On September 28, the Dorchester Park Association will hold its Gala Celebration in Dorchester Park to create an endowment fund that will support the restoration and maintenance of the park's treasured urban forest. Hundreds of guests will enjoy cocktails and a catered gourmet dinner, dance to the Fat City Band, and bid on a variety of auction packages worth thousands of dollars each. Unfortunately, if the Gala were being held at this moment, they would navigate past more than 120 beer cans, bottles, condoms, and other assorted litter left there by young men and women reveling in the park last night. And they would view the depressing sight of graffiti that was scrawled on a baseball locker earlier in the week.

Last year, that would not have been the case. One or more members of the association or a civic-minded neighbor would have called the Metropolitan Police, and the revelers would have learned by now that the park is not an hospitable site for their parties. Unfortunately, Mayor Thomas Menino disbanded the Metropolitan Police and folded some of its manpower into the Boston Police. I've no quarrel with the Mayor on that point. He's been put between a rock and a hard place by financial constraints, and in the current atmosphere of fear and crime, there are higher priorities than our beautiful park and others like it.

But the Metro Police existed for a reason. Their role was not entirely redundant. The Boston Police can't be nearly as responsive. They feel our pain. (We've talked to them.) They do what they can. Patient, civic-minded neighbors of the park do their part. Because of them, today's litter will be gone by nightfall. But the party will resume where it left off tonight or tomorrow, or on the eve of the gala. The issue will continue until it snowballs completely out of control with a new element that brings drug dealing and serious crimes that raise the priority to a place where it stands on a par with the duties the Boston Police are meant to deal with.

As of now, there seems to be no place to shift the responsibility. It's time for the mayor's office and our representatives to sit down and assess this and related issues and to forge a low-cost, viable solution. We may not need a full-fledged police force like we had before. But, at the least, we need a small, focused unit of personnel with sufficient authority who can respond to matters of this kind, particularly in the evening hours. Perhaps our civic associations can get the ball rolling when they return from their summer recesses by opening dialogues between their communities and our representatives. We can't afford to let these matters fester.

Oh, and by the way, check out dotpark.org for more information about the gala and to order tickets to the event. We promise there will be no litter.

Henry G. Belot

Washington Street