Cambridge police used the chemical irritant pepper spray twice in August, just two days apart, with starkly different responses to inquiries about the incidents.
City councillors requested and got a detailed report from police about the Aug. 1 instance. In that case, residents were forced from their homes in a six-story building after police tossed in balls containing the chemical in powder form to dislodge a suspect barricaded in one apartment – unsuccessfully, it turned out. And police commissioner Christine Elow said police wouldn’t use the chemical again in a similar situation.
The reaction was different for the Aug. 3 incident, a Harvard Square demonstration against Israel’s war in Gaza and the Capital One bank, allegedly a lender to the Israeli arms maker Elbit Systems.
Police arrested three people, on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to throwing an explosive or unknown chemical substance, and said they pepper sprayed protesters to stop them from assaulting officers.
Prosecutors have dropped the most serious charge of throwing an unknown chemical, according to court records. No reason was given in the records. The charge said Bronte Wen, 27, of Somerville, allegedly threw a balloon filled with an unknown liquid and hit officer Jarrad Cabral in the chest, where it exploded and caused a burning sensation. Cabral’s body camera did not “properly activate” during the protest, according to his police report.
So far most councillors haven’t shown much interest in investigating police actions at the protest. The incident, though, has raised questions about access to police body camera footage as well as police use of pepper spray.
Concerned about response
The questions about the protest started when Gerald Bergman, an Essex Street resident, wrote messages to the chairs of the Public Safety Committee, the council as a whole and the city manager asking for an examination of police actions at that demonstration as well as one a week later also targeting Elbit Systems. Bergman focused on the Aug. 3 event, saying he wasn’t there but had heard from others who were.
Based on what they told him, “I am concerned that the police use of barricades and pepper spray, as well as the extremely large police presence on Aug. 3, was an overreaction to the demonstration and served to be a cause rather than a deterrent to what occurred,” Bergman’s message said. “The use of barricades and pepper spray used on that day may not have been used in a way that adequately and fairly protected free speech activities.”
Four councillors replied to Bergman’s messages. Two of them, Sumbul Siddiqui and vice mayor Marc McGovern, seemed to confuse the Harvard Square demonstration with the 18-hour standoff at 243 Broadway. Siddiqui said she and other councillors had asked for a report – but about the standoff, not about the demonstrations. McGovern said the council’s Public Safety Committee would look into the issue, and the committee held a meeting to hear the police report on 243 Broadway.
The other two councillors, Patty Nolan and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, said they have asked city officials for more information.
Footage “cannot be released”
Sobrinho-Wheeler also raised the issue of body camera footage, saying he had asked to look at it to see “if there were violations of Cambridge’s ordinance restricting the use of chemical crowd control agents and kinetic impact projectiles.” He was told that footage from the demonstration and from the 243 Broadway incident “cannot be released while there is an ongoing investigation,” he said in an email.
This is similar to what councillors learned when police officials presented their report on the pepper balls that spread the chemical irritant throughout the six-story affordable housing building at 243 Broadway – that footage won’t be released to the public until the case against the barricaded suspect, Princiano Faustin, has concluded. He faces nine charges stemming from an alleged Central Square rampage with two machetes that injured two bystanders, and he has been found incompetent to stand trial at this time.
Councillors reacted by asking city officials to propose a system to give public access to camera footage and suggested a 30-day time frame.
“We’ve spent two years and many hundreds of thousands of dollars getting these body cameras,” councillor Burhan Azeem said in September. “If the footage isn’t released until much further along, many years after an incident, I think they kind of defeat the purpose.”
A person of interest
Meanwhile, another issue arose involving release of body camera footage. An MIT graduate student who participated in the Aug. 3 demonstration, Richard Solomon, has been suspended from most activities on campus because campus police received “photographic evidence” from the demonstration that resulted in identifying him as a “person of interest to Cambridge police,” according to a letter from MIT officials to Solomon notifying him of the ban. Cambridge police spokesperson Sgt. Robert Reardon said a “person of interest” is someone who’s being investigated for a crime.
Did Cambridge police send body camera footage of the demonstration to MIT police? No, according to the city administration, but that answer came 15 days after police at first refused to say.
Reardon said Sept. 24 that he could not answer because of “an ongoing criminal case related to this incident.” On Oct. 9, city spokesperson Jeremy Warnick said in an email on an unrelated question that police did not send body camera footage to MIT police. Warnick said Cambridge police “could have been more explicit.”
Reardon did say that the Cambridge body camera policy allows police to share footage with other law enforcement agencies.
MIT spokesperson Sarah McDonnell didn’t respond to questions about Solomon. Reardon suggested a reporter call the Middlesex District Attorney’s office with the unanswered questions; spokesperson Meghan Kelly said she was “working on” answers and then stopped responding to emails.
Exemption requires explanation
Solomon is seeking the body camera footage from the demonstration himself, to “get back on campus,” he said. The city denied his request, citing an exemption to the state public records law that echoed a familiar theme when it comes to making the camera footage public: that there was an ongoing investigation.
But that exemption requires public officials to go further than merely saying there is an investigation. It says they must show how releasing the footage would interfere with the investigation to the point where the threat to law enforcement could violate the public interest. Solomon appealed the city’s denial, and the state agency that oversees the public records law told the city to comply with the requirement to show harm. The city’s response isn’t public.
Cambridge police are seeking charges against Solomon related to the demonstration, his lawyer said. Reardon said police have applied for a criminal complaint of assault and battery of a police officer and interfering with police against two more demonstrators besides the three arrested at the protest; he refused to name them because the department doesn’t identify suspects who get a summons, he said. A clerk magistrate must find adequate cause to issue a criminal complaint.
Sobrinho-Wheeler has also asked city officials whether police sent body camera footage from the demonstration to MIT police and had not received an answer as of Monday.
As for pepper spray, Cambridge police have said they will investigate any use of the chemical as a “use-of-force” incident. Release of the investigation reports is also subject to the public records law.
This post was updated Oct. 16, 2025, to note that an MIT student was suspended from certain campus activities after taking part in an Aug. 3 demonstration, and to remove extraneous details of the case.
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