If Boston is serious about urban renewal, it may want to bring back one of the now defunct policies of the late Mayor Thomas M. Menino: Broken Windows policing.
Broken Windows theory holds that enforcing public order laws — such as laws against graffiti, trespassing, and illegal street vending — reduces both the fear of crime and crime itself, and thus makes for safer communities.
Overshadowed this week by President Barack Obama's historic visit with Cuban leaders in Havana, another top American government official made some history of his own.
On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry met in Havana with Latin America's oldest communist guerrilla rebel group, the Revolutionary of Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) which has waged war on the Colombian government for half a century and which the U.S. government has designated as a foreign terrorist organization and drug cartel.
