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By Chris Dwan

The Department of Racial and Social Justice (RSJ) will present the Police Department Staffing and Operations Analysis to the City Council this coming Thursday (November 30) at a “committee of the whole” of the Confirmation of Appointments and Personnel Matters (CAPM) committee, chaired by Judy Pineda Neufeld.

The Curtatone and Ballantyne administrations have run this process at a belligerently slow pace and with a level of secrecy that makes any claims of urgency, or transparency (and thus accountability) laughable. As recently as this week, the law department claimed that the final staffing study is “not yet in the City’s possession,” nearly two years after the consultants were hired and with the City Council already scheduled to see it on Thursday.

It’s frustrating but typical. The Northampton Shoestring recently published an article calling out Somerville for “so far put[ting] the most effort into pushing back against The Shoestring’s public records requests, initially failing to even respond until The Shoestring appealed to the state.”

That certainly aligns with my experience.

While I am frustrated with both the lack of transparency and the lack of progress, I want to be clear: I very much want RSJ to succeed. I hope that RSJ will grow into an influential department that is able to live up to its stated goals of inclusion, equity, and justice. I am committed to that success and I will not be content merely to blame somebody for the failure.

That commitment is why I have chosen to go into substantial, perhaps excessive, detail about the history of this report below. It is also why I plan to make my way up Central Hill on Thursday evening to witness the next steps, though I am certain that they will be frustratingly cautious and incremental.

We owe it to ourselves to pay attention, to think deeply, and to try to understand the situation clearly as we make choices about police and policing in our city. Whether or not you choose to read the rest of this post (it’s a lot), I hope to see you at City Hall on Thursday and in the conversations to follow.

The Long Form

The journey to get to this report has been somewhere between one year (the last time we got an update), two years (when the consultants were hired), and three and a half years (when we started this chapter of our conversation about policing). Several important decisions have been waiting on the recommendations that are supposed to emerge on Thursday, including the long-term size and makeup of the police force, and whether / how to create a layer of civilian oversight on the department.

CAPM is an interesting choice to host this presentation. Given the history and subject matter, it would have been appropriate to discuss this in Finance (chaired by Jake Wilson), Public Health and Public Safety (Charlotte Kelly), Legislative Matters (Lance Davis), or even Equity, Gender, Seniors, Families, and Vulnerable Populations (Beatriz Gomez Mouakad).

One reason to send it to CAPM is Councilor Gomez Mouakad’s request in October of 2022: “That the Director of Racial and Social Justice provide an update on the Police Staffing Report,” which has been waiting for a response in that committee for nearly a year.

Mouakad’s item was last discussed on December 1, 2022. The minutes report that: “Liaison Carrillo said that RSJ had provided the consultant with the last piece of data needed for analysis, and they are now waiting for the results of analysis. The Administration is hoping to have that work finished by winter of 2023, which will generate a final report to guide the community engagement process. Councilor Kelly commented that the Administration said at the beginning of 2022 that the staffing study would be done in May and it has been pushed back multiple times, and asked what is the ongoing cause of delay. Ms. Carrillo said that she would get an answer.”

So far as I know, we never received that answer and the community engagement is already well underway.

That’s the one year story. We’ve been waiting a year for an update. How about the two years we’ve been waiting for work product from the consultants?

A year before Councilor Gomez Mouakaud’s request, in October of 2021, Councilors Scott and Ewen-Campen asked for an “update [to] this Council on the status of the Police Staffing Study which was included in the FY2022 budget and estimated to take 2–4 months.” Two months after that request, just weeks before Mayor Curtatone left office, the city issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) on December 9, 2021. Proposals were due two weeks later, the anticipated contract award date was Jan 15, 2022, and the project was slated to end on May 22, 2022.

That schedule was always wildly optimistic and everybody has to have known it.

A press release on March 8 of 2022 announced that we had hired Raftelis Financial Consultants (just two months behind schedule). Mayor Ballantyne’s triumphant report on her first 100 days in office featured the hiring again just a week later.

After that, the updates stop cold. Those two press releases are still the only results when I search for “Raftelis” on the city’s main web page.

Our auditing department’s “open checkbook” shows that Somerville has written five checks to Raftelis for a total of $48,500 — with the last payment no later than June of this year, so they got paid for something, it’s just not clear what.

The five payments made to Raftelis between July 2021 and June 2023 total $48,500.

It’s hard to avoid the impression of a slow-roll.

The 2021 request by Councilors Scott and Ewen-Campen sparked healthy discussion at three separate meetings of the Finance committee until Chair Wilson shut it down, marking the item as “work complete” — presumably on the basis that the consultant had been hired and thus the status update provided.

That’s the two year story. Two years, $48,500, and (according to legal) no report final enough to be responsive to a records request. For me, though, the proper context for this report stretches back three and a half years, to June of 2020.

A Black Lives Matter shirt on the Make Way For Ducklings sculpture in the Public Gardens in June, 2020

It was the first year of COVID and the video of George Floyd’s murder on May 25 had sparked national outrage. The agenda for the council meeting on June 11, their sixth fully remote session, included not less than 18 items related to policing. Nine Councilors, including then Councilor Ballantyne, sponsored a resolution calling on the Council to “create a Police Commission and a Community Police Review Agency.” Notably, the resolution didn’t request action by the Mayor, but rather the Council itself. The council could still choose to act unilaterally. I hope that they do if the administration continues this secretive foot dragging.

The Council also approved a resolution that evening “supporting the Just Us Somerville organization of local residents of color and consider[ing] their demands regarding policing,” and received a petition signed by an unprecedented 3,000 residents on the topic of “redistributing police funding.”

The resolution demanding a Police Commission and Review Agency was discussed at seven separate Legislative Matters meetings over the next year. The minutes track our community grappling with how to even talk about the crisis. It’s a good read, and also a bit of a harrowing history of those troubled times.

Chair Davis eventually laid the resolution, to create a police commission and oversight body, on the table in May 2021. He did not mark it “work complete,” so it remains in Legislative Matters. The minutes from the final discussion say: “Councilors Ewen-Campen and Scott met with the City Council’s Policy Analyst, Community Outreach Coordinator and the Director of Racial and Social Justice to begin discussions on how to move this matter forward.”

Thursday’s big reveal might be thought of as a next step in that conversation, just two and a half years later.

For all that, as I said up top: I remain a committed optimist, at least over the long term. I hope that we can use whatever we learn on Thursday to advance our shared goal of making Somerville safer, more equitable, and more just for all.