BOSTON — Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn sent a second formal letter this week to Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox, calling out a Wu-era BPD staffing crisis and warning that Downtown Boston has now seen its fifth shooting victim in recent weeks.

The letter, dated Wednesday, was Flynn's follow-up to a July 5 letter to the commissioner on the same subject. It landed the same morning a person was shot on Bromfield Street in Downtown Boston — an incident Flynn cited as the fifth shooting victim in the neighborhood in a stretch of weeks.

Flynn cited the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association's own figures for the staffing crisis: the department is roughly 600 officers short and operating at roughly one-third of the workforce it needs. Officers, Flynn wrote, "privately express to me that they are frequently overwhelmed with the recent rise in violent crime and lack of respect for police officers."

The councilor said BPD has "longstanding issues of understaffing, overstretched resources, forced overtime and looming retirements" and that the department's officers have been working more than 16-hour days for years.

The letter also went at the framing Mayor Michelle Wu's administration and its allies have used to describe Boston even as the shootings have accumulated.

"We have to acknowledge the status quo is untenable," Flynn wrote. "Boston is not the safest city in the country. I'm again calling for a public safety summit to address violence and crime in Boston."

He argued the summit needs to include "the public, neighborhood organizations, police and first responders" and that the city "must both hire hundreds of police officers and work closely with state and federal partners as well."

Flynn noted that in February 2025 he attended a Downtown Public Safety Summit hosted by the Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association. That gathering, he wrote, produced the One Downtown Task Force in March 2025 — an intergovernmental group that includes Wu, State Representative Aaron Michlewitz, Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden and Rishi Shukla. The task force was supposed to "proactively ensure coordination among stakeholders and mobilize resources to address public safety and related quality of life concerns."

Sixteen months later, Downtown Boston is on its fifth shooting victim in a stretch of weeks.

Flynn said he will host an on-site meeting in Downtown Boston early next week to discuss the improvements he says are needed. He signed the letter with his rank as U.S. Navy (Retired).