Anger spilled over Wednesday at a community meeting about the fatal shooting of Xavier Bautista last week – and the fact that he’s just the latest in a string of deaths afflicting some parts of Cambridge and not others. Residents packed the Citywide Senior Center in Central Square and spoke of their fear and resentment over unsolved murders and officials they felt weren’t paying attention.
Race and class issues were raised by people fed up with recurring gun violence and looking for places to vent frustration and terror, with some of the most eloquent speakers including members of Bautista’s family. At first, attention seemed focused on the idea that police had been denied a tool that could have saved his life: the ShotSpotter gunfire-listening technology.
That discourse has been so widespread that mayor Sumbul Siddiqui said she is working to call the City Council back from its summer break for a special meeting to discuss the use of technology “with broader, other issues.”
But speakers also responded to an idea raised by officials that Cambridge was “safe” with 10 to 15 incidents of gunfire a year, most victimless, in a city of 121,186 people within around 6.4 square miles.
“Cambridge is a safe city, but having something like this happen chips away at the sense of security,” district attorney Marian Ryan said. “To think that on a street in a city that we all love and have spent so many years in, something like this can happen in a second, perhaps weighs on us more than we always recognize.”
Bautista, a 32-year-old Cambridge resident and a Public Works employee, was shot at 4:30 a.m. Saturday outside his home at Broadway and Norfolk Street in The Port neighborhood. He lay alone and was declared dead when first responders arrived an hour later, alerted by a 911 call about a body. Police unions say that if ShotSpotter was active and happened to hear this incident, a faster response could have saved Bautista’s life.
“We don’t feel safe”
City manager Yi-An Huang – who later acknowledged that he has been to seven community meetings in four years to talk about sudden violence – echoed Ryan while attempting a look at the nuances of the technological debate: “Cambridge is a safe community, but we also see these things happen … I would say we see this happen too often.”
The response was strong.
“We don’t feel safe,” said Victoria Angeles, Xavier’s sister. “My cousin also was killed a couple streets down from my house on the same day 12 years ago. So to tell me that the city is safe multiple times, does it do anything for me or my family? It does nothing for us.”
“Cambridge is not a safe city, it’s a scary city. The fear that I have experienced is overwhelming,” said Denise Cosby, whose 21-year-old son was was fatally shot at Harvard University in 2009. “If it wasn’t my son at Harvard University, it was the [Boston Marathon] bombers across the street from my house. Then recently it was this guy coming down Memorial Drive, right in front of my house. I have been traumatized and retraumatized.” A May 11 gun battle on Memorial Drive was provoked by a parolee in emotional distress with an illegally obtained AK-47 assault rifle.
One resident felt that even though Cambridge was a “safe place objectively,” saying so was inappropriate because the meeting was in response to a killing.
Focus on The Port
Jalen Bernard, a city employee and a Cantabrigian, asked the gathered officials – Huang and Siddiqui, with city councillors E. Denise Simmons and Tim Flaherty – “Do you know where the most dangerous part of the city is? Because I’m from over there, and when was last time you were there?”
His point was driven home by Victoria Angeles, remarking on the difference between living in Cambridge as a white person than as a Black or brown person, and Xavier’s cousin, Casey Torres Angeles, making a point about violence in and around The Port neighborhood: “This isn’t happening in West Cambridge. When’s the last time you heard something happened in West? Stabbing in the The Coast, maybe East or North Cambridge. Lately in The P, it is shootings consistently.”
The officials’ responses were not as direct as Bernard wanted, but did blunt its effect: Huang is a former resident of The Port, and Siddiqui grew up in public housing in North Cambridge. Simmons is a resident of The Port whose son was fatally shot in 1995, and charged out to speak at the meeting as essentially one of the crowd rather than as an elected official: “Mister city manager, I respect what you said, but when you say ‘Cambridge,’ just say maybe for you, not for Black and brown people.” Flaherty was similarly impassioned about “the level of fear” among residents in North Cambridge, The Port and Riverside, casting himself as an ally. Other councillors were present, but they were among the audience and were not asked to speak by moderator Mo Barbosa.
Community bound together
Huang also apologized for his words. “Every year we have programs and people across Human Services, people within the police department, people within Community Safety working hard to find a way for our community to be safe,” he said. “I said the wrong thing, and I apologize … this is actually the challenge, that we are a community where we don’t all feel bound together, we don’t all live the same experiences. I see exactly what you are saying.”
Angeles, even while speaking at length about the dangers of his neighborhood, managed to show a way that the community was bound together: In explaining how people repeatedly have used the Fourth of July for shootings because gunfire will be mistaken for fireworks, Angeles described how “every summer The P has cops everywhere” – then went on to acknowledge that acting police commissioner Pauline Wells being raised in North Cambridge “just makes me feel good,” and expressed gratitude to “the cops that you see walking around,” who are also from Cambridge, several of whom he called out by name. He gave a shout out to Anthony Galluccio, the lawyer and youth sports coach who is a former councillor, mayor and state representative. When the meeting ended, Angeles shared a long hug with councillor Marc McGovern.
Galluccio was bitter about how the murders of Black and brown people were devalued and forgotten, and that narratives sprang up around the victims being “in the wrong place at the wrong time at the wrong hour of night.” (Neither Galluccio or Wells said they were aware of this arising in the killing of Xavier Bautista.) He urged the media to note of Bautista “what a great person he was, write about what a great father he was, write about what an awesome city worker he was – because before long there will be inferences and assumptions made that make people on the other side of Cambridge feel more comfortable forgetting that he was shot and killed in front of his own house.”
Crime-solving technology
The technology of crime solving was the meeting’s other theme, and the crowd had sharp criticism for the lack of ShotSpotter when Bautista was shot, even if not everyone knew what the technology was – and missed or ignored Wells’ response about a gunfire incident that took place on the Fourth of July last year: “I don’t think we had a ShotSpotter [report], but we did have public safety cameras in Central Square that were able to solve that crime.”
A majority of city councillors voted on May 18 to shut down ShotSpotter, in large part because there was no evidence that the system keeps anyone safe. In giving testimony to the council, police could cite nothing from 14 years of its use that showed it had helped solve a crime or save a life. Flaherty said there was an example of that from Somerville, but could offer no details.
There are also surveillance concerns with the use of technology like ShotSpotter – though also no evidence that ShotSpotter itself has been weaponized to spy on the people it purports to protect.
Safety over privacy
The residents at the meeting agreed with police unions who see the city as less safe with the tech turned off: In the words of Central Square restaurateur and former vice mayor Dennis Benzan, “privacy is important, but our safety is more important.”
(Photos: Marc Levy)
“Cambridge no longer uses ShotSpotter gunshot technology, and we do not currently have automated license plate readers. These technologies are not a substitute for good police work, and they do not solve crimes on their own, but it would be equally inaccurate to suggest that they don’t matter,” Wells said. “These and other technologies, such as public safety cameras, are investigative tools that can provide information more quickly, and in a homicide investigation, time is often one of our most valuable resources.”
Afterward, Xavier Bautista’s family led a walk a few blocks away to Sennott Park, where candles were lit around a shrine where Bautista was killed. The only words spoken for the public were by priests.
This post was updated July 9, 2026, to correct the last name of Victoria Angeles.
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