Worcester Primary Turnout, Police Oversight and ICE Questions

Downtown Stabbing Raises Revitalization Concerns

By-Hank Stolz
Graphic-Radio Worcester

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Worcester, MA-This episode of the Radio Roundtable, hosted by Hank and Ben, features political commentator George Russell and immigration attorney Randy Feldman discussing two main topics on Primary Election Day.

The first half of the discussion focuses on voter turnout and the mechanics of local elections. The panel examines contested state representative races in the 14th and 15th Worcester Districts, where incumbents Jim O’Day and Mary Keefe face challengers Dr Barur Raj Rajeshkumar and Ron Waddell respectively. George Russell draws on his extensive campaign experience to explain how ground-level voter outreach operations, including door knocking, phone banking, poll observers, and targeted voter history data, remain the decisive factor in local races. “The local races, those small local races are the bread and butter of turnout. Those are the people that drag out the vote.” says Russell.

The group also discusses the sharp contrast between low in-person early voting numbers (762 votes) and high mail-in ballot returns (approximately 7,000) in Worcester, debating the merits of each method and the safeguards that prevent duplicate voting.

The second half covers a Worcester Human Rights Commission meeting at which Police Chief Paul Saucier and other senior department officials presented. Randy Feldman, a commission member, summarizes key takeaways including the breadth of the department’s community outreach efforts, “The critique and the criticism sometimes is that the neighborhood watch groups are sometimes some older white people who have an enforcement mentality… I didn’t realize until last night that those watch groups are a very, very small part of what the police department does as far as reaching out to the community directly.” upcoming policy changes to juvenile diversion and mental health response protocols, the resource limitations affecting social worker deployment, and the department’s defense of the ShotSpotter surveillance system.

Feldman also describes pressing the chief on body camera compliance, the redaction of sensitive content from public records requests, and whether Worcester police have ever informally notified ICE about individuals, which the chief categorically denied. Feldman recounted his questioning of the Chief on that subject, “I was told that on the Eureka Street, that incident on May 8th… the police notified ICE that you might want to look into this. And the chief said, ‘We don’t notify ICE ever.'” “I said, ‘Chief, really? I’m talking informally or formally. I’m talking bad crimes or lesser crimes. You’re saying that you never notified ICE?’ And he goes, ‘We never notify ICE. I don’t think my officers even know the ICE number.'”

The episode closes with a brief discussion of a recent downtown stabbing near Worcester Common and whether such incidents warrant a distinct public response given the city’s investment in downtown revitalization.