Cashman: If protesters want change, they can march to City Hall

Mayor Marty Walsh has a message for anti-police protesters: go meet with him if you want change.

If the protesters want more than just media coverage, they have not taken the necessary steps to create the change they are talking about as they pound the pavement.

Walsh says his door is open to the leaders of the protests, but no one has come knocking. “I have requested five times in public for the organizers to come in and have a meeting,” he said yesterday. “They say I know where they are. I don’t know where they are.” In a year-end interview with the Herald, Walsh talked about a variety of issues facing the city. But he made it especially clear that he doesn’t want a Ferguson-like crisis here and is trying to create a stronger relationship between the cops and the community. But the dialogue has been slow to develop.

The protesters need to meet the mayor halfway and set up a meeting with him. “If the leadership wants to come in and have an open dialogue I can let them know all the things we have done in Boston,” he said. “They have not come to me. It is not my job to seek them out.  It is their job to find me.”

A lone crazy gunman killed two NYPD cops last week as a demented retribution for the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., at the hands of police.  Instead of halting the demonstrations so the grieving families of the slain officers could bury their loved ones, some groups in New York refused to silence the rhetoric out of respect, even for a brief period.

Those protests fell far short of improving relations with the cops.

Just the opposite in fact.

Walsh is saddened by their lack of respect for the men in blue. “I think it is a shame what is happening with the two police officers,” he said. “I think the protesters need to be a bit more respectful of the police department.”

“Police killings of blacks” won the Associate Press Poll for the top news story of 2014. It has been a story of heartache and violence.  However, if the story is to become about awareness and change, protesters need to coalesce around defined leaders with clear goals.

Here’s a New Years resolution for the Boston contingent of the demonstrations: Set a meeting up with the man who runs the city. You can find him at 1 City Hall Square in Boston.  Jaclyn Cashman co-hosts “The Morning Meeting” with Hillary Chabot on Boston Herald Radio weekday mornings 9 a.m. to noon.