Forty people were selected tentatively Monday to participate in a Cambridge civic assembly initiative – the first such municipal process in Massachusetts and one of the first in New England – about the gunfire-detection system ShotSpotter. Before the names are shared, staff must reach out to each person to confirm their participation, said Jackson Price, the city’s director of community engagement.
Those who are willing will take part in four Saturday sessions – Oct. 24, Nov. 7, Nov. 21 and Dec. 5 – to make recommendations that will be presented to the City Council in December.
The members were chosen out of more than 400 people who volunteered citywide out of 15,000 people contacted within about two and a half weeks. Respondents were as young as 16 and older than 75, Price said during a presentation and selection held in council chambers at City Hall.
Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui did the selection honors, coming to three tumblers in succession that she turned until a ball bearing a number emerged from each. Her first selection was a six, followed by a two and an eight. Price displayed the demographics of the group of 40 people in sort 628: half female; 43 percent renters of market-rate apartments, 35 percent homeowners, with the rest renting affordably or in permanent supportive housing; with a range of ages and race representative of groups in the city (45 percent white, 23 percent black, 18 percent Asian and East Indian, and separately, 13 percent being Hispanic or Latinx); and education (from 38 percent with graduate degrees to 5 percent with a high school degree only).
In addition, “we made a deliberative design choice to ensure that half the panel will have at least some lived experience with gun violence, either personal, family or through close connections, close friends or living in a community that has experienced that trauma,” Price said. Fifteen percent of the chosen participants said they had experience gun violence personally.
Resident assemblies had been considered by a special committee looking at updating Cambridge’s 80-year-old governing charter, but the council rejected the idea when presented in 2024. It took a crisis to bring the idea back.
The City Council voted May 18 to disable ShotSpotter in Cambridge, with a five-member majority saying there was no evidence the system keeps anyone safe, and a fear that the system could be used for surveillance by the federal government. Reconsideration was brought on by the July 4 killing of Xavier Bautista, when ShotSpotter was off; the council voted 6-3 at an Aug. 3 special meeting to turn the system back on for 90 days and to bring residents together to decide the issue, having been swayed by the idea that important parts of the community hadn’t been consulted in the run-up to the May 18 vote.
“Today is a really historic day for our city,” Siddiqui said. “The civic assembly is a new and innovative approach to community engagement that will help shape the future of public safety and surveillance technology in Cambridge.”
The unusual nature of the resident assembly process “alone is worth celebrating,” Siddiqui said. “But what truly makes tonight meaningful is the commitment of our community to show up, to participate and imagine together what thoughtful, inclusive policymaking can look like.”
