Known for feuding with the mayor, police chief John Romero has had his forces cut drastically in the past two years.

But they aren’t able to. Lawrence’s budget crunch has all but gutted the city’s law enforcement. In fiscal year 2011, Lantigua cut the police department from 151 officers to 110. (Staffing levels have subsequently risen to 118 officers through grant funding, according to police chief John Romero.) After the reductions, felony crimes — including murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, arson, larceny, and auto theft — rose 23 percent from the previous year, Romero says.

The Lawrence Police Department’s “special operations” units have been especially hard hit by the cuts. The street narcotics unit, consisting of seven experienced plainclothes officers, was shut down by Lantigua (who declined to comment for this story) on July 1, 2010, along with five other special units that focused on gangs, burglaries, auto theft and insurance fraud, domestic violence, and community policing.

From July 1 to December 31, 2009, when the special ops units were fully staffed with a total of 35 cops, there were 990 felonies committed in Lawrence. During the same period a year later, after the cuts, that number rose to 1,410.

“Drugs fuel most of the crime in the city,” says Romero, who was a New York City cop for 30 years before becoming Lawrence’s chief in 1999. He says that, on the one hand, he can understand the staff cuts. “I get it — there was no money. But I told the [city] council, you need to understand what’s going to happen.”

One of the task-force agents from the drug buy says the cuts have been devastating. “We’ve had 24 murders in the last 30 months,” he says. “I’d say 80 percent of those are drug-related. Taking away special operations has set the city back 15 or 20 years.”

Orlando Rosario drives a tow truck through the streets of Lawrence. A stout Latino Falstaff with a permanent 5 o’clock shadow, Rosario has been working for Sheehan’s Towing for more than a decade and knows every shopkeeper, cop, and crackhead in the city. Driving along, he points to where an expensive SUV has been left running at the curb — an incongruous sight in this neighborhood filled with junk cars and taxis.

“Watch,” he says. “That’s a drug house.”

As we cruise by, an attractive fortyish blonde walks briskly outside and slams herself into the driver’s seat. She has something in her hand and stares down lovingly at it. In the passenger seat is a young boy who’d been left alone in the car.

Rosario points out one drug house after another. Passing a fast-food restaurant at the intersection of Essex Street and Broadway, he says, “Here’s where all the crackheads and prostitutes go in the morning. You’ll see ’em here every day between 7 and 9. It’s like their office.”

Broadway is thick with traffic between Essex and Lowell streets. A short while later, a guy pulls up alongside, calling out in Spanish to Rosario.

“He’s a teacher,” Rosario says. “Bigtime drug dealer.”

Josue Hernandez is leading a recall effort against the mayor.

BORN IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, William Lantigua moved to the U.S. in 1974 at the age of 19, settling in Lawrence. He worked as a technician at Schneider Electric in North Andover for 23 years while doubling as a community organizer and volunteer campaign strategist in local elections. In 2002, he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives from Lawrence’s 16th Essex District. He was reelected four times before announcing his candidacy for mayor of Lawrence in 2008.

Lantigua’s victory brought new hope to the overwhelmingly Latino population of the city: Here was a guy, like many of them, who had come to Lawrence from the Dominican Republic looking for an opportunity. A tall, slender man with a shaved head, Lantigua, now 57, possesses a kind of endearing clumsiness in front of a crowd. But his mien can quickly turn cold, and he’s often surrounded by a dozen or more grim-faced men wearing baggy suits that look like they came from the Russian politburo’s thrift shop.

Unfortunately for the city, Lantigua’s political persona changed as quickly as his moods. First, there was his refusal to give up his position as state rep, claiming he could do both jobs simultaneously — and collect both salaries. (Finally, in February 2010, his colleagues in the House forced him out by saying they’d deny Lawrence $35 million in bailout money unless he quit.) Then, last May, it became known that Lantigua and his live-in girlfriend, Lorenza Ortega — who works in the city’s personnel office — were accepting federal fuel assistance to pay the heating bills for their condominium. Since the mayor is paid more than $100,000 a year, he and Ortega were clearly ineligible for the approximately $1,165 annual fuel subsidy that’s meant for struggling families. Lantigua bristled when questioned by reporters, claiming he didn’t know he was receiving fuel assistance and that he was preoccupied with city business.

Meanwhile, the mayor has prevented his department heads, including the police and fire chiefs, from releasing information or talking to the press without his permission. That gag order is just one source of Lantigua’s strained relations with his public safety departments. He has stated that firefighters get paid to sleep, and that Lawrence police are “intimidating” and “lazy.” Certainly, the current administration inherited severe budget problems from the previous mayor, Michael Sullivan. But Lantigua’s dismissiveness hasn’t helped him win points with the fire or police departments.

