Transforming Community Safety and Health
Martin Luther King Jr once said that “true peace is more than the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.” We must ask ourselves what justice is there in our community when our neighbors live unhoused, when children go hungry in our schools, when there are those who fear interactions with those deputized by our city. For us to achieve a just peace, we must work to create community safety and health that is holistic and steers the levers of government and the hands of our residents towards aiding one another.
This election is an opportunity to expand the meaning of public safety beyond issues of harm and incarceration by talking about the ways that we can make each other stronger and safer through solidarity. If elected, I will work to holistically support the health and safety of our community by legislating against racism, working to end opioid death, achieving our Vision Zero goals of no traffic deaths, and putting our money toward community care programs.
Community Safety for Communities of Color
As a Black resident of Somerville and a member of Just Us Somerville (the only community group for people of color in the city), I’ve engaged in many conversations about feelings of isolation and safety with residents of color locally. Many of our white neighbors claim that our city loves its diversity, yet a recent Harvard study found that our city lacks “diverse representation at the City and crucial decision making tables,” and a Tufts study found that less than half of residents feel that “Somerville police treat Black or Hispanic residents fairly.” As a result, many of us feel unsupported.
As a councilor, I have worked to change this underrepresentation by:
Creating an accessible way for people of color to report hate crimes without interacting with the police
Centering racial equity in CBAs to end the displacement of people of color and provide support for POC-owned small businesses to close the racial wealth gap
Working to diversify city jobs and commissions
Joining community groups to increase the safety of our students by ending the disproportionate discipline of students of color caused by cops in schools
Ending Opioid Deaths
Addiction and diseases of despair have long been ailments that have harmed members of our community, at times with fatal consequence. Between 2013 and 2017, 81 Somerville residents died due to confirmed opioid-related overdoses. This is a scourge that too many of our neighbors, friends, and family members have been taken by. Please, if you need help, reach out to Somerville Overcoming Addiction or Cambridge Health Alliance.
As a City Councilor, I have made ending overdoses in our community a priority for the mayor by serving on the Supervised Consumption Site Committee with City staff, medical experts, and substance users to do outreach and design a plan to establishing an overdose prevention center in Somerville. I will continue to fight to ensure we invest the necessary funding to establish the first Supervised Consumption Site in New England by the end of this year.
Creating Safe and Accessible Streets for All
Somerville residents strive to make this a safe place for our families and friends to live. As a pedestrian and cyclist, I want the roads, crosswalks, and sidewalks to be safe and accessible to all. Unfortunately, that is not the reality of our streets today. Over 2019 and 2020, after four years of zero traffic fatalities, four Somerville residents tragically lost their lives in pedestrian hit-and-runs. It is notable that three of those killed were women and that, nationally, car crashes are a leading cause of deaths for children.
Our city is small; small enough that every loss echoes with grief across our community. We cannot afford inaction any longer to prevent more traffic deaths from occurring. We can achieve our Vision Zero goals of zero traffic fatalities again by investing in structural changes to our streets that will incentivize safer driving, separation between cyclists, pedestrians, and drivers, and accessibility for all.
I am proud to have signed onto Somerville Alliance for Safe Streets’ Call to Action and pledge, if elected to the council, “to support safe streets and equitable mobility items in the… budget, insist on the formation of the oversight committee called for in the City’s Vision Zero Plan, and to use all the power at its disposal to ensure that proposed streetscape projects align with the City’s stated goals.”
Those goals must include making our city’s sidewalks meet ADA requirements so that residents with different mobility needs are accommodated. As someone who worked on ADA violations with the Equal Rights Center, I promise to push these issues to the forefront. Our city should prioritize universal design in all of our urban planning.
Refund the People by Investing in Healing Public Services
True safety is more than responding to harm. Community safety should mean working to undo the root causes of harm and creating alternative means of dealing with conflict. “A majority of Somerville residents think only social service workers should respond to situations involving mental health crises, homeless individuals, neighbor disputes, and intoxicated individuals,” according to a recent Tufts survey. This is the vision that I have worked to create in our community.
Last year, amidst record job loss, housing instability, and illness, our local representatives initially planned significant cuts to housing, healthcare, and economic development due to budget shortfalls. Instead, our community organized six hours of public testimony to the city council demanding that we fund community care rather than incarceration. Not only did we keep those programs from being defunded, by moving money that would have been used to hire more cops, we were able to fund rental and food assistance for residents in need as well as hire two bilingual social workers and a clinical youth specialist to the city’s Health and Human Services department.
Another world is possible. Mutual aid groups like MAMAS have taught us that it is the solidarity of neighbors looking after neighbors that makes us safe, not the threat of state-sanctioned violence. If elected, I will work alongside the community to reorient our city toward meeting the material needs of our residents, shifting away from police as a solution to all city interactions with the public, and centering racial equity as well as trauma-informed transformative justice in our responses to harm.