'Stop people from becoming victims': Worcester PD to publish weekly crime reports on social media

WORCESTER – When Interim Chief Paul B. Saucier was assigned by City Manager Eric D. Batista to lead the police department Sept. 1, he made it clear that his main ambition would be transparency to the public.

In an interview last week, Saucier said that the department’s newest step towards that ambition will be to publish weekly crime reports using map charts on social media.

Saucier said that every Tuesday around 4 p.m., the department will post the update across seven categories: Residential breaking and entering, commercial breaking and entering, larceny from motor vehicles, motor vehicle recoveries, street robberies, traffic accidents and vandalism.

The information will be compiled by the Police Department’s Crime Analysis Unit which designs the maps weekly for the police commanders to use in their weekly assignments.

Every update, Saucier said, will contain information from a window of time spanning Tuesday to Tuesday.

“There's a lot of information that we should have going out to the public,” said Saucier, “so they can make an informed decision.

“Maybe people will see them and then they could say, ‘I'm not going to leave the car door open,’ so that may change their thought process.”

The updates will be posted on Facebook, where the department has almost 90,000 followers.

The location of each incident will be shown using distinct symbols such as a balaclava, or a robber’s mask, for street robberies, or stars for vehicle accidents.

Circles of different colors will show what shift an incident happened, yellow being the day shift, gray the afternoon shift and dark gray the night shift.

Although the past two weeks the maps were posted later than the anticipated time, the department’s spokesperson Lt. Sean Murtha assured that the updates will be posted as promised starting next week.

Saucier hopes to add gunshots to the weekly report, while overdoses will be left out of this series and will be published through a separate series.

Moving forward, Saucier said that the department wants to also publish more unresolved cases, which he said will be addressed by frequent posting on social media.

With a career of almost 30 years in the Worcester Police Department, Saucier, who is 57 years old, was most recently deputy chief for seven years under the former Chief of Police Chief Steven Sargent.

Sargent retired Sept. 1 after 37 years of being with the department.

Since then, his decision was often correlated to the city's reporting of a 2021 investigation of Sargent to the state's police oversight agency. That report was published by the Telegram & Gazette the day before Sargent’s retirement.

Saucier said that the steps he is taking towards transparency as interim chief are directed towards his goal of permanently holding the seat of police chief.

“My goal since the police academy was to one day become police chief,” said Saucier. “So here I am and I hope it stays this way.”

To him, greater transparency would mean to inform the public, thus lowering crime in the city.

“We want to stop people from becoming victims,” said Saucier. “Sir Robert Peel in 1829 said in a statement, ‘The test of efficiency of the police is the absence of crime and disorder, not the police's reaction to it or what they’re doing to stop it.’

“There are different circumstances where you cannot put information out…but other than that, let's put it out. I don't want people to think we try and undermine anything. Anything that should be in the public, we're going to put out we have no reservations about that whatsoever.

“We need everybody’s help. Any advice that can come from the public, we'll do it.”

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Worcester PD to publish weekly crime reports on social media