Revere police cut the ribbon Thursday afternoon on an electric van they intend to park in a different neighborhood every week, hand out ice cream from, and use to reach people who would never walk into the station. It is called the CARE Wagon. The department’s own description, from the captain who proposed it, is “an ice cream truck on steroids.”
The ceremony was at 4 p.m. at the Harry Della Russo Stadium complex. The department invited the public by social media the morning of. No account of who spoke or what was said has been published yet, so this is a story about what the van is for, told mostly in the words the department used when it asked the City Council for permission to fund it.
What it is
The vehicle is an all-electric Chevrolet BrightDrop, the delivery van General Motors built for fleets. Capt. Thomas Malone told the council in August that the department had recently bought it. The name is an acronym, Community, Access, Resources and Engagement. The plan is to run it year-round on a weekly rotation through Revere’s neighborhoods rather than only at festivals, so that residents on Shirley Avenue or in Beachmont see the same officers regularly instead of once a summer.
Ice cream is the hook. Behind it, Malone said, the van will carry Coffee with a Cop, clothing drives and toy drives, and it will go out with the department’s behavioral health unit to reach people living outside. That last use is the one that separates it from a parade float. A van that shows up in the same lot every Tuesday with a clinician on board is a way to build the kind of contact that a cruiser cannot.
How it is paid for
The council voted in August to create a gift account for the police department, a separate fund that lets the department accept donations for community policing projects and track them apart from the operating budget. Malone’s plan is to put a QR code on the side of the van. “All the money that is donated to us is going right back into the van,” he said, describing it as a pay-it-forward arrangement in which the ice cream a resident donates today is the ice cream a child gets next week. The city’s finance director was consulted on the account structure. Ward 6 Councillor Chris Giannino’s reaction: “I love this idea, and it is about time.”
What the van itself cost, and whether a grant covered it, has not been disclosed in anything the department or the city has published. That is worth a question, since an electric BrightDrop is not a cheap vehicle. The department also has a habit worth noting: its most recent formal press release, dated September 2, was about its license plate reader program. The CARE Wagon got a social media post. The order of priorities in the communications is not necessarily the order in the building, but it is what the public sees.
The Chelsea comparison
Chelsea’s police department won the city an All-America City award this year in part on community-centered work, the Downtown Task Force and the Faith and Blue gatherings. It does not, as far as we know, have a dedicated outreach vehicle or a gift account that lets residents fund one. Revere’s version is cheap to copy. The expensive part is the commitment to show up every week.
The Revere Journal is likely to carry photos and quotes from the ceremony in its Wednesday edition. If the department publishes the van’s schedule, we will run it.