POLICE BUDGET TALK
Some mayoral candidates call to defund, as others point to lack of officers
Acting Mayor Kim Janey is set to unveil the city’s budget proposal this week, thrusting the thorny issue of police funding back into the spotlight — and into the Boston mayoral race.
Janey — who’s running for a full term — will present the budget to the City Council on Wednesday.
It’s not clear what the specifics will be — “you will see our budget next week,” she said in a press conference this past week — but a city budget official said there will be a continued focus around the police budget.
This comes after last year’s protests over racial issues, which led then-Mayor Martin Walsh to cut $12 million out of the Boston Police Department’s $60 million overtime budget.
Several councilors, including mayoral candidates Janey, Andrea Campbell and Michelle Wu, pushed for deeper cuts last year and ultimately voted against Walsh’s budget when they didn’t get them.
And the police department, struggling with increased retirements and various demonstrations, has since blown right through the reduced overtime budget — which is allowed, per city rules.
The city’s budget official said making sure those overtime cuts actually take effect this year will be a focus of Janey’s proposal.
As the council waits on Janey, the Herald asked the other five major mayoral candidates what they’d do with the police budget if they were in charge.
“This is absolutely going to continue to be a major topic of discussion,” Campbell said of the police budget, which was set at $404 million overall for the current fiscal year, which ends June 30. She said she’s “waiting to get that budget and review every detail of it.”
Campbell said she wants to move “at least” 10% out of the overall police budget, but insisted that that wouldn’t mean a reduction of force. She said the department should shift its resources to foot patrols and let other specialists like mental health professionals handle some of the calls for people in distress.
Campbell insists that these changes are what her constituents want.
But law-enforcement groups and supporters of the police say defunding is a recipe for disaster, adding that the Boston Police Department is already undermanned by hundreds of officers, which is what leads to the overtime overruns in the first place.
Essaibi-George echoed those concerns, saying, “We have such significant overtime costs because we do not have an appropriately sized police force … the system is not working for anyone.”
She said she supports looking at adding officers, with a focus on further diversifying the police force and making sure more people are involved in the decision-making process.
“Community and police officer alike feel they haven’t had a seat at the table, and that makes them feel like they’re against each other, and they shouldn’t be,” she said.
Wu, former Boston economic chief John Barros and state Rep. Jon Santiago opted to respond by email, and didn’t answer the questions directly.
“The police are called for a variety of social issues. They are expected to be social workers, conflict mediators, neighborhood patrollers, crime fighters, mental health counselors, and more,” Barros said. “What we train them for is a much more narrow field of work. We have seen — far too often — the results of this mismatched training. And far too often this has devastating impacts on communities of color.”
Barros called to “reform the way we do policing,” including adding social workers to responses and diversifying the force.
Santiago said he, too, supports looking into using more social workers and other professionals for some 911 calls.
The emergency room doctor pledged to “work closely” with the police department “to create a more efficient department that works in partnership with the community. And my administration will fund a budget to do just that,” he added, without elaborating on whether that would mean an increase or decrease.
Wu said, “We need to be bold and do more to transform our systems of public health and safety based on building trust through transparency and accountability. I’ve proposed structural changes to how we respond to 911 emergency response calls to ensure greater investment in a public health response that would better serve residents with mental health challenges, experiencing homelessness, and living with substance use disorder.”