Let's begin with a discussion of context. In the past year the number of homicides in Boston has skyrocketed, leading to an amount of murders not seen in the city in a decade. And the solved-to-unsolved ratios are not pleasent. Whatever your political bent is and whatever you see as the cause or appropriate solution to this trend, you'd imagine that the city's cops would have their hands full. Detectives should be working long hours interviewing witnesses, tirelessly taking notes in those TV-cop flip notebooks. Right?

Now overlay onto that background the story of one Paul R. Arsenault, a union parking meter repairman who worked for the city for 7 years making $34,695-a-year in one of the country's most expensive cities to live in. Seven months ago, Arsenault was stopped for allegedly drunk driving and his vehicle was towed and impounded. A subsequant search revealed a highly suspect collection of quarters and a Transportation Department t-shirt.

Operating on a hunch, detectives were assigned to the case and for the next 7 months they followed Arsenault around on his route, making sure he didn't grift any quarters. Keep in mind that is was during those 7 months that the unsolved murder rate in Boston was lurching upward at an alarming pace. Following some grade-A cloak-and-dagger work by the city's finest, they eventually set him up and nabbed him with about 30$ in stolen quarters.

Yeah, 30 dollars.

You can read a more detailed explanation of how his scheme and the dragnet worked in the Globe story, but the obvious disconnect in priorities remains the same. 10-year-high in murders on one hand, 30$ in quarters on the other.

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