A divided City Council committee gave a favorable rating to next year’s proposed budget for the Cambridge Police Department, sending it to the full council on Wednesday.
Three members of the Finance Committee – which includes all the councillors – voted against the proposal because of their chagrin over police officials setting up their own alternative police response program without telling councillors, who were designing a separate city department to provide an unarmed alternative to police.
The police program “was news to a lot of us,” councillor Sumbul Siddiqui said. “And that’s the tension that I’m still grappling with.” She voted against advancing the proposed police budget, along with councillors Patty Nolan and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler.
Mayor E. Denise Simmons, vice mayor Marc McGovern and councillors Paul Toner, Catherine Zusy and Ayesha Wilson voted yes, and councillor Burhan Azeem was absent.
Both initiatives – the police department’s co-response and the new Community Safety Department’s Community Assistance Response and Engagement team – answer calls involving people in a mental crisis, but the police unit includes an armed officer and a social worker and takes on situations that could involve violence. There’s another difference: The police co-response unit can answer any call it chooses, but the Care team must be dispatched by the emergency call center and can respond only to certain types of nonviolent situations.
In fact, the Care team had to negotiate with the police unions over what types of calls it could answer. A union spokesperson said previously the reason was concern over the risk of violence.
The fact that police officials planned their co-response program while councillors worked to establish a second alternative response department, leaving councillors in the dark, was revealed last month in a Harvard Crimson article. Then the head of the new department, Liz Speakman, told councillors that the police unit had even showed up at some calls that the Care team had answered. Speakman has resigned to work at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center; interim department head Marie Mathieu said later the duplicate responses occurred only five times out of hundreds of calls.
Sobrinho-Wheeler said there might have been good reasons to set up a police co-response unit to deal with calls that Care couldn’t handle, but “there should have been a conversation with the council before [co-response] was rolled out.” When the council approved a policy order in 2020 that led to the creation of the Community Safety Department and its Care team, councillors expected that the new department “would be the city’s co-response,” he said.
Police officials introduced a wrinkle in the situation at the Finance Committee hearing: A state Department of Mental Health grant that funded the social worker on the co-response unit plus supplies and overhead is due to expire this fall, said James Barrett, a psychologist and director of clinical support services. Police have applied for a new grant to fund two social workers, but the state mental health department faces “significant cuts” and “there is a potential that we will not be funded,” Barrett said.
That led Simmons to lay the groundwork for possible but unlikely city funding. The program with one social worker costs about $120,000, Barrett said. “It would be unfortunate if we lost [the program],” Simmons said. City manager Yi-An Huang, answering a question from Simmons, said the city “has not tended to guarantee that we will backfill contingencies,” apparently referring to the potential loss of the state grant.
There was scant mention of the other unarmed response initiative in Cambridge, the Holistic Emergency Assistance Response Team, the grassroots organization established in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. Though the council supported city funding for Heart and the group got $300,000 in federal pandemic aid from the city, it struggled to get a city grant.
Last year, the Community Safety Department gave $150,000 to Heart from $600,000 that was set aside in its budget to support community organizations working to prevent violence. The department’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year includes money for community groups, but the amount hasn’t been decided, city spokesperson Jeremy Warnick said previously.
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Pretty much expect to see that vote from Simmons, Toner, Zusy, and Wilson, but a shame to see it from McGovern. He’s lost my vote.