Lantigua’s ham-fisted patronage system is also drawing heat. One personnel change in the police department has fueled an ongoing circus of accusations and finger pointing, not to mention suspicions of a secret federal investigation. Right after his inauguration in January 2010, Lantigua demoted deputy police chief Mike Driscoll, a 20-year veteran of the department, and replaced him with sergeant Melix Bonilla, who’d been a top Lantigua campaign aide.

It wasn’t long before Bonilla was caught up in controversy of his own. Approximately a year after Bonilla’s appointment, his 17-year-old son, Jamel Bonilla, allegedly used his father’s gun in a home invasion. (According to the Eagle-Tribune newspaper, Melix admitted as much as part of a deal that gave him immunity from prosecution; Jamel was indicted and pleaded not guilty.) Then, in April 2010, Bonilla sent police chief John Romero a memo suggesting the department trade several seized vehicles to a local car dealer, Bernardo Pena, who had ties to Lantigua. In the end, the police department gave up 13 vehicles, including a Lexus, a Cadillac, and an Acura, for four used Chevrolet Impalas.

Lawrence’s state-appointed fiscal overseer, Robert Nunes, estimated that the city lost $36,408 on the deal, and stated that the swap violated state and federal laws. (According to the Eagle-Tribune, the Essex County district attorney’s office and the state inspector general are still investigating the deal, and the FBI has also questioned people involved in it.)

Subsequent revelations raised questions about Pena’s relationship with Lantigua. As the controversial car deal was under way, Pena donated $200 to Lantigua’s campaign war chest, and in February of last year, Pena’s company, Santo Domingo Motors, cosponsored a birthday party/fundraiser for the mayor, with tickets costing as much as $100.

Lantigua is also under federal investigation, according to several press reports, for shipping city and private vehicles to the Dominican Republic, including a garbage truck, undercover police vehicles, and a school bus.

Lantigua’s many issues have led not just to discontent, but also to a determined recall effort. Standing at the corner of South Broadway and Andover Street, several volunteers, all Latino, are holding signs in English and Spanish, asking passersby to sign a petition calling for Lantigua’s removal from office. Twenty-four-year-old Josue Hernandez stoops into a car window, using an app on his cell phone to determine whether the person who wants to sign the petition is a registered Lawrence voter. Last summer, a different recall effort failed when the city ruled that many of the signatures collected did not belong to registered voters. Recall organizers suspected sabotage. Now, Hernandez and his colleagues must gather the signatures of 5,382 registered Lawrence voters — 15 percent of the number who cast ballots in the last election — to force a special election. They have 30 days to do so, and in the first three days have collected more than 500 of them.

Hernandez’s public criticism of the mayor may have had repercussions — his juvenile record, including arrests for armed robbery, assault, and more, was posted on a pro-Lantigua Facebook page, the information coming from pages originally printed from a police department computer. (Chief Romero immediately opened an investigation, which is ongoing, into who did it.) Standing on the corner, Hernandez shows me a YouTube video on his phone of Lantigua confronting residents at a Walk for Peace last July. In the video, residents are trying to engage Lantigua as he repeatedly and angrily points at the ground in front of him — implying that his critics can kiss his feet. Finally, a political ally standing beside Lantigua takes him by the arm and convinces him to stop. “It’s a peace march,” Hernandez says, “and here he is acting like a thug.”

NEARLY 13,000 CHILDREN attend Lawrence’s troubled public schools. The past three superintendents were fired, including the most recent, Wilfredo Laboy, who’s currently under criminal indictment and awaiting trial. Last fall, the state declared Lawrence a “chronically underperforming” system, and for the first time in Massachusetts history took over an entire district, essentially saying the city isn’t competent to run its own schools.

The Department of Education completed its review of the district last fall. Among the reasons it cited for the takeover are a dropout rate that’s three times the state average; a high school graduation rate of less than 50 percent; a pattern of “disrespectful and intimidating behavior” exhibited by school committee members; systemwide underperformance in math; an English language aptitude that’s among the bottom one percent of all Massachusetts districts; chronic absenteeism; and a rate of in-school disciplinary suspensions more than triple the state average. And in a city where the student body is 90 percent Hispanic or Latino, the schools have been deemed woefully understaffed with teachers qualified to teach English-language learners.

Inside the schools, the problems are difficult to overstate. One day last fall, a middle school teacher found students huddled in the back of the classroom, according to attorney Linda Harvey, who represents the teacher. “He’s got a knife,” said a student, pointing at a boy holding a four-inch blade. The teacher ran to the classroom door and yelled for a security officer, who removed the boy. The teacher advised the security officer to call the police and an ambulance. Ninety minutes later, the student was sent back to the classroom without the knife, Harvey says.