Somerville has been awarded almost a quarter of a million dollars to buy body-worn cameras for our police department. Accepting the money was on the agenda for Tuesday’s Finance Committee meeting. Somehow, despite nearly six years of public process around “reimagining” policing, and despite having already applied for and been awarded the funds, the administration was just not quite ready to talk about it. Finance chair Ben Wheeler left the item in committee, presumably to be talked about in two more weeks.
Maybe.
The administration told the committee Tuesday that it needed more time to figure out the details of policy and an updated collective bargaining agreement. This struck me as odd, since the first page of the grant application required the department to provide a copy of a body-worn camera policy, as well as either approval from the unions or a statement that a good-faith attempt was made to negotiate. In any event, an update on those negotiations took more than 90 minutes in a closed-door “executive session” at Thursday’s meeting of the full council. That pushed the meeting past the four-hour mark, leaving the councilors exhausted and punchy – though not too tired to head over to Highland Kitchen for their usual nightcap with the mayor and staff.
The other police grant on Tuesday’s agenda was just under $50,000 for “overtime and backfill for crisis intervention training certification and recertification.” I suspect that everybody would agree that training our officers in crisis intervention and deescalation is a good thing. Apparently we’re behind on it. According to the grant application, 75 of the department’s 123 officers are up for recertification, and 19 officers have never been certified. This grant provides enough overtime to certify seven and recertify 25. That’s a substantial improvement over the six officers we trained in 2025, but it still seems like we’re losing ground.
One reason we’re falling behind is that, apparently, the department’s schedule is packed so tight that the only way to squeeze in training such as this is by using overtime. The administration explained to the committee that if the person being trained was not scheduled for a shift, they would get overtime pay. Otherwise, another officer would have to fill in for them, so that person would get the overtime pay. I’ve written in the past about the many downsides of running a department with so much overtime rather than staffing up or adjusting scope, and this is no exception.
I’m not aware of any other city department that pays overtime for trainings and professional certifications. In most cases, staff take their own time and often pay out of pocket. Not so with the police: According to the grant application, our overtime rate is $78 per hour. Getting a 40-hour certification nets the trainee a bit over $3,000, and getting recertified comes with a $624 stipend.
Back on the topic of body-worn cameras: The grant application includes a succinct timeline of our ongoing struggles to “reimagine” policing. Somerville declared systemic racism to be a public safety and health emergency in June 2020, and has apparently been in discussion with police union leadership about using body-worn cameras since at least 2015. The application mentions the staffing study that was released in 2023, which notably said that we don’t need as many patrol officers as we use. The timeline tapers off after that, adding only a sad note about “morale and hiring challenges in the department.”
The current situation is not fair to anybody. Our police department is exhausted and demoralized, burning out on overtime because adding officers is seen as a political nonstarter. Activists are disappointed in the lack of real progress in adjusting the department’s scope and approach, despite six years of trying. These constant nickle-and-dime negotiations serve as proxy fights for that unresolved strategic tension, which soaks up massive amounts of time and civic energy. We spend a bit under a million dollars a year on the Department of Racial and Social Justice, and I would be hard pressed to tell you what we get from it. RSJ’s top line goal last year was to update its mission statement, and the recent readout on “public safety for all” was remarkably spare.
There is a way out of this logjam, but it will take decisive action. Just as with charter reform, there are no small steps that will get us where we need to go. It is past time for the City Council to act on its 2020 commitment and create a police commission and a community police review agency.
If we had created some sort of police oversight body in 2021, it would be ready for a five-year review and overhaul today. I suspect that even flawed oversight would have been a net positive compared with this ongoing unproductive friction. I continue to be optimistic that RSJ can become an effective department, but it is clear to me that asking a new director with a vague mandate to take point on police oversight and reform was always unfair at best, and a recipe for failure at worst.
Whatever your opinion on the appropriate size and mission of the police force, we all deserve better than this.
Reach out via cdwan@csindie.com.
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