Money we don’t need
(This piece originally appeared in the Cambridge Somerville Independent)
The Somerville City Council accepted nearly $200k for the police department on Thursday. The debate was fractious, with stress spilling over from a chaotic finance committee meeting on Tuesday into Thursday’s full council meeting. Things were so tense on Tuesday that committee Chair Ben Wheeler stopped the meeting at one point to ask the city clerk for parliamentary guidance on how to proceed through competing demands from committee members.
The Boston Office of Emergency Management gave us a total of $160k - $127k for “Special Response Team equipment and training,” and another $43k for “software.” The Metro Mayors Coalition (MAPC) provided $22,800 to fund “youth violence prevention.” Perhaps surprisingly, most of the heat and fire was over that second, smaller grant.
The MAPC Community Safety Initiative, also known as the “Shannon” grant, is an annual funding opportunity focused on “addressing a community’s gang and youth violence problem.” Somerville has applied for and received these funds for several years. They support summertime activities for underprivileged youth, including a junior police academy, trips to the aquarium, and a much loved intra-city basketball tournament. Somerville’s chief of police, Shumeane Benford explained on Tuesday that the grant pays overtime for the officers to staff those activities.
Things were going smoothly at the committee meeting until Councilor Jon Link asked about a clause in the award that requires the department to “contribute daily crime data to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Fusion Center’s Coplink.” Cambridge Day reported last year that coplink (AKA crimetracer) had shared data with ICE until 2023, but then removed the access as a matter of policy. Councilor Link expressed concern that, despite the recent policy change, our data would find its way into federal hands and be used to target Somerville residents for arrest and deportation.
Chief Benford responded that all of this data is already public, saying that anybody can walk into the station and take a look. Both Link and Chair Ben Wheeler emphasized that there is a huge difference between paper records held at the police station and an internet-connected database where information is indexed and aggregated statewide. Responding to a direct question about whether accepting this grant might lead to increased ICE arrests in Somerville, the chief acknowledged that he could not rule it out.
At this point the conversation went in two directions at once.
Councilor Kristen Strezo focused on the fact that this is a routine, annual grant to support underprivileged youth. Link and Wheeler doubled down on concerns about the impact that sharing this data might have on our most vulnerable neighbors. In my opinion, these are both valid points. The question is whether the benefits outweigh the risks. When the committee asked whether refusing these funds would result in the cancellation of the tournament, the chief said yes. Personally, I doubt that.
The Shannon grant disburses more than $500k annually, and the tournament draws participants from a dozen local cities. Presumably the show would go on even Somerville turned down our 4% of that total. I think it’s unlikely that Somerville officers and students would be barred from participating — the cops would just have to choose to do it without overtime. We would also need to cover direct expenses — stuff like jerseys, tickets, venues, food, and transportation. If we really wanted to do this program (which everybody says we do), the Mayor could put $5k in his regular budget and the chief could choose to spend 1% of the $2M that the city budgeted for police overtime this year.
The community could also step up with a fundraiser, which might not be a bad idea anyway. I’m betting that we would easily generate more than $5k for the sorts of programs I heard about. I think we should do all that and more for these kids. Speaking only for myself though, a fundraiser for police overtime would be a tough sell.
For me, the fact that this money is going to overtime raises other questions. Besides casting a bit of a shadow over the appearance of volunteerism — anybody who has run a business knows that long-term use of overtime is a mistake. Overtime is more expensive by half versus hiring enough personnel. Worse, the prolonged use of overtime leaves employees exhausted and demoralized — a complaint we have heard time and again from the department. Somerville budgeted $2M in police overtime this fiscal year — 15% of the salary line. From a purely financial perspective, budgeting for sustained overtime is wasteful. Doing it year over year is stupid.
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The committee eventually voted 4–1 (Link opposed) to recommend accepting the grant. At the full council meeting on Thursday, Councilor Scott asked that the items be separated out to take a roll call vote on each. He opened his remarks by saying that he “knew how this was going to turn out,” and that he “did not expect to change anybody’s mind.” After a few brief speeches, the final vote on the Shannon grant was a razor thin 6–5 in favor of acceptance. The other two passed easily.
Software and shields
The software money is for a pair of “digital forensics” tools called Graykey, and Blue Voice. Graykey is a cell phone cracker that the police use to unlock mobile devices. Blue Voice does AI for police work, which includes search, summarization, and automated reporting. The Chief said that having Graykey in-house was helpful to quickly resolve cases of sexual violence and human trafficking, since the commercial labs that provide this service can have backlogs of up to 20 days. According to the chief, using a 3rd party for such sensitive information also raises privacy concerns, though Councilor Scott raised identical concerns about having such a powerful tool available at the police station. According to Somerville’s annual Surveillance Technology Report, Graykey was used 30 times last year. While no complaints are reported, neither are any audits or public records requests.
