The Finance Committee of the Cambridge City Council gave a unanimous thumbs-up on Tuesday to move forward with a $3 million plan for a new Community Safety Department.
This approval came during discussions about the 2023 fiscal year budget, and now the full city council will vote on it with the finance committee’s positive recommendation.
If this goes through, the CSD would kick off the city’s efforts to handle emergencies without involving police, running programs like the Cambridge Alternative Response Program that would deal with mental health crises and other situations where violence isn’t involved.
Cambridge started looking into alternatives to traditional policing after George Floyd’s killing in May 2020. The council set up an Alternate Public Safety Task Force in June that year to rethink how the city handles policing and public safety overall.
Councilor Marc C. Mc Govern, who co-led that task force, told me in an interview that creating the CDS would help reshape public safety by steering away from criminalizing things like homelessness, mental health struggles, and drug problems.
“We need more and different resources for people who are in need of services but may not want to rely on the police,” Mc Govern said.
The CSD wouldn’t just run its own programs but also coordinate community safety work outside city government. About $1.5 million is earmarked for “community-based programs and services.”
Christina Giacobbe, who manages emergency communications in Cambridge, mentioned that HEART – which stands for Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team and is led by residents – might be one group they team up with.
“We hope HEART will work with us and we believe that we’re getting close to really understanding each other,” Giacobbe said.
Stephanie Guirand from HEART shared some worries about how CSD would actually operate, especially noting that CDS plans just six staff members.
“We’re still very much unclear as to what it is this department will do,” Guirand said. “If four to six people can receive 10 percent of 911 calls, then we have to wonder why the city has increased the police budget, and why the police has such a large force in the first place.”
The proposed 2023 budget for Cambridge Police went up nearly 7 percent-from about $69 million to over $73 million.
While HEART doesn’t work alongside police directly, CSD would have access to police radios and might pass some calls along to them.
City Councilor Quinton Y. Zondervan said in an interview that because CSD collaborates with police, “that’s exactly why [the proposal] is not good enough,” adding “what we really want is a HEART model.”
Mc Govern admitted he gets why some folks want emergency help totally outside government since CDS teams up with police at times.
“It’s a government department – no matter where they’re housed, no matter where they sit, there are some people that aren’t going to want to deal with that, and they should have another response,” he explained. “HEART could be another response.”
He also pointed out that having both HEART and CSD isn’t seen as competing ideas; Cambridge says it can fund both at once comfortably.
Councilor E. Denise Simmons expressed optimism during Tuesday’s meeting about what lies ahead for CSD and its new way of handling community safety issues.
“It was a pleasure to do this groundbreaking work on behalf of the city and its citizens,” Simmons said. “It was truly a collaborative, engaged process and I look forward to seeing its outcome.”
– Staff writer Sarah Girma can be reached at sgirma@globe. com. Follow her on Twitter at @Sarah Girma_.
– Staff writer Brandon L. Kingdollar can be reached at bkingdollar@globe. com. Follow him on Twitter at @newskingdollar.
Source link
