The Worcester City Council took on the important task of staring at crime stats for nearly two hours on Tuesday, Feb. 24, both congratulating themselves for how wonderful they are and the police department for the statistics presented, which show reductions in crime in 2025.
The stage show reeked of a campaign commercial, full of very simple explanations that all, naturally, proved just how wonderful the police department is.
Councilor Kate Toomey, eager to continue to showcase she’s more a volunteer lobbyist for police unions than an at-large city councilor, won the kiss the ring contest, at one point saying that Chief of Police Paul Saucier created “miracles” in crime statistics while being around 60 officers short of the total the budget allocates to the department.
Nobody is upset about reductions in crime. The statistics presented by Chief Saucier are great news. Homicides down from 16 in 2024 to two in 2025. Other violent crime was down, as was property crime.
Saucier said the unit he began, which focuses on taking illegal guns off the street, seized 150 firearms in 2025. He also spoke about efforts in community policing, including a requirement for patrol officers to walk within the city and engage with residents as part of their shift. Those are good things.
With the exception of Councilor Khrystian King, who mentioned that crime statistics in the city are in line with national trends, there was no effort to contextualize the statistics.
Crime across the country trended downward in 2025. According to the Council on Criminal Justice, which tracks “13 violent, property, and drug offenses reported to police in American cities,” across 35 cities which provided homicide data, “the rate of reported homicides was 21% lower in 2025 than in 2024.” It also found that “reported levels of 11 of the 13 offenses covered in this report were lower in 2025 than in 2024; nine of the offenses declined by 10% or more.”
If we are to believe that the police are a primary force in preventing crime, rather than responding to reports of crime and arresting culprits, then why did some of the same councilors not criticize the department for the increase in homicides from six in 2023 to 16 in 2024? What happened between June 18 and June 21, 2025, when both homicides in the city occurred within a four-day span? Why did the police department allow this?
Nobody should ask those questions because they are equally ridiculous to the stage show put on Tuesday. Police departments can do some things to mitigate crime. A department cannot control the intentions of other human beings. To take the nearly endless variables that affect the occurrence of crime and boil it down to “police, good,” is just insulting.
Analysis Absent
In what should be surprising to no one, the council made no effort to evaluate the performance of the police department in any meaningful way. After all, some councilors in Mayor Joe Petty’s majority coalition inside the council actively participated in promoting Alex Jones level conspiracy theories about interns at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) writing its pattern and practice investigation report on the police department and imposter cops being the culprits that led to allegations of sexual assault in that report. Honest evaluation is not their agenda.
That’s the most infuriating part of the non-stop campaign run by some councilors. They are so busy proving their loyalty to police union officials for endorsement and campaign support, they have not even a remote interest in evaluating the effectiveness of the department in any meaningful way.
What does a meaningful evaluation look like?
I had no idea, so I dug in.. After a few hours, I came up with a series of meaningful metrics that would provide far more insight into the effectiveness of the department’s policing strategies. I have no doubt it is far from perfect, but it’s more effort than the Public Safety Committee of the Worcester City Council has put into the topic in over a decade.
I consulted the following:
- “Compstat: Its Origins, Evolution, and Future in Law Enforcement Agencies” by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance;
- “Measuring Community Trust” by the International Association of Chiefs of Police;
- “Measuring Performance in a Modern Police Organization” by Malcolm K. Sparrow, professor of public management at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University;
- “Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities” by the Proactive Policing Committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
- “PEEL assessments 2025-2027: Police effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy” by HMICFRS (UK)
Metrics that Matter
In each of these metric sets, reasonable analysis requires a rolling 12-month average, comparison to the same time frame in previous years, and broader historical data with breakdowns by district.
1. Safety Measured by Harm Caused
- Violence Trends: homicides, nonfatal shootings, aggravated assaults.
- Violence Hot Spots: Locations with repeat shootings, aggravated assaults, robberies, etc over multiple different time periods (ex. 12, 24, and 36 months). Is the list shrinking or growing?
- Serious Traffic Crashes and Pedestrian-involved crashes: Fatalities and Serious Injuries based on crash data, not citations issued. The goal is measuring harm, not police activity.
- Traffic Crash Hot Spots: Intersections and sections of streets between cross streets with multiple serious crashes over multiple different time periods, separately for crashes and pedestrian-involved crashes.
2. Quality of Service
- Response Time: Median and 90th percentile of each call priority level. NOT average.
- Call Completion: percentage of calls answered and handled without long holds or the calls being abandoned
- Repeat callers and call locations: Number of repeat callers over multiple time periods. Are the problems actually being solved? Is the number growing or shrinking?
3. Investigations
- Clearances: Rate of case clearance for homicides, shootings, aggravated assault, robbery, etc.
- Clearance Quality Audit Results: Case file audits to avoid cases cleared on paper only
- Victim Communication: Time to first meaningful contact, update communications. Including random sample audits, surveys, etc. Not only self-reported metrics.
4. Harm Minimization, Legal Compliance
- Use of Force: rate per 1,000 arrests, rate per 1,000 encounters, injury rate for civilians and officers.
- Resident Complaints: rate of complaints, not internal investigation results, per 100 officers, time to resolution, number of officers with repeat complaints over multiple time periods (Is the number shrinking over time?)
- Efficiency of Stops, Searches: Stops per 1,000 residents, percentage of stops that result in searches, percentage of searches that result in contraband, percentage of search results by type of contraband (gun, other weapon, drugs, etc.)
- Vehicle Stops, Occupant Removed: Vehicle stops per 1,000 residents, percentage of stops that result in an occupant exit order, percentage of exit orders by Article 14 justification, percentage of exit orders resulting in arrest. Rolling and historical.
- Charges Filed: Number of arrested individuals per 1,000 residents, percentage charged, percentage of cases pending, percentage of charges dropped, percentage of guilty pleas, percentage of guilty verdicts.
Make no mistake, the current makeup of the Worcester City Council will never demand this information or anything like it.
In 2025, the city settled two lawsuits for civil rights violations for $2.25 million. One man was held on a murder charge for five months. He couldn’t have been at the scene of the murder, and in no way did he match the description provided by witnesses. Another man, Natale Cosenza, served 16 years incarcerated before a Worcester Police officer gave radically different answers in the civil case than he did during the criminal trial about the most important piece of evidence in the case.
In Worcester, that’s not called perjury. That’s not called lying. That’s called heroic. You disagree? You just hate cops.
The officers involved faced no discipline for their actions in either case.
No investigation, not even a single hearing, by the Worcester City Council has taken place to try to determine how these things happened and present recommendations on how to prevent them from happening again.
Wrongful incarceration is a small price for someone else to pay for the reelection of the Mayor’s majority.
