REMARKS OF DISTRICT ATTORNEY DANIEL F. CONLEY Chelsea Rotary Club Luncheon January 20, 2004 Let me begin by thanking the Joe Vinard and the Chelsea Rotary Club for having me here today, and let me thank all of you for sharing part of your day with me. I know how valuable your time is, and how busy the days can get between business, family, and other responsibilities, so I am grateful for these few minutes to tell you about the district attorney's office, especially about what we do in Chelsea. I've been looking forward to our discussion. Before I start talking about my job as district attorney, I'd like to say a few words about this wonderful city. I love coming to Chelsea - and not just for the corned beef at Arthur's Deli -- although I won't turn down any invitations either. Since I became district attorney two years ago, the thing that has always struck me about Chelsea is its vitality. It is full of life. We all know it has had its bad times, but you can't keep a good city down, and Chelsea, this Phoenix on the Mystic River, has risen again. And due in large part to you, the community leaders, and dedicated public servants like Gene O'Flaherty and Jay Ash and Jarrett Barrios and the Chelsea city councilors, I am certain that Chelsea will never again fall into the stifling grip of corruption and fiscal woe that nearly strangled it to death more than a decade ago. Quite to the contrary - I believe Chelsea's best days lie ahead. Whenever I come to Chelsea, I am struck by both the diversity of its people, and the diversity of its places. I served as a Boston City Councilor for eight years, and I can tell you that Chelsea has many of the same attributes that make Boston such an attractive city. Like its larger neighbor across the river, Chelsea has a proud history dating back to Colonial times, back to the Battle of Chelsea Creek. Chelsea has a diverse population, and that is cause for celebration. The Hyde Park section of Boston, where I was raised and still live, is a neighborhood where people of all ethnicities live together peacefully. I sense the same thing here. One thing that has made Chelsea great is that it has always welcomed immigrants, be they Jewish or Irish, Eastern European or Puerto Rican, Vietnamese or Salvadoran. How many people came to your streets in search of a better life? Tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands. That's something to be proud of. Chelsea has a bustling downtown and thriving commercial zones. How many other cities can boast great little mom-and-pop stores, like you have on Broadway, just a short walk from the gleaming modern offices of Everett Avenue. You have a waterfront that brings the Boston skyline so close you'd swear, on a clear day, that you could reach out and touch it. You have state-of-the-art schools. You have artists and theater groups. In Prattville, you have leafy residential streets that rival anything in West Roxbury or Hyde Park. This is indeed a city on the rise and I'm happy to have it as part of . As many of you know, I was appointed District Attorney on Feb. 19, 2002, and won election to a four-year term that November. Becoming district attorney was the culmination of a professional dream that was born many years before, when I worked in the Suffolk DA's office as a prosecutor. Like all young prosecutors, I started out in the district courts, handling a huge volume of low-level cases. I was promoted first to the Boston Juvenile Court, where I saw the problems caused by young offenders, and later to a Superior Court Trial Team, where I handled everything from drug trafficking to armed robbery to murder cases. I served on the first anti-gang task force, and I was eventually promoted to the Homicide Unit by former District Attorney Ralph Martin. I responded to countless crime scenes, many of them homicides, but I never grew immune to seeing the ramifications of crime. It was during these years that I realized that my calling was as a crime fighter, to lock up people who committed crime, to help their victims, and to prevent further crime. This is the role I have prepared myself for throughout my professional career. I passionately believe that it is not just my job but my calling, not just my vocation but my avocation. It is a calling I wouldn't trade for any other in the world. And one of the things I most want to do is make the neighborhoods of Suffolk County, including Chelsea, safer places to live, to work, and raise families. I want to ensure that Chelsea remains a viable place for economic and personal growth, a place where people want to open a business, want to settle, want their children to be educated. How can a district attorney - the top elected law enforcement officer in the county - do that? The answer is very simple. In order for all that to happen - in order for businesses to thrive, for people to buy houses, for children to learn - you need one basic ingredient: public safety. Crime is a hindrance to commerce. People won't