Safe streets everybody's fight

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

It wasn't fear this night. It was more subtle.

It was dark and late and I didn't know the neighborhood. I was in Providence. What did I know about Providence? The walk from the theater to the parking lot was just two blocks, but who knew what lurked on those blocks?

So I asked someone to walk me to my car. I felt foolish making the request. And yet, I wouldn't have walked alone.

The next day, I took my daughters shopping in Boston. I am comfortable on Boston's busy streets day or night, but my daughters are not. Both have learned from experience to expect the unexpected and to be on the lookout for danger.

The 21-year-old was walking with a group of friends a few years ago, from the Herald to Boston Common in the middle of the afternoon, when a man walking toward her reached out and touched her where he shouldn't have - not that he should have touched her anywhere.

Her thought, when she saw his hand reaching for her, was that he had a knife, and that she was going to die. But even while thinking this, she was unable to do anything. She felt like stone, she said, incapable of motion.

"You'll never believe what happened to me," she said later, making light of the experience. But the kernel of fear born that afternoon has festered and grown.

My younger daughter never jokes about her experience. She walks down the city streets with her jaw locked and her eyes sharp, constantly gauging the crowd. She was sitting with me outside Filenes a few Christmases ago when a woman approached and began hollering and threatening us. When she reached into her shopping bag for whatever she was seeking, my daughter was convinced she would pull out a knife or a gun.

She began to cry. The tears lasted for many nights after. The distrust lingers still. It has made her street wise and alert. And I suppose this is a good thing. But last Saturday, I tried to convince the wary pair that both of these incidents were aberrations. The streets of Boston are safe, I told them. Don't worry.

We shopped at Downtown Crossing. A 20-ish guy with dark, dirty hair and Charles Manson eyes, sitting in a shoe store, looked the 21-year-old up and down. I watched him do it. I watched him continue to do it. The 15-year-old saw, too. The 21-year-old was oblivious because she was busy looking at shoes.

"Let's get out of here," I whispered to her. "Why?" she wanted to know. Then caught the man's eyes, and understood.

He followed us out of the shoe store and into a nearby bookstore. Was he going there anyway? Were we paranoid or perceptive? He was on one side of the store. We were on another. But he wasn't looking at books. He was, once again, staring at my daughter.

When we left he did, too. He held the door open, grinned at her as she walked past, then disappeared into the crowd.

We carried our misgivings with us all day. We stayed together, kept our guard up. We felt vulnerable.

On the street, we passed men and women in ragged clothes, men and women sprawled in doorways, men and women walking around communing with phantoms, punching invisible foes. They were all we saw. We didn't look in the shop windows. We hardly noticed the crowds. If Christmas music were playing, we didn't hear it.

Why didn't you shop at Copley Place? Or Faneuil Hall? Why did you go there anyway? That's what people asked.

The questions that need to be asked are, what can we do as a community, a city, a country to make all our streets safe again? What can we do to help those who live on the streets and have nowhere to go? How can the mentally ill be best cared for? How do we most effectively keep those who are not mentally ill, those who are simply bad, from taking control? How can we begin to regain the freedoms we've already lost?

We will only lose more if we keep running to other shopping malls, other neighborhoods, pretending that if we don't see problems, they don't exist. They do.

And they will not go away unless we confront them.