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Segarra Celebrates First 100 Days

Focus on Education, Crime, and Children

By Jeff Cohen

October 01, 2010

Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra celebrated his first 100 days in office with a press conference. WNPR's Jeff Cohen reports.

Segarra had a lot of good news to report - including a $13 million dollar federal schools grant that he hopes will increase high school graduation rates.

Segarra also said that serious crime in the city is down -- and it is. As of September, the city's murder rate dropped 33 percent year to date.

But what he didn't say was that the number of shooting incidents has gone up - by five percent. So has the number of shooting victims - by eight percent.

It's a figure that was especially poignant just as police announced the latest gun death in the city -- a 25-year-old woman killed by a stray bullet as she left a convenience store Thursday night.

And it's a figure that apparently isn't lost on Segarra. He wants to meet more regularly with state prosecutors. He wants to beef up an athletic league that brings together the city's children and its police officers. He wants to speak with the governor about prisoners that are released into the city.

"I as mayor cannot undo the decades of societal, political, whatever neglect has occurred...I can only look forward and try to do as much as I can knowing what I know now to try to curtail that."

Segarra took over as mayor in June, following the resignation of Eddie Perez.