The money for the special response team will go to buy the helmets, shields, and body armor of the sort that can be seen all too often on the news these days. Chief Benford cited the city’s annual menorah and christmas tree lightings, as well as “other protests,” as examples of situations where he would want to have a well armed and armored team in reserve. Councilor Scott, speaking in opposition to taking the money, recalled instead the police violence at the so called “straight pride” march in 2019.
As above, all of these are valid points. The question comes down to trust.
Oversight
I suspect that all of this would be easier if the city had made more visible progress on what has variously been called the “police commission,” “civilian oversight of police,” “re-imagining policing,” and “public safety for all.” All the way back in June of 2020 — in the depths of the first year of COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests — Councilor Mbah put forward a resolution demanding that the city, “create a police commission and a community police review agency.” That resolution was co-sponsored by most of council, which includes many people still in the chambers now.
Shortly thereafter, Mayor Curtatone set aside a million dollars to create a department of Racial and Social Justice (RSJ). Consultants were hired, task forces were convened, a report was produced, listening session were held, and still other consultants were hired to produce yet another report. We’ve spent millions of dollars and countless hours over the last six years, with little to show for it. Thursday’s agenda included an update from RSJ, which is a tepid and vague thing. The page “public safety oversight” contains just three bullets — expressing support, noting a state entity, and teasing discussions with Cambridge.
This interminable process has left the city unable to resolve either the fairly straightforward question of staffing (it’s a number, at the end of the day) or the deeper trust issues. This, in my opinion is the root cause of these endless proxy fights over relatively small amounts of money — with all of their associated bad feelings.
No free lunch
During Thursday’s debate, Mayor Wilson stepped to the microphone (as he does at every council meeting) and emphasized that rejecting the grant would do nothing about either ICE or data sharing. “It’s just turning down free money,” he said. I disagree, and not just because I put value on the time and goodwell that the council burned last week. That “clubby” feel I wrote about just a couple weeks ago was nowhere to be found by 11pm on Thursday, and that’s a real loss.
The city is facing a $6M budget shortfall due to cuts in federal support and the slowdown in biotech real estate. Some well loved programs are going to be cut. Staff are going to be asked to do more with less. Many important activities are going to be deferred. Some will be cancelled. It will take relentless focus to stay true to our own priorities and not be distracted by easy money that comes with subtle strings.
It may seem counterintuitive to respond to a budget shortfall by turning down money, but it’s about setting our own priorities rather than letting others set them for us. I keep coming back to Chief Benford’s assertion that without the Shannon grant … lacking just $22,800 … he would not choose to prioritize engagement with the kids at the Mystics. No aquarium trips, no youth academy, and certainly no basketball. That sounds misguided and shockingly cheap to me. If these programs are really that low on the chief and the Mayor’s priority list, we should talk about that. It smacks unpleasantly of the administration and the department holding these charismatic programs hostage to preserve … what exactly?
In my opinion, we should do all these youth programs and more, with or without the grants. The $22,800 for staff time seems like a pittance (especially at time and a half), and I bet DPW could find the remaining $5k in the couch cushions down at the fleet or the highway division’s offices. A commitment to staff and fund these programs regardless of external funding would have created space for the real conversation about the risk/benefit trade-off to our undocumented neighbors. We should have been talking about how we’re obviously going to support the kids at the Mystics. Given that, the question is whether $22,800 is a good price to sell out, no matter how incrementally, our commitments as a sanctuary city.
The same is true with GrayKey, Blue Voice, and especially with the tactical gear. I always prefer to start from requirements: Do we want the police to have a phone cracker? Do we want to armor them with riot gear? Where do those decisions lead? What are the benefits? What are the risks? If the answer is “yes” then these grants are money savers. If not, they pulling us away from our priorities and ideals — adding risk and distraction to no great benfit.
Which brings me, at long last, to the question of police staffing. Whatever your feelings on the appropriate scope, organization, mandate for the department, budgeting $2M for overtime year over year is just dumb. It’s frankly inexcusable to budget 15% overtime rather than hiring 10% more people for the same money. While I, personally, wish that we had gotten more out of the last six years of conversations about police reform, this appears to be our reality and we should be smart about how we plan for it.
