Mayor Jake Wilson has called a Monday special meeting of the City Council, bringing councilors back from their summer vacations to continue his push to accept a $231,000 grant to buy body-worn cameras for the police.
The council has discussed the grant at length over the past several months, and a majority have signaled that they are not ready to accept the money. The Finance Committee voted 4-1 against acceptance, an unusual move that would normally have been the end of it. The administration followed up with a late-night push at the council’s last meeting before their traditional summer “recess,” though. When it finally adjourned, just after midnight, the grant remained “on the table” to be picked up in the fall.
The stated reason for dragging the council back into session, according to a memo from the administration, is that the funds need to be expended and the equipment delivered by Aug. 31 or else the grant goes away. Given that it didn’t have the votes just three weeks ago and that nothing much has changed in the interim, I have to wonder what the administration hopes for.
One possibility is that it is hoping to leverage a technicality: Under the council’s rules, ordinary votes pass with a majority of the councilors present at a particular meeting, rather than a majority of the full body. It normally takes six votes to accept a grant. If the council just barely makes quorum – in an extreme example, if only six councilors were present, a measure could pass with only four votes. This generally makes sense to avoid grinding the ordinary business of the city to a halt over a couple of absences, but given the amount of time and attention the council has devoted to this issue, it would be a deeply unsatisfying conclusion.
The superficial objection to the grant is that it will cost the city more money than it brings in. According to the administration’s memo, operating a body-worn camera program will incur annual costs of almost $100,000 in software and license fees. The Somerville Police Superior Officers Association has already negotiated a 2 percent raise, effective whenever the cameras are deployed, that will add another $105,000 annually. The Somerville Police Employees Association is still negotiating its own pay increase, which seems likely to wind up in the same range. Once that larger population of officers don the cameras, an additional staff member will need to be hired to manage the devices. That role will sit within the police department at an estimated salary of $117,000.
All-in, this one-time grant for $235,000 would force the city to increase the police department’s budget by at least $400,000. That’s a bitter pill for the council after a bruising budget season that included layoffs and repeated assertions that, as councilor Jesse Clingan said, “we can’t find two nickels to rub together.”
There is also the question of how the cameras will be used: In 2019, Somerville passed a landmark piece of legislation that requires council approval before any new surveillance technology is deployed. All systems need to be documented in a Surveillance Technology Impact Report describing the intended use, who will have access to the data, how long it will be retained and so on. The administration has been iterating on a Stir for body-worn cameras in parallel with the grant, and an updated version is attached to tonight’s agenda. This version lists four justifications:
More accurate documentation of police-public contacts.
Better ability to review probable cause for arrest, and as evidence for investigations, prosecutions and training.
Documenting crime and accident scenes.
To improve police accountability and aid in internal investigations.
Conversations about police and policing do not happen in a vacuum, and that fourth point about “accountability” is very much on the public’s mind. A few weeks ago, 89 residents (I am one) submitted a petition demanding a public hearing before any votes on the cameras. That hearing is planned for September, but the mayor has asked the council to also include a public hearing at tonight’s meeting. A press release said that this is “not to preempt, but in addition to the requested hearing.” I’m hard pressed to come up with a better example of “preemption” than ramming through a vote months before the requested hearing. I’m at a loss as to what purpose the September hearing will serve if the council accepts the grant tonight.
It is highly unusual for the council to deliberate an important topic the same night as a public hearing. Doing it this way removes the possibility for councilors to do research, follow up and engage with residents out of the public eye. If a councilor wants more details on a point (or just wants to hear it said again) they will have no better option besides asking residents to speak multiple times. That, in turn, runs the risk of seeing the meeting descend into a chaotic, unfocused and potentially hostile back and forth between residents. Public hearings are usually exclusively listening sessions, and for good reason.
The administration’s press release presents a selective history of the debate on body worn cameras, in the context of a cherry-picked summary of the city’s efforts to reform policing since 2020. It references a 2020 council resolution that supported “full implementation” of the cameras, introduced with mayor Joe Curtatone. Future councilor and recent mayoral candidate Willie Burnley spoke against the resolution at that meeting. He noted that implementation would require the public to give more money to police and that the officers involved in the George Floyd murder were wearing body cameras. Councilor Kristen Strezo said, at the time, that body cameras “can be a great resource if accompanied by an independent review board to review the footage,” and councilor Will Mbah said that “the structure of the police department would need to be evaluated, with a system created to manage body camera footage.”
The question of independent oversight of the police has been passed around with no concrete action for the past six years. At that same 2020 meeting where the council called for the cameras, they also called unanimously for a “police commission and a community police review agency.” In late 2020, the council hired temporary staff to lead a public process on civilian oversight. The report from that effort remains an excellent review of oversight models nationwide and how they might apply in Somerville. The mayor created the department of Racial and Social Justice, which in turn commissioned task forces on public safety for all, civilian oversight and antiviolence.
The current administration has been at pains to remind the council that the report calls for implementing body-worn cameras. It has remained silent about that same report’s recommendation that there be “clear policies allowing BWC footage to be reviewed by the civilian oversight commission.” The department of Racial and Social Justice also partnered wth the police department to commission a staffing report on the structure and organization of the department. Its 16 recommendations include reducing the number of patrol officers and establishing a civilian review board. On body-worn cameras, that report recommends “engaging with the community to develop a policy on [their] use.”
Alas, Racial and Social Justice is no more: This year’s budget cut half the staff and rebranded it as “Equity and Belonging.” I have repeatedly expressed frustration with RSJ’s lack of traction, but giving up on it before establishing civilian oversight seems misguided. The budget does include a position in the mayor’s office to manage oversight of the police, but it seems to have been bolted on hastily without a lot of thought given to the details of how that would work. In any event, that oversight role will not be filled until the fall, and the council is being asked to approve binding policies on body-worn cameras immediately.
I have written previously about how the ongoing mistrust between the police department, the mayor’s office, the council and the public makes even simple conversations much more difficult than they need to be. This year, the council struggled to accept $22,000 to pay police overtime for a youth basketball tournament without tensions coming to a head in the meeting. The cure for this mistrust is to engage as vigorously on independent oversight as we do on pushing these grants. Lacking externally visible progress on civilian oversight, these late-night, recess-canceling sessions are wasteful and counterproductive.
We also need to ask what fell off the table so this grant could stay on it. The council meets two or three times a month, and most meetings run between two and three hours. At least six hours of full council (including two grueling closed-door sessions) has been spent talking about this thing. That doesn’t count the hours burned in the Finance and the Legislative Matters committees, nor the staff time required to prepare and explain the 23 items listed in the memo attached to Monday’s agenda (nor the memo itself).
My rough math says that the council has spent something like 20 percent of its attention so far this year on this grant.
There has also been a cost of civic attention and engagement. Every advocate knows that public attention is the most precious and limited resource in the city. People spent hours on that petition, and we will all sit for more hours tonight giving public feedback. For my part, I would love to write about other topics, but the mayor seems hell bent on getting the police their raise, so here we are.
We will never know what we might have accomplished in the first part of 2026 had the mayor read the room and set it aside. It seems a waste to put in all that time and energy just to get a “no” vote, but even that would be better than accepting this grant that will cost the city nearly half a million dollars a year without establishing appropriate public oversight first.
Reach out via cdwan@csindie.com.
The City Council hearing is at 6:30 p.m. Monday via Zoom.
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