City councillors put off voting on a controversial request to spend $570,000 on new guns for police officers so they could get more questions answered at a Finance Committee meeting 10 days later. At the committee meeting Thursday, though, councillors spent only about a half-hour of a two-hour session on the issue.
And although several councillors submitted questions on the gun purchase in advance, police commissioner Christine Elow said police didn’t bring answers to those queries to the committee meeting.
“We’re compiling a list of everything, and we’re going to do a detailed response to all of those,” she said. Creating some confusion about that remark, Elow went on to imply that she did have some answers: “I can go over the answers that we have, but we will compile a detailed list of all the questions that we got from the councillors and send that out to you. I do not have that right now.”
She didn’t go over answers to any of the questions, nor was she asked to.
At the March 17 council meeting Elow said the department needs to replace police guns because the manufacturer is no longer making them and the police department’s supply is running low. City manager Yi-An Huang said in his request for the money that the new guns being bought have more modern features and will have new holsters that turn on officers’ body cameras automatically if they pull guns out.
At that meeting, councillors asked why the department couldn’t find money in its $81 million budget for the gun replacements, why it wanted to take money from this year’s “free cash,” a reserve, instead of buying the guns as a capital expense, and why it needs more than 330 guns when there are 288 officers. They got answers but apparently were not satisfied with them, resulting in the referral to committee.
Councillors were also aware of how it looked to spend money on guns for police when the city is closing a homeless shelter in June, something mentioned in many public comments. This issue didn’t come up at the committee.
The questions
These are some of the questions that councillors asked in advance of the Thursday committee meeting and and that still remain unanswered:
Councillor Sumbul Siddiqui: If police learned in 2022 that the guns in use would be discontinued, why wasn’t there enough time “to go through the traditional capital expense process” instead of turning to free cash now?
Also, a 2020 police report to the council said the guns were acquired in 2020 and cost $419 apiece. If this is accurate, why will the new ones cost more than twice as much even with trade-in? Councillor Cathie Zusy asked a similar question.
Councillors Patty Nolan and Siddiqui: What is the new gun that police want to buy?
Nolan: Is it true that Cambridge police officers have fired a gun in the line of duty only five times in the past 100 years?
Nolan: Why not wait the usual eight to 10 years before replacing them?
Federal funds and budgeting
The committee meeting started with a detailed report of how the city has spent its $88.1 million allocation of American Rescue Plan Act funds since fiscal year 2022 and will spend its funds until the money runs out at the end of 2026. It then moved to an overview of the police department draft budget. The committee will consider the police budget in detail in a few weeks as part of the budget process for the next fiscal year starting July 1.
At that point, councillors had about an hour to discuss buying new police weapons. Instead, they turned to other topics such as police body cameras, increased staff devoted to the new body cameras and whether Cambridge has too many police officers.
This last issue came from Zusy, who offered figures she had calculated on the number of police officers per capita in Somerville, Boston and Cambridge. Nolan, chair of the committee, said the issue had received an “extensive analysis” two years ago, with one reason for Cambridge needing more officers being the large number of people who come to the city daily and are not counted in per-capita figures. That didn’t stop Zusy from bringing up her numbers again, near the end of the meeting.
Other gun topics
During the last half hour, councillors did turn to the subject of guns. Councillor Ayesha Wilson asked if the purchase had anything to do with the lawsuit by former Lt. Thomas J. Ahern against the city and the maker of the current police guns, Sig Sauer, alleging that Ahern’s gun fired without his pulling the trigger and the city retaliated against him for claiming the gun was defective and unsafe. Wilson didn’t name Ahern.
The request for new guns has nothing to do with that, city solicitor Megan Bayer said in describing the suit, also without naming the parties.
Councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler pressed Elow about her assertion at the March 17 meeting that state law requires every police officer to carry a gun. He said he could not find any such law. Elow acknowledged she had been mistaken; a local policy adopted by the city manager and the police chief requires a gun for every officer, she said.
Sobrinho-Wheeler then turned to a different topic – whether school resource officers should be armed.
Support for the funding
Councillor Paul Toner had to wait almost to the end of the meeting to speak, though he had raised his hand about 45 minutes earlier. “I would have liked us to have voted for this a week or two weeks ago, whenever it was first brought to us. It doesn’t sound like there’s a different funding source that we can find. I haven’t heard anybody say that. It’s not a bad idea to get new, updated guns for the police department that also have the added benefit of partnering with the body worn cameras to make them even a better safety feature,” Toner said. He will vote for the measure when it comes to the council Monday, he said.
Councillor E. Denise Simmons said she will, too. She said she supports the measure because “one of the things that I’ve observed as someone who’s lived in Cambridge my entire life, and particularly since 2008, 2009, I think our police department has done extraordinary jobs around deescalation and bringing the community in and making people feel not only safe but noticed and supported.”
As for the still unanswered questions submitted to police before the committee meeting, Nolan asked Elow to provide answers before the next council meeting Monday. Several, from Nolan, involve body cameras, not guns; Nolan asked Elow to give priority to the gun questions.
A stronger
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It seems hard to believe the lawsuit by a former officer about the current gun has “nothing” to do with this emergency need to replace every gun on the force. If it truly does not have anything to do with the lawsuit it seems like the city can wait a year to purchase the new guns via the usual capital expense process.