REVERE — Police said they plan to open a new downtown substation this month to reestablish a robust physical presence in the central business district five years after decamping from the neighborhood for new headquarters in Revere Beach.
“Initially when I took over as chief, one of the things we determined with the Mayor’s Office and community leaders was that there appears to be a lack of a physical police presence on Broadway for no other reason than we moved from Pleasant Street to Revere Beach Parkway,” Revere Police Chief Joseph Cafarelli said Wednesday. “We put in a two-man walking route during peak hours that has been embraced by the community ”¦ and the next step would be a substation in the Broadway area.”
Revere Mayor Daniel Rizzo said Monday night in his State of the City address that a new police substation in the Broadway central business district would be opened within 30 days.
Both Cafarelli and Rizzo’s Chief of Staff Miles Kennedy said Wednesday that an increased physical police presence — both in terms of a physical building for police and police physically in the area —had been identified as a goal of city leaders.
“One of the goals of the mayor is to revitalize the Broadway business district area,” Kennedy said. “With a strong police presence, the Mayor feels that will help to revitalize the area.”
Cafarelli noted that police cruisers had to travel down Broadway to return to the former headquarters on Pleasant Street — a one-way street — and were thus previously a familiar part of the Broadway street scene.
But he said the police were less frequently in the neighborhood now their headquarters had been moved. Meanwhile, city residents and business owners were also less frequently in police headquarters — as the headquarters’ new location on a six-lane divided highway was not that conducive to pedestrian traffic.
“We do get drive-ins, but what we’re trying to do is minimize that,” Cafarelli said. “We want people to have access on a walk-in basis.”
Both Cafarelli and Kennedy said that the 30-day goal for the substation was doable.
But both also mentioned some details remain to be decided.
Kennedy said the city envisioned the substation would be a storefront, small-office space and the city was looking at a private property on Pleasant Street — the same street where the old Police Station used to be — as a potential location. But they had not signed a lease and could not determine how much the substation would cost, Kennedy said.
Cafarelli also said the costs of the substation were not finalized and the department was working on the numbers with the community development department.
Cafarelli said he was also still trying to determine a schedule for staffing the substation. He said that the school resources officers and a resource coordinator would be based at the location and the substation would be open at least during prime business hours.
But he was still trying to balance out how to arrange schedules so that the building was constantly staffed but officers were able to spend time out in the community.
He said also that the community’s needs would dictate the operations at the new location.
He said the resource officer could run community-outreach projects out of the substation, specifically mentioning a project to reconvene a citizen’s police effort. Officers assigned to the Broadway neighborhood could also use the location as a base, Cafarelli noted.
While Kennedy said the substation will not be at the old police headquarters — a building whose worst conditions are memorialized in a display case at the new building on Revere Beach Parkway — Cafarelli said the substation will be a bit of a homecoming for police.
“We’ll be right back to where we started from,” Cafarelli said.
Cyrus Moulton can be reached at [email protected].
