But last month, Wu, now mayor, flipped on that key campaign issue and asked the city to increase funding for BRIC. On Oct. 4, the Boston City Council approved Wu’s funding request, electing in a series of 7-5 votes to give the surveillance center an additional $3.4 million in grant funding to hire eight new analysts—four times the amount that Wu voted against two years ago. 

The increase in BRIC funding was approved despite concerns from some city councilors that the center and the Boston Police Department (BPD), which oversees it, had not sufficiently addressed evidence of targeted surveillance, with all five of the council’s members of color voting against the funds. BPD’s gang unit and BRIC’s gang database are currently being investigated for racial bias by the Massachusetts attorney general.

“They provided no metrics, no evidence that it makes us safer,” said Councilor Ricardo Arroyo during the meeting. “The fact that they’re currently under investigation for possible civil rights abuses and racial discrimination makes it impossible for me to vote for those grants today.” 

To local organizers, Wu’s 180-degree pivot feels emblematic of a larger reluctance by her administration to enact the policing reforms that she championed during her rise in Boston politics. Wu had called for a 10 percent reduction in the city’s police budget during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The following year, she campaigned for mayor with bold rhetoric around policing as well as specific policy priorities, from ending police use of tear gas and no-knock warrants to abolishing the surveillance center. Anger over years of police abuses helped sweep her into the mayor’s office with a 28-point margin of victory. 

But since she took office, those promises largely have not materialized, and funding for law enforcement has mostly gone up. During the most recent round of budget negotiations in June, Wu even rejected the council’s attempt to cut $30 million from the police department, and instead passed a final budget with a $9 million increase for police.  

Fatema Ahmad, the executive director of Muslim Justice League, which has led the charge against BRIC funding, said that Wu’s about-face on the surveillance center is part of a broader retreat from the promises that politicians made during the height of the movement for police accountability. “As soon as she was elected, the stances started turning around,” Ahmad told Bolts. “Immediately, we were told that the gang database wasn’t a priority because of other policing issues they were tackling. You know, we saw not only a lack of commitment to decreasing the budget, but now this year an increase in the police budget.”  

Wu has gestured to policing reforms instituted since she voted against the BRIC funding in 2021 to explain her change of heart. In a recent letter to city council members urging them to support the increase in funding, Wu wrote, “Since the June 2021 council vote, several consequential policy and leadership changes have been implemented such that the BRIC and the Boston Police Department operate in a significantly different environment today.” 

In this new environment, Wu explains, the surveillance BRIC conducts—which she calls “public safety intelligence and analysis”—is crucial to achieving larger public safety goals like reducing gun violence. “From reimagining community outreach and coordination of providers, to engaging high-risk individuals with high-quality supports,” Wu wrote, “Our community safety efforts rely on detailed and accurate intelligence to guide all City agencies to close gaps through deploying coordinated resources and services.” Wu did not respond to Bolts’ request for an interview for this story. 

Boston-area activists and other politicians elected in the wake of the 2020 uprising say that little has changed about policing there and argue that Wu’s progressive credentials are now serving to provide cover for what is little more than an attempt to give even more money to a law enforcement agency that operates mostly in the shadows. 

janhavi madabushi, the executive director of the Massachusetts Bail Fund, which pays people’s bond so they can stay in their community pre-trial, told Bolts, “I don’t understand how a progressive mayor can rubber stamp and give basically a blank check to the Boston Police Department.”

The Boston Regional Intelligence Center was established in 2005 as one of a host of intelligence-sharing “fusion centers” established around the U.S. after the events of 9/11. BRIC brings together local law enforcement and first responders from nine communities across the Boston metro area, as well as liaisons from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and even the “private sector,” according to an archived description of the center on BPD’s website.

“The initial justification for the creation of these places was ‘we need local police to be involved in a nationwide fight against terrorism,’” Kade Crockford, the director of the Massachusetts ACLU’s Technology for Liberty Program and a longtime scholar and critic of the BRIC, told Bolts—despite the fact that the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 had nothing to do with local law enforcement. 

“There was almost immediately an identity crisis in these fusion centers, because local police and the democratically elected people that are in charge of the police are in pretty much every city in the country under some degree of pressure politically to deal with regular crime,” Crockford explained. “People are not going to community and neighborhood meetings where they can have coffee with a cop and asking them, ‘What are you doing about al-Qaeda?’” Moreover, actual instances of terrorism on U.S. soil are quite rare; in 2012, a report by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Investigations concluded that fusion centers were ineffective and wasteful of taxpayer dollars. 

