During recent outdoor office hours, while speaking with a constituent, Ward 6 city councilor Lance Davis noticed something jarring out of the corner of his eye. About 10 feet behind her at the edge of Somerville’s Community Path lay a used drug needle.
The needle, Davis said during the Aug. 22 meeting of the City Council, was an example of a pressing safety issue Somerville needs to address: increased public drug use and unsafe disposal of drug paraphernalia and complaints of inappropriate behavior, especially in Davis Square and Seven Hills Park.
The half-dozen issues and possible solutions will be discussed Wednesday at a 6 p.m. online meeting of the council’s Public Health and Safety Committee.
Constituents in Ward 7 have raised the same concerns with worry about the lack of safe spaces for their children in the park, councilor Judy Pineda Neufeld said. They’re finding people passed out or consuming substances in their own backyards, she said, and they want an immediate response.
The conditions at Seven Hills Park are an “urgent crisis,” Neufeld said.
The city “can take a compassionate public health approach to our unhoused neighbors and ensure that there’s a safe environment for our community members to utilize,” Neufeld said in an Aug. 15 email to Kimberly Hutter, legislative liaison for Mayor Katjana Ballantyne.
A response from Hutter on Aug. 22 said Somerville police were on constant patrol in Davis Square and that the city is establishing a Community Health Worker outreach team to offer homelessness and harm-reduction services.
“The goal is to have the shelter and support needed so that persons experiencing homelessness will have safe places to stay overnight and visit during the day that will relieve pressure on our public spaces and offer our unhoused greater opportunity for stability,” Hutter wrote.
Police, Public Works and the Health and Housing departments coordinate regularly to consider intervention options, Hutter said.
Substance use disorder and the growing unhoused population are separate issues, but they can overlap, Davis said.
“It’s a shared challenge that we face when we live in an urban environment, in the system that we have. Frankly, at the municipal level, but more so at the state and federal level, they just don’t put enough resources into helping people who have various challenges,” Davis said. “The system is designed that way, and we all know how we could change this even though our country has made a collective decision not to.”
Still, “people still need to be good community members in whatever situation they find themselves,” Davis said. “The approach is not going to be to arrest everyone or chase them out, but we do also need to expect more appropriate behavior from some folks that, I’m told, have been displaced.”
The city needs to maintain a compassionate approach and a focus on the root issues of substance use disorder and homelessness, Davis said. He was grateful for the Somerville Police Department’s response so far, including their simply sitting down to talk with unhoused people, as sending in police to chase out community members “would simply push folks who are going through a hard time somewhere else.”
Another council resolution for discussion in committee would require the administration to install and replace secure needle disposal receptacles, because ones provided previously by the city have been damaged, and needles that aren’t disposed of properly create a public health and safety risk. To protect residents from coming into contact with hazardous waste, the council also referred a resolution for more trash and needle pickup in Davis Square, Seven Hills Park and the Community Path.
The committee will also consider a call for an update from the city on opening an overdose prevention center. The project has stalled in Somerville and other cities because the state hasn’t said it will protect medical staff or drug users the would monitor from the federal government, which doesn’t support the approach. Cambridge officials said in July that they wanted to see the cities jump together on OPC creation and find strength in numbers
“If Cambridge, Somerville, Boston are all moving together, we would all feel more comfortable,” said Yi-An Huang, Cambridge’s city manager.
Those interested in the Wednesday committee meeting can register online to attend the meeting over Zoom.
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The last time I walked through there I saw: one person shooting up with a needle, another person purchasing presumably heroin, another lighting up a pipe, and a fourth being attended to by medical professionals and police.
But yea, let’s put in a needle box. Problem solved! What a kind and compassionate society we are for allowing this to take place in our public spaces.