Jon Stewart called the cops our internal border patrol in a recent interview and I’ve seen it in our own backyard. While I love seeing photos of white majority towns in Greater Boston holding BLM rallies and vigils on their town commons, I want to see those words backed by actions. Too many of these communities are sundown towns whether they realize it or not, through their use of exclusionary zoning and having the police patrol their borders at night. I’ve seen it in Belmont where my wife used to work nights, where half the police force is on the Cambridge line right when the sun goes down. My father saw it when he worked nights on the North Shore in the 90’s. He pulled over and asked a cop what they were doing (talk about a white privilege) and they used racial slurs to say they were keeping the wrong kind of people out of their town. Not in the distant past but in my own lifetime, in the supposedly bluest state in the North. So towns need to reallocate police budgets to social services, they need to rezone to enable class as well as racial diversity, their schools need to be safe spaces for students of color (participating in METCO doesn’t cut it, gotta social and emotionally support those kids too!), and their cops should be disarmed (be real, these are the lowest crime places in the world and we have the strictest gun laws in America) and retrained. Urban cops need to be from their communities, look like their communities, and be subject to strict civilian oversight and accountability. We don’t need to wait for the feds or Trump to get booted, we can demand this change today.
Cambridge, home of Harvard, MIT, and plenty of upper class people, doesn’t strike me as a town I’d feel the need to be protected against.
Cambridge is a city of contradictions. It’s schools are still Title I despite the wealth of the city and the high funding it provides them. 40% of its residents are people of color. 60% of its school children belong to a racial minority. So this is a low crime community that is still policed with a large and well funded force that is not entirely reflective of the community, albeit, more reflecting that the police forces of surrounding communities.
So I’m not sure if you are saying you have nothing to fear from the CPD or from Cambridge residents, either way, this has always been the case. None of us really have anything to fear from the police or from “dangerous” neighborhoods. It’s the people of color in those communities who are predominately the victims of police violence and criminal violence. Time to change it.