There were no “defund the police” calls Tuesday, but overlaps in services were examined critically in a Finance Committee hearing in which Cambridge Police Department officials described a proposed budget for the next fiscal year that saw a 2.7 percent increase from the current year to $57.4 million, with 91 percent of that total going to salaries and wages.
The department’s budget has grown 57 percent over the past 10 years, compared with the overall city budget growth of 87 percent, according to a police presentation. “Our department has not grown. The work that we have been involved in has changed and shifted and increased,” commissioner Christine Elow told city councillors. “We’re doing more with less.”
Some budget growth has come from adding technology, such as the body-worn cameras now on officers and cameras installed around Central Square’s highest-crime areas. Police are considering adding cameras to Harvard Square too, Elow said. But the department size of 354 full-time equivalent employees is considered middling compared with other cities, and the city gets good value when considering “the extraordinary services that we offer,” she said. “Particularly around our outreach, [and] building relationships with our most vulnerable. It really does take a lot of just people power to go out and pound the pavement.”
Responding to the Black Lives Matter moment of 2020 that questioned why crises of mental health and other often nonviolent incidents automatically brought armed responses, the city created a Community Safety Department in 2024; now with a staff of 15, its Community Assistance Response and Engagement team responds to 911 calls that can overlap during its working hours with police. CPD has a program that sends an officer out with clinical social worker in what it calls “co-response.”
“When we created the Community Safety Department, the thought was that it wasn’t going to be a redundant service,” councillor Cathie Zusy said. “We didn’t need to have both.”
The city also has a robust array of social services departments, councillors noted, and 20,000 students and their extended communities at Harvard, Lesley and MIT see some public safety services handled by campus police. Patty Nolan, who chaired the first part of the hearing, mused that maybe Central Square Business Improvement District ambassadors – who rove the square doing everything from picking up litter to pointing people to services – “should be our Public Safety Department budget as well, because they are certainly providing a lot of the services.” (School crossing guards are included in the police budget.)
Difficult to separate
The 911 call codes that go out to police and the Care team are set independently by medical professionals, Elow noted, and there are overlaps. Police officials describe having two weekly meetings to coordinate and communicate among the various teams handling clinical-style responses. The relationship between the departments is evolving, Elow said, and who goes to which calls is not “as easy as one for one.”
Councillor Marc McGovern gave an example he’d seen of why responses can be complicated: A mental health crisis in Central Square that brought members of the Care team but suddenly moved from the sidewalk to the street. “Care social workers are not going to stop traffic,” McGovern said. “This idea that these two departments are going to somehow operate separately – anyone who’s done this work is going to tell you that’s just not the reality.”
Still, “police are oftentimes the response to the failure of these infrastructure and systems to provide care and dignity for our residents,” said councillor Ayah Al-Zubi, taking over chairing duties. The same anecdotes shared at the meeting that showed the kindness, helpfulness and creativity of police officers in nonviolent situations showed why others could have done it. “I don’t think a weapon is needed to do that kind of work,” Al-Zubi said.
Councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler had criticisms too, noting that the co-response model was set up by police as the council tried to activate the Community Safety Department. “It was not an initiative from the council or something the City Council had asked for, but was set up and does continue to exist,” with officer time on the co-response team paid for by the city, he said.
But it’s not an added officer, Elow said, and so the work adds nothing to the city budget. She noted that much of the department’s approach to street outreach has been in place for decades – the approach was formed in response to the state closing mental health facilities in the 1990s, when “many individuals living with serious mental illness were out in the streets without the proper support.”
“I want more clinicians with our officers on a street,” Elow said.
Safer city despite its size
Cambridge is relatively safe – McGovern noted that it doesn’t appear in the top 10 most dangerous Massachusetts cities with populations bigger than 75,000, despite having an estimated population of 121,186 as of 2024 that “doubles in population during the day” as 100,000 people come to work.
Police patrols account for 52 percent of department costs; there were 100,000 calls for service last year, with crimes resulting in 4,306 investigations with a 60 percent clearance rate. The total includes violence and gunfire incidents – there were nine last year – but does not break out the violent crimes in the budget.
A 90-day police Community Action Team initiative in Central Square last summer addressed shoplifting, quality-of-life concerns and open-air drug activity and led patrols to 703 encounters with 343 people, resulting in 182 arrests, including 41 for shoplifting and 64 for drug offenses, superintendent of operations Pauline Wells said. Sixty-five of the people interacted with were referred for mental health or addiction services.
That work has been moved to the department’s Family and Social Justice section and expanded, Elow said, to follow the problem as it moved to Harvard and Porter squares as a result of the attention paid to Central.
The department expects to expand its up to 40,000 walk-and-talk patrols annually with “more people,” Elow said, including some new officers coming out of Cambridge’s police academy.
“I feel very proud” of the department, Zusy said, and councillor Tim Flaherty said that in his experience as an attorney involved with police around the state, “the Cambridge Police Department is the gold standard.”
The department also, to the surprise of the committee chairs, took up the first hour of a two-hour hearing with its presentation, which was heavy on description of services but skipped some data. That added questions but left less time for councillors to ask them. The meeting was extended by 20 minutes to allow for councillors to speak, a need that drew a rebuke from Sobrinho-Wheeler.
“This meeting is specifically about police budgeting,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said. “There are other opportunities to talk about programs of the police department and what’s working or what’s not.”