When Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden was introduced at a recent political event in Revere, the applause was substantial.
Mayor Patrick Keefe praised Hayden in his remarks, stating, “We’re here to celebrate our public safety. We have the most sworn officers, police and fire, that we’ve had in over two decades. We haven’t had a homicide in the City of Revere in over four years.”
A week later at an event in Chelsea, residents gave Hayden an equally enthusiastic and respectful welcome as City Councilors Leo Robinson and Calvin T. Brown hailed the district attorney’s many accomplishments during his four-plus years in office.
“Kevin Hayden has done a tremendous job working with our law enforcement officials in protecting our residents and engaging with our community,” said Robinson. “He has been highly visible at events promoting public safety and his office has always been accessible and professional in its immediate response to correspondences and phone calls from our residents. He always has a team present at such events as National Night Out and public meetings.”
Hayden, who is seeking a second term as district attorney for Suffolk Country that encompasses Boston, Revere, Winthrop, and Chelsea, said, “We have accomplished a lot of things in the short time that I’ve been in office, and we need to make sure that good work continues.”
Statistics indicate that there has been a significant decline in incidents of crime across the county that has 800,000 residents.
“Historically low crime rates don’t happen by accident, and a lot of what we’ve done over the course of the first term has helped achieve that,” said Hayden, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Boston University Law School. “Whether that’s dealing with our Juvenile Alternative Resolution (JAR) Program helping our young people and keeping them away from our criminal legal system – a program which we’ve expanded to emerging adults – it has been extraordinarily successful so far.”
Services Over Sentences (SOS), an alternative-to-prosecution program launched in 2022 by Hayden, has been a focus of the DA’s office in addressing the opioid crisis.
“The opioid epidemic continues to be a problem for us, particularly in our South End neighborhood right now, and our focus is on recovery, on getting people we call high-risk, high need, into the treatment that they need, the housing access that they need, and to give them the opportunity to build a life that they need, and hopefully, first and foremost, to get clean and sober. That’s how we address that problem. That way we can prosecute people less, and it saves lives – we have real proof of having saved lives through our Services Over Sentences program.”
Speaking about the intervention and prevention aspects of his office, Hayden, who oversees approximately 165 attorneys and 310 staff members overall, noted, “We have our Fraud Fighters piece, which is primarily geared toward our elder community, but as time goes on, we’re finding that our younger folks are very interested in it as well. When you talk about online fraud, phone scams, and the things that are happening now, particularly in this new age of AI, it’s a rampant problem. It’s one that’s hard to prosecute, so we know and we’ve learned that intervention and prevention are our most useful way of combating that problem, telling people exactly what scammers are doing, and staying up-to-date and one step ahead of them, and letting our communities know how they can prevent themselves from being defrauded.”
Hayden said that retail theft continues to be “a real issue.”
“The reality is there is no one-size-fits-all solution in how you tackle that problem,” said Hayden. “Someone who’s homeless and down and out, and starving for food who is stealing is a lot different than someone who’s running out of a store with thousands of dollars of merchandise at a time and doing that for a profit. So, we have partnered with our retailers and with law enforcement to make sure we are dealing with shoplifting and retail theft in a comprehensive and effective way.”
Hayden emphasized that his office “will always focus on the most serious and most violent crimes, first and foremost.”
“That’s what keeps people up at night, that’s what people are concerned about – everyone wants and deserves to be safe,” said Hayden. “And we continue to focus on violent crime, and how to drive it down, and how to be better. But we’re doing very well in that area. We are seeing historically low crime rates across the board.”
Hayden smiled when he was asked about the rousing receptions he has garnered at local events. He knows that there is work still to be done.
“I’m just extraordinarily humbled by the response I’ve received in our communities – it’s humbling to know that people have the confidence in my staff and me and the work we’re doing,” said Hayden. “I’m proud of the work we’ve done during my term. Rome doesn’t get built in a day. It takes time to establish things that we’ve established – the extraordinary successes across every major area. We’ve also improved the office internally as well, from a professional development standpoint, from raising the salary of our assistant district attorneys and all our staff. We’ve been able to work very closely with our legislature to get salaries increased for our staff – that’s very important when it comes to retention and being able to keep people around. And we’ve also increased the number of staff. We have 40 more people working in the office than we had before, and we continue to work on adding some more, because if you don’t have the people to do the work, then it’s hard to get it done. I’m so proud of the work we’ve done. We have some of the best public servants in the entire state doing this work. We’re proud of what we’re doing in Suffolk County, keeping our communities safe while also continuing to advance important ideas around criminal and legal reform. But we’re not resting on our laurels.”