Today is election day in the city of Boston, a good time to reflect on the successes, failures and potential of this city’s government.

Two years ago, when I was first elected, the theme that drove the mayoral and council elections was a sense that city government needed to get back to basics. Candidate Thomas Menino and numerous council candidates argued that city government needed to refocus its efforts on serving the city’s residents and concentrate on making the city a better place to live and do business.

Some saw these themes as conservative, but I think the better way of describing them is that they were non-ideological. The newly elected mayor and councilors for the most part espoused a pragmatic approach to government. The three issues that dominated the debate then are the same issues that dominate the debate now: crime, education and quality of life. So how is the city doing? The answer on each is, better, but not perfect.

Let’s start with crime, or put better, public safety. Over the last several years Boston has seen consistent, significant drops on reported crimes. Crimes against the person and against property are down. Some of the reasons for the drop are demographic. But credit is also due to the city.

When I first joined the Council, the number of police officers totaled 1,800—a near record low. For several years the city, hampered by a declining economy and tight tax revenues, had put a freeze on hiring police officers. As a result of attrition, the force complement had declined.

The Council and the Mayor reversed that. Beginning in 1994, new recruits were trained and put on the street. As of this writing, the force totals around 2,000. By January 1997, the police department expects to be at 2,300 officers.

At the same time, the police department began to implement its oft-promised neighborhood policing scheme. The general concept behind neighborhood policing is to keep officers assigned to one sector, or neighborhood, so that they become familiar with the area and so that the area’s residents become familiar with them. This is in sharp contrast to the old model, where police response was driven by 911 calls: when a call came in, the nearest available car went to the scene.

Under the old model, an officer could first be in the South End, then whiz over to Mission Hill for a second call, then zoom over to Back Bay for a third. In the new model, which is backed up by a revised 911 dispatch system, “sector integrity” is maintained, meaning that an officer stays in the same neighborhood.

Neighborhood policing does not necessarily mean the return to walking cops, but it does mean a new focus on trying to prevent crime by understanding a neighborhood rather than simply responding to crime calls after an incident has occurred.

Neighborhood policing is more manpower intensive, and will not be fully implemented until the 2,300 full-force complement is achieved. But even at today the concept is having a positive effect.

With all of this happening, why is it that most residents continue to say, statistics notwithstanding, that they do not feel safer? Over the last two years, I have had one car stolen and two car-related break-ins (versus none in my previous 37 years of life), so I write from a perspective that is sympathetic to this concern.

Part of the reason is that while crime may be down, the nature of much crime, particularly crimes reported in the press, is different. Crimes seem more random—typified by the shooting of a young girl playing in a Mission Hill playground. This creates a greater sense of fear. In addition, while crimes may be down, they still occur, as I can attest, at an unacceptably high rate. Finally, although we have a stronger police force now than we did two years ago, we still have a ways to go.

Where do we go from here? First, the city must maintain its commitment to increasing the police force to 2,300 and to fully implementing neighborhood policing. Second, we need as a city to change our attitudes about what is acceptable and what is not. Too frequently we tolerate graffiti, prostitution, public drinking and drug use, crimes that create a sense of disorder and fear in a community and that are the precursors of a rise in more serious crime. My feeling is that we need to move in the direction of zero tolerance of these behaviors, something that the Boston Housing Authority is advocating for in the city’s public housing projects.

Finally, we need as a city to address the root causes of crime: the extraordinary alienation and helplessness of principally poor kids. One solution to that, education, is the subject of next issue’s article.