NO CROWDED hearings. No noisy demonstrations. No thundering editorials. No Page 1 stories. No television stakeouts. No flood of letters to the editor.
In the last 3½ weeks, 12 Boston-area cab drivers have been attacked by armed passengers; all but one have been robbed; several have been wounded. At first the attackers used knives. Then came handguns. This past Monday, a cabbie in Roxbury found himself gazing at the unfriendly end of a sawed-off shotgun.
The reaction has been mostly nonexistent. The Boston media have not gone into overdrive. The mayor and governor have had little to say. The city's vast array of neighborhood organizations and special-interest groups have preserved an unbroken silence. The police commissioner serenely waited until the 10th attack before making time to meet with cab officials and taxi drivers. As for public outcries: Listen carefully, and you can hear — nothing.
Oh, well. Who cares about cab drivers, anyway? It's not like these guys getting robbed and stabbed and having guns shoved in their faces are important. Why get in a lather over people who work 12-hour shifts, don't make a lot of money, and frequently speak with an accent?
Now, if 12 Beacon Hill politicians had been held up in the past month, then we'd see some action. The State Police would be assigning round-the-clock bodyguards to every member of the Legislature. Senators and representatives would be calling press conferences to announce bravely that they would perform their public duties regardless of the threat to their personal safety. Conservative columnists would be getting slammed for creating the "antigovernment climate" that gave rise to the attacks. Yes, indeed, if politicians found themselves under siege, it would be a very big deal.
Or suppose it were employees of Boston's abortion clinics who were being robbed at knife- and gunpoint every few days. The response would register on the Richter scale. Teams of reporters would be on the story; their articles would dominate the front page. Planned Parenthood and the ACLU would be screaming with outrage. The National Organization for Women would go ballistic at this latest threat to "the constitutional right to an abortion." The governor would mobilize the National Guard to protect the clinics — and, if he didn't, the White House would do it for him. The talk shows would devote hour after hour to discussing the latest developments.
But mere cabbies? The only place they're likely to see anyone who worries about their constitutional rights is in the bathroom mirror.
In fairness, though, the Boston Police Department is on the job. The cops are under orders to pull over taxi drivers at random — "to ensure their safety," a top police official says. The department's spokesmen say the drivers are delighted to be pulled over when they haven't done anything wrong; cabbies speaking off the record say they hate it.
One cab company, Town Taxi, has installed roof ads on 25 of its cars. "Save a life," they plead, urging motorists to call the police if a cab driver appears to be in trouble. Those roof ads would be infinitely more effective if they read: "WARNING: The driver of this taxicab is armed." In fact, driving a taxi would be the safest of occupations if cabbies routinely carried a gun.
But the police have no intention of allowing drivers to pack heat. Until 1989, the Boston Police Department flatly barred cab drivers from arming themselves. Today, they merely make it impossible in practice. Any cabbie who qualifies for a gun license can take his gun with him while driving, the BPD spokesman says — then immediately adds that none of the drivers who have been attacked would qualify.
Still, it's not as if the police are leaving the cabbies with no way to protect themselves. When they pull a cab over for a random check, they are supposed to give the driver a pink card with safety tips. A cabbie who finds himself under attack could use one of those cards to give a nasty paper cut to an armed robber.
Let a bank charge $2 to withdraw money from its ATMs, and lawmakers will trip over themselves in the rush to denounce the greedy corporations. Let the New England Patriots propose to relocate from one New England state to another, and forests will be leveled so the papers can cover the story in numbing detail. But let a dozen men who spend long days driving for a living be mugged in the space of a few weeks and no one goes into a frenzy.
Even when cabbies are killed, hardly anyone loses sleep over it. In 1991, three Boston cab drivers were shot dead in their cars. The city scarcely noticed, until some drivers threatened to stop picking up fares in Roxbury and Dorchester, where the murders had taken place. That was too much for then-Mayor Ray Flynn, who denounced the frightened drivers as "reckless and irresponsible." When the president of one cab company protested Flynn's callousness, the mayor called a press conference to denounce him. "If [ he] doesn't want to operate his cabs in these areas, he can get out the city."
Happily, Flynn is no longer mayor. And happily, no cabbies have been killed in 1999. Must it come to that? If a dozen beagles had been attacked with knives and guns on Boston's streets in the last 3½ weeks, the town would be in an uproar. Don't taxi drivers deserve at least the concern we would lavish on dogs?
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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