Conflict has broken into the open between police unions and the city over two changes long sought by activists and supported by the city: equipping officers with body cameras and establishing an unarmed response team as an alternative to police.
The president of the Cambridge Patrol Officers Association, Chris Sullivan, issued a statement Monday questioning the qualifications and training of the new Cambridge Assistance Response and Engagement team that began answering some emergency mental health-related calls July 15. Sullivan asserted that police were involved in most of the initial responses and said: “This fundamentally has resulted in a duplication of services.”
The statement also reiterated that police “are supportive of the deployment of body-worn cameras” – despite the fact that the patrol officers and superior officers unions sought privately to force the city to negotiate with the unions on whether to adopt the cameras. The unions’ complaint to the state Department of Labor Relations was dismissed July 10, but the two sides continue to talk about impacts of body cameras on police work.
Sullivan said an agreement with the union on cameras is taking longer than it could because of “the city’s position of not compensating [union] members fairly for the care and maintenance of the new equipment.” A spokesperson for the union didn’t immediately say why the union continues to say it supports deploying the cameras when it tried to require the city to negotiate that decision.
As for Sullivan’s assertions about the Care team, city spokesperson Jeremy Warnick said it wasn’t true that police were involved with most of the Care team’s initial responses to mental health and other calls.
Warnick said two of the six incidents did include police, but the others did not. He added: “Personally, I’m disappointed to see what appears to be an attempt to generate division amongst two important public-facing departments in the city … Particularly in light of a significant milestone for a new department that couldn’t have been possible without the support and collaboration of the various Cambridge public safety agencies, including the police department.”
Warnick said each team member has undergone 500 hours of training since last September and has been observed for 100 hours by other first responders such as firefighters, Pro EMS, police and First Step, which provides services for unhoused people.
The city had been negotiating with police unions about which 911 calls the unarmed team could answer. Warnick said last week that the city “addressed several of the unions’ concerns” and now “believes it has complied with its bargaining obligations” although there is no agreement.
Sullivan said the patrol officers union “is committed to working collaboratively with the city as Cambridge experiments with alternative means of providing certain emergency services. However, we continue to have concerns about the qualifications and proper training of Care team members.”
He said the union’s worry “is underscored by the challenges the city has encountered in staffing the Care team, including the termination of several team members.” Three of the initial eight team members were fired in January during their probationary period, for undisclosed reasons, two months before the initial start date for answering calls. The city has advertised for replacements.
That start date was postponed until this month, though the team answered requests for needle pickups since February.
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Opposition to the cameras is ridiculous, and a bad look for the unions. Cameras are now cheap, if one breaks it can be replaced easily. If an officer has a ‘streak of bad luck’ with broken cameras, refer him to IA.
Yes, I don’t understand the union’s position either because as you say, cameras are only getting cheaper. But where the real costs are is the storage and retrieval costs (usually by third party vendors) because there can be tens of thousands of hours of data/footage per officer. Someone must get paid to find the particular footage requested and isolate the relevant segments. Plus, when some particular footage is requested, identified and retrieved it often requires the hiring of an editor to remove or cover up personal details of those in the footage who aren’t pertinent to the case, for privacy reasons. This is why it may take a few weeks to ever see body cam footage. That’s a few weeks of someone getting paid to process every step of its handling. So cameras aren’t costly but the time-consuming handling of the footage definitely is, especially because police agencies are more low tech than they are high tech. Another money question is, when cops wear body cams, do the insurance rates that agency pays go down or do they go… up? If more often than not in contested cases body cams show cops making mistakes, then one would assume police insurance rates are higher for agencies using body cams. On the flipside, if wearing bodycams in general tends to reduce the amount of unnecessary use of force, then insurance rates for those agencies are probably lower.
There are good reasons to oppose cameras the police are just opposing them to try to get even more money though https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/f/4764/files/2024/07/Alec-Karakatsanis_The-Body-Camera-FINAL.pdf
Presumably, your newspaper considers itself “pro-union,” but this article shows a fundamental misunderstanding of collective bargaining. A union’s job is to negotiate over anything that affects the wages, hours, and working conditions of its membership. While the decision to require body cams may be within the City’s managerial prerogative, the union has the right to negotiate over the impacts of that decision. Suppose the management at your job decided to install cameras that monitored everything you did. Can you think of impacts you’d want to negotiate? For example, under what circumstances can the film be used against you? Are there any exceptions? Are you entitled to see the film? When? Will the film be preserved, and if so, for how long? Will the film be made public?
I suspect the generally anti-union slant of this article is because it concerns a police union, and true to its generally knee-jerk orientation, this newspaper generally disapproves of police. Are you pro-union only if the union represents workers you approve of?