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2) Fingerprint lab

In January, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office revealed that Stephan Cowans had been wrongfully convicted seven years ago of shooting a police officer, based in large part on a faulty fingerprint match. Eight months and several reports later, O’Toole finally shut down the latent-print unit, which examines crime-scene fingerprints for police investigations.

The final report, from Ron Smith & Associates, a private forensics firm in Meridian, Mississippi, makes startling reading material. During the summer, Smith tested the processing techniques of five of the six members of the unit (not including the two who botched the Cowans case, who were both put on leave in April), and they scored a combined 36 percent. A three-year veteran of the unit got just three of 15 matches right on the easy level of the test, and went 0-for-15 on the advanced level. One of the unit’s other members made "the most serious of all technical errors" on the test, while another made an erroneous match where "the reported matching fingerprint in no way resembles the latent fingerprint." Yet another showed "significant deficiency in knowledge" despite having worked in the unit for five years.

Who knows how many cases could have been solved over the years if these people had simply been trained to do their jobs? And if the department tolerated this level of incompetence for so long, what does that say about the ballistics lab, the DNA lab, and other forensics specialists?

O’Toole has put the other forensics units under review. "I don’t want any more surprises," she says. "I know that it was disheartening to the members of that [fingerprint] unit when a report was released recently saying that the training was substandard, and I decided to discontinue the latent-print examinations. Yes, to some extent we did let them [the unit members] down."

3) Shooting civilians

Long before Snelgrove died on Lansdowne Street, 2004 had already become a troubling year for police shootings of civilians in the city. In late June, police shot and killed 40-year-old Bert Bowen on a Roxbury street; the BPD has said that Bowen threatened the officers with a gun as he ran from them. Two anonymous witnesses, however, told reporters that they did not see a gun in the man’s hand. (A day later, the name and criminal history of one of those anonymous sources was revealed in the Boston Herald column of Mike Barnicle, whose brother is a BPD officer.)

A week later, police shot and killed 58-year-old Luis Gonzalez, a small, frail, mentally ill man, in his South End home after being called in to subdue him. Officers claimed that Gonzalez threatened them with a box cutter, even after they used pepper spray on him.

Perhaps these shootings will prove to be justified, but after four months, why are we still waiting to find out? And why are the officers involved already back on duty if the investigations are still open? A report on Bowen’s shooting has made it to the DA’s Office, but has not been released. Gonzalez’s inquiry has not even made it that far.

And those were just the fatal shootings. Others have been non-lethal, but serious nonetheless. In March, for example, officer Anthony Platt shot at a man in a stopped SUV in Charlestown, wounding him in the face. We are still waiting for a report on the incident, eight months later.

"It’s taken me a while to understand what the process is [for investigating incidents of police shooting civilians]," O’Toole says. Now, she says, she regularly checks the progress of investigations. "In every instance where I’ve questioned a report that’s been late, there’s been legitimate reasons for it."

4) Rising violence

On May 16, with the city’s yearly homicide toll at 22, O’Toole announced a five-step plan to reduce the "plague" of rising street violence. Over the next 12 weeks, 20 more murders took place. In response, O’Toole launched Operation Neighborhood Shield — a multi-agency crackdown on street criminals in targeted "hot spots" — on August 6, declaring that "we’ve had enough." Another 14 homicides have occurred in the 12 weeks since the program went into effect.

Of the 56 homicides this year, only 21 have resulted in arrest, according to the BPD. That’s a 38 percent clearance rate, down from 63 percent through August of last year, a poor record that may be contributing to the cycle of retaliatory violence. Shootings have become startlingly indiscreet: earlier this month a man was shot multiple times in Dorchester’s Four Corners at one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. A few weeks earlier, a 17-year-old had been shot to death in mid afternoon on Washington Street, in Dorchester.

O’Toole suggests that some of the talk of increased violence is overstated, and says that year-to-date violent crime overall is down six percent through the end of September. "I’d like to think that the reduction could be a result of some of the strategies we implemented in May," she says.

But the level of violence, including homicides, rose sharply in 2000 and has been a problem ever since. Since then, every six months or so the papers fill with headlines about the latest evidence of the problem, but nothing changes — instead, everyone in authority constantly reiterates that it’s not as bad as when Boston had 152 murders in 1990.

"It’s very difficult to come up with strategies with increased homicides — there aren’t necessarily patterns," says O’Toole. "It seems to be somewhat cyclical, it seems like we’ve had lulls and then a rash of tragic shootings."