come to a store if they think they will be robbed on their way home. Young couples will not buy houses in a neighborhood they perceive as threatening. Kids can't learn if they are worried about getting beaten up after school. My job is to work with Chief Garvin and your fine police force and make sure you have the peace of mind to do all those great things you want to do. That is exactly what I am doing. I can give you two examples from recent months. Two and a half weeks ago, a 61-year-old Vietnamese immigrant, Sao Sun, was fatally stabbed on Grove Street. When his body was found on the morning of Jan. 2, State Police detectives assigned to my office, working together with your excellent Chelsea police detectives, began working around the clock. Two days later, they had identified two suspects, two 18-year-old men, and after interviewing them, we were able to charge one with murder and the other as an accessory for helping conceal the knife. There is nothing so tragic as a life taken by violence. The evidence suggests the attack on Mr. Sun was random. At this point, there is no evidence that he was robbed. He surely posed no threat to his killer. One thing you learn when you investigate and prosecute murders is that you often cannot ascribe a sensible motive to such an insensible, unspeakable crime. Life will never be the same for Mr. Sun's family. There will always be an empty seat at their table. The memories they have of him will always be tinged by pain, and each coming New Year will always remind his family of that horrible season when their husband, father and grandfather was taken from them. Mr. Sun can no longer speak for himself, to tell the law, this is how I was wronged. So what is left now is for us to speak for him, to give him voice before the law, to hold accountable those who committed the ultimate crime. And that is exactly what we will do. Several months ago, during the fall, your detectives, again working in conjunction with my office, conducted a sweep of drug dealers in the Bellingham Square area. This effort sent a strong message that we strive to send every day: The neighborhoods do not belong to the drug dealers. The neighborhoods belong to the good, honest people who want only to work hard, make a living, and raise their families in peace. Of course, solving and preventing violent crimes remains our most important priority, but we also address what we call 'quality of life' issues - problems like vandalism, low-level drug dealing, car thefts, and the like that occur in Chelsea and all urban communities. I want to make sure people want to stay in Chelsea to live and work. I have found, in my years as a prosecutor and city councilor, that what drives a family away from a neighborhood, more often than violent crimes, are the nuisance crimes like vandalism and public drinking and stolen cars. These crimes touch many more people than do violent crimes, and they seriously threaten the basic standards of living that we are all entitled to - peace of mind, quiet neighborhoods, clean streets. No one should have to look out his or her window and see a drug deal going down on the corner. No one should have to look at graffiti on the side of buildings or cars. To best fulfill the mission of the DA's office, I want your help. One of the hallmarks of my office will be its accessibility. I want you to tell me what your concerns are, what problems you have that we can help you with. One of the most effective strategies we used to drive crime rates down over the last decade were partnerships between prosecutors, police, civic groups, and local businesses and residents. Those partnerships remain in place, and we plan to further build on them. Of course, any program, and any crime-fighting strategy, benefits from a periodic review and concerted effort to sharpen its focus. That's what I'm doing with one of the District Attorney's Office's most heralded and successful programs - the Safe Neighborhoods Initiative, which we operate in five neighborhoods in Suffolk County, including Chelsea. The Safe Neighborhoods Initiative, or SNI as we call it, targets the most pressing public safety problems as defined by prosecutors, police, probation, and community members. We ask the community to tell us what the crime problems are, and we work together to address them. In a sense, I have just outlined for you my vision for the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office - an office that is a leader in partnerships that reach across different segments of society to make our neighborhoods safe; a proactive office that goes to the heart of our neighborhoods - the good people who live and work there - and ask them to tell us what their concerns are, so we can address them swiftly and effectively. I ask all of you to join in that effort, to help us achieve that vision. With business leaders like you by my side, we will truly make Chelsea and all of Suffolk County remain safe places for us and our families. --END--