-based community policing at crime hot spots and engage target area residents and businesses in safety programming.
- Facilitate improvements to business practices and storefronts to make the commercial district more inviting, such as assistance to access a new façade improvement loan program, window treatments and clean streets.
- Activate the two public squares, which book-end the target area, with festivals and art-in-the-park events to increase pedestrian foot traffic that will, in turn, deter crime.
- Employ 25 at-risk youth to assist with maintaining target area public spaces, and refer isolated at-risk youth to the tested youth intervention model at the local youth development agency Roca, Inc.
- Support the Chelsea Hub to meet its mission of delivering coordinated interdisciplinary intervention services to individuals engaged in or impacted by crime when appropriate.
Other Key Partners
The City of Chelsea, The Neighborhood Developers, Roca, Inc., The Chelsea Collaborative and the Chelsea Chamber of Commerce
This web site is funded in part, through a grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Neither the U.S. Department of Justice nor any of its components operate, control, are responsible for, or necessarily endorse, this web site (including, without limitation, its content, technical infrastructure, and policies, and any services or tools provided).