Safe-Proofing an Initiative

One of the most frightening situations that a parent can face is not knowing whether their child has a firearm in their own house. The Boston Police Department’s new Safe Homes Initiative is a way to help Boston area parents deal with just that dilemma. The program consists of a community advisory council that identifies households where juveniles are believed to be carrying firearms, followed by a search team comprised of police and community members who go and request to search the children’s rooms. Searches are completely voluntary, and if an illegally possessed gun is found, no arrest will be made. While this initiative is an aid to parents worried about their teenagers, one aspect of Massachusetts state law may make this program more detrimental to the families than the its designers intended.

Since Massachusetts has no parent-child confidentiality law, police officers who enter these homes can use anything they hear the family say or anything they observe in the house to incriminate people in that family. When parents volunteer to allow police officers into their homes specifically to make those homes safer, those families must know the potential implications of that visit.

Although it may seem counterintuitive to implement a program that faults some illegal behaviors but ignores others, the Safe Homes Initiative causes more harm than good when it becomes a vehicle through which the police can “spy” on families. The purpose of this initiative is to help parents feel safe in their own homes and reduce the number of guns in the possession of underage residents. If the police use this initiative to incriminate people for petty offenses, then the number of people who want and would allow for these searches would drastically drop.

A reduction in the residents willing to allow searches would be disappointing because, in the past, similar initiatives implemented elsewhere have been very successful. A similar police and community collaborative program was used in St. Louis during the 1990s. The program ran for 18 months, and overall 510 guns were removed from these houses. Perhaps even more impressive than the number of guns recovered is the percentage of households that agreed to have their homes searched; a whopping 98 percent. It would be a shame for these people to fear searches because of the possibility of facing charges for anything they say or do during these visits.

The solution to this problem is not to revoke the Massachusetts law regarding parent-child confidentiality, but to ensure that this law is clear to the residents who agree to be searched. The track record for this type of program is encouraging, and hopefully, similar results will occur in Boston. Making it clear to residents that their behavior and words can be used against them must happen first, so that finding firearms can become a priority.