Black and white rally together, speak as one, only for police commissioner to seek to divide
Our police department is better than many, which we can appreciate as the country undergoes upheaval coast to coast in the form of people of all colors rising up against police brutality and systemic racism. With even Nascar banning the Confederate flag and military leaders seeking to remove the name of traitorous generals from the bases where we train our soldiers, this is an important moment for people and their police. A Monmouth University poll shows 76 percent of us “consider racial and ethnic discrimination to be a big problem,” up 26 percentage points in less than five years, and that includes 71 percent of white people in the survey. A sociologist told The New York Times that the involvement of white people in the current work for justice is “utterly different from anything we’ve seen.”
It seems curious, then, how far out of his way our police commissioner went Wednesday toward trying to divide black from white in Cambridge.
Trying to discredit the hundreds of calls that came in during a Monday public comment session about stripping his department of some money and redirecting it toward human services, commissioner Branville G. Bard Jr. called out the number of white voices he heard by saying, “I did not hear authentic voices on Monday night. I heard a bunch of people looking for their ‘I’m a black ally’ receipts, hoping that they could somehow use it to pay off white guilt.”
The Cambridge Observer posted a clip:
Bard, who is black, compared the calls Monday with the rally on Cambridge Common the previous day: “I was at the rally on Sunday afternoon, and I heard nearly 3,500 authentic voices, many of whom were black and brown.”
But anyone who was there with him on the Common knows there were many white faces too, and that it was at that rally with “authentic voices” where organizers exhorted people to call in Monday. Little did they know that the voices would turn inauthentic overnight.
By focusing on the white voices calling for change and branding them unworthy of being heard, Bard drained attention from – and demeaned – the black voices making similar critiques with even greater moral authority, and calling for the same things. That includes the esteemed Moses family, whose letter was introduced by Malaika Moses with praise for the councillors who introduced the motion striking at Bard’s budget: “We’d like to thank councillors [Quinton] Zondervan and [Jivan] Sobrinho-Wheeler for their courageous stance that the city budget is a moral document that reflects what we as a city truly value.”
What was even more surprising about Bard’s cynical attempt to deflect attention from the council motion was that it came only a month after a police superintendent under Bard’s command accidentally went public with an online complaint about a U.S. representative being “another liberal fucking jerk” – this in one of the most famously liberal cities in the United States, jeered or embraced depending on the speaker as “the People’s Republic of Cambridge.”
Does this police force actually understand, respect or even like the city it patrols?
Though that errant tweet May 3 may be disconcerting in the contempt it reveals for the majority of Cantabrigians, surely we’ve all dabbled in regrettable rhetoric in online conversations we think are private. Bard’s comments were scripted, though, and read out purposefully and with intent to a City Hall chamber full of officials (some attending virtually) and an audience of potentially many hundreds of residents.
This is the same city leader and enforcer of laws who found a business owner guilty of criminal “threats” against fire inspectors while sitting as a license commissioner – even after hearing the inspectors themselves give testimony under oath that they knew the threats weren’t physical, but more about the likely filing of a complaint with their managers. Bard refused repeatedly to explain or justify his vote. The ACLU is now suing because of Bard’s judgment.
The conversation about the police budget picks up against Monday, surely with cooler heads. But it will be hard to shake questions about why Bard wrote and decided to speak those insulting but presumably heartfelt words. And, increasingly, about the judgment he shows.
This post was updated June 15, 2020, to correct a statement that the ACLU was suing the city; it is suing a state agency over the License Commission’s finding of a “threat.”
Spot on!
Slow clap for spotting one and missing the other.
“I don’t need them to save me”
Who said that? Councilor Denise Simmons.
Damn if whitey do. Damn if whitey don’t. Silly devils….
It’s a shame that some people enter into discussion of such policy issues with an arrogant, condemnatory attitude, presuming that they know everything there is to know about the subject of their advocacy. I doubt that any of those who are demanding defunding or abolition of Cambridge Police have ever troubled themselves to consult with people in Cambridge neighborhoods who are afflicted by high crime rates. Certain Cambridge City Councillors are now taking on this same approach – they put together an ordinance proposal for cutting the police department’s budget without ever consulting the chief of police or constituents from areas such as Cambridgeport where there has been a lot of violent crime.
In 2018, as reported in the Cambridge Chronicle’s “Cambridge City Councillor: Uptick in gun violence ‘an emergency’,” former mayor Denise Simmons spoke about the urgency of the deteriorating situation. Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui has also expressed great concern about this. Both women are persons of color with life-long residency in Cambridge and close connectivity to people in affected areas. Simmons characterized the treatment of police chief Branville Bard at last week’s committee hearing as “bullying.” The chief – an African-American man who has made clear his support for the issues of Black Lives Matter protests (see: “Cambridge police commissioner responds to George Floyd’s death”) – was very perturbed by the complete disregard of ordinance proponents for the sincere and consultative work which he and the department had been doing.
As a response to community and Council feedback in 2018, a task force was set up, to do comprehensive engagement toward not just deterring and preventing crime, but also in assisting with making productive life options available to those who ended up incarcerated (see: “Cambridge Gun Violence Spurs Police Task Force,” in the Patch, 2018). Perhaps those now advocating for abolition were not around when the Caribbean festival had to be cancelled in 2017 due to the threat of gang violence. A custodian with whom I’m familiar had his son-in-law shot to death in East Cambridge. That same year, there was a shoot-out at a similar festival in Boston, which occurred in front of police officers who were posted there (and who made arrests).
As of this April, crime was still all too prevalent in Boston (see: “This Is Too Much: Crime Continues Despite Pandemic,” at WBUR’s site). In Cambridge, however, as the Crimson reported in “Cambridge Crime Numbers Reach Five-Decade Low,” the situation has been improving. There were “only” 2257 serious crimes in the city last year. Business and education populations were still especially targeted for thefts, however.
Cambridge Police have said that the messages they’ve received from residents in high-crime neighborhoods about the Violence Prevention Task Force has been overwhelmingly positive, that the increased police presence and enforcement was welcomed. Denise Simmons has been involved with a “Safe City, Safe Streets” initiative for years. One reads that there are persons who have been doing the work on abolition proposals for years, but where are the results to show actual benefit of sustainable alternatives for citizens? A more enlightened approach is that of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which has published: “A New Era of Public Safety and Community Policing: An Advocacy Toolkit for Fair, Safe and Effective Community Policing.”
By the way, the owner of the bar who was accused of threatening inspectors spent 35 minutes being (according to inspectors’ account of what took place) “agitated, argumentative, aggressive, insulting, rude, very loud and confrontational,” at one point grabbing papers from the hands of an inspector, and finally telling those functionaries that they would “live to regret” having coerced her into extinguishing the bar’s candles. She went far beyond just expressing opinion. Although the inspectors were in fact incorrect about the law, that did not give her the right to behave in such a way.