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BIPOC residents submitting comments re: hiring Police Officers.
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Official Text
To the Honorable City Council:
We are reaching out to express our opposition to the hiring of the nine new officers that are being considered for appointments on Wednesday, January the 20th. As a movement, Defund SPD is led by a majority-BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) steering committee of residents and our value statement (see attached) reflects our movement's commitment to center BIPOC folks within this movement in our organizing strategy. Unlike some, we are very aware that people of color are not a monolith in their beliefs, experiences, political orientation, or solutions to the issues we face. Having said that, we thought it was important that the council realizes that the hundreds of emails that you have been receiving from across the city calling for no new cops, in part, come from many people of color - many more than we will be able to track or convey in this message.
We want to be clear that our opposition to these appointments is not about any of these candidates as individuals and, likewise, it is not hampered by their racial identities. We've already written (see attached) about how the problems of policing cannot be fixed by racial diversity. At this moment, our concern is the wider state of our community. While so many people are suffering in our community from the impacts of this pandemic, we believe that there are better things we can do with this money, such as investing in rental assistance and mental health counseling for our residents.
Every dollar that we spend making sure that our neighbors are fed and housed right now, during this increasingly deadly crisis, is critical. The average salary for a new SPD officer is $65,000. Hiring these nine new officers will likely cost the city at least $585,000 a year, before accounting for expenses such as police details and overtime which will likely cost our city hundreds of thousands of dollars more a year. The cost of these salaries, which will only increase over time, represent an undoing of the work that the council partnered with the community on last summer and the commitments the council made.
In cutting the six unfilled police positions in this year’s budget, the council made the decision to lower the overall salary portion of SPD’s budget and declared that reassessments should be made in partnership with the Director of Racial and Social Justice. Given that this director has yet to be hired and we are months away from reviewing a new budget, the effort to appoint these individuals feels at best premature. Please stay true to the commitment you made to our city by not moving forward with these hires at this time.
As your constituents, we are asking you to hold off on any new SPD hires until our community can come together around a process and budget that reflects our city’s values, the community’s needs, and centers justice for our residents.
Sincerely, BIPOC residents of Somerville,
State Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven
Matthew Kennedy
Amira Al-Subaey
Willie Burnley Jr
Kaneesha Johnson
Leanne
Sharik Purkar
Flora (Yuan) Wang
Joel Rivera
Michael Leonard
Charles Thomas Lai FitzGibbon, educator
Suhail Purkar
Sagal Alisalad
Kayla Williams
Marwa Sayed
Joshua Felizardo
Brandon Morgan
Saumya Chatrath
Daniel W
Srini S
South Asian American (who would prefer to go unnamed)
And many more