So fusion centers shifted course, allocating resources to ordinary street crime while continuing to maintain their image as crucial bulwarks against terrorism. But Crockford argues that BRIC and its brethren have actually been used for two very different purposes: “One, to monitor people’s noncriminal speech and associations that are protected by the First Amendment related to activism and religious expression; and two, to continue criminal intelligence operations primarily directed at Black and Latino young people under the auspices of anti-gang programs.” 

BRIC regularly shared information about Boston public school students with ICE, with life-changing consequences for at least one person: in 2018, a young Salvadoran man was deported after police wrongly labeled him as an MS-13 associate. A 2012 report by the Massachusetts ACLU and state chapter of the National Lawyers Guild  found that the center has a habit of spying on anti-war demonstrators and other activists engaged in constitutionally protected forms of protest. And in late 2017, FOIA requests by the organization revealed that BRIC had used a social media surveillance program called Geofeedia to monitor common Arabic terms like ummah, which translates to “community,” as well as phrases like #blacklivesmatter and #muslimlivesmatter. The program flagged posts that expressed solidarity between Jews and Muslims, tweets from the volunteer group Muslims Against Hunger, and a slew of sophomoric jokes about ISIS. (“My god ISIS needs some decent videographers. Any Emerson students interested? I hear they pay well in promised virgins.”) 

“We’re so used to being surveilled by every type of law enforcement,” said Ahmad of the Muslim Justice League, speaking about Muslim communities in the U.S. “And so when you have something like BRIC locally, it’s just so much harder for the community here to feel like they can talk about their politics especially, or organize in the face of an institution that’s not just flagging them for using just really common Muslim words—but also clearly going after activists.”

Today, BRIC operates a fleet of cameras throughout the Boston metropolitan area—including at least 40 in the northwest suburb of Somerville, which, like all the other cities besides Boston included within its purview, has no direct say over how or where that surveillance technology gets used. Willie Burnley Jr., a city councilor in Somerville, says this presents basic democratic and transparency issues. “Without the consent of the council and an explicit pathway for us to withdraw participation in BRIC, it puts us in a particularly challenging position to adequately protect our constituents from surveillance that may not be in their best interest,” he told Bolts.

Moreover, Burnley says that BRIC’s inter-agency status allows it to effectively override the fact that Somerville, as a smaller, more progressive city than Boston, has different attitudes towards policing and greater checks already in place around the use of surveillance technology. Burnley himself was elected to his at-large city council seat in Somerville in 2021, after helping found the activist group Somerville Defund the Police, which advocated for the reallocation of money away from the Somerville Police Department and towards social services and housing.

Recently, when the department decided it wanted access to a phone hacking program, GRAYKEY, BRIC went ahead and bought it for them. “This extremely well-funded multi-jurisdictional surveillance structure is bypassing our own municipal laws and policies,” Burnley told Bolts. The department still needs to go before the council to be granted official use of the technology, Burnley said, but the center’s actions seemed to bypass some standard checks and balances on police department authority. “We’re not in the police department watching them every day,” he said. “So the fact that they have this technology, we have to essentially take them at their word that they aren’t using it.” 

BRIC has been arguably best known for the controversial gang database it maintains: a list of thousands of Boston-area residents, only about 2 percent of whom are white. As of 2021, 75 percent of names in the database belong to Black people, who make up only 7 percent of the Boston metro population. 

Wu once spoke of abolishing the gang database altogether. But earlier this month, in her letter to city council asking for increased BRIC funding, she praised new guidelines for the database that resulted in the removal of nearly 2,500 names since 2021. 

But to local activists, this purge doesn’t go far enough. They believe that the entire methodology that underpins the database is fundamentally flawed. 

“There’s this myth that they’re using some kind of science for figuring out who is a gang member in this database, but it’s based on this 10-point model,” said Ahmad. “It’s all very behavioral. And that hasn’t changed.” Residents are assigned different numbers of points for various behaviors or associations, including the clothing or tattoos they sport and the people they interact with. The young Salvadoran man who was deported had racked up 21 points, all for instances in which police observed him hanging out with people they had also labeled MS-13 associates or gang members.  

madabushi’s organization posts bond for residents in five counties, including Suffolk, where Boston is located. They said that the people they work with are more likely to be assigned a higher bail, denied bail entirely, or face harsher conditions of release, such as house arrest or GPS monitoring when their name appears in the gang database. “Young people are being surveilled over social media and if there is cash appearing in a young person’s picture, or a certain kind of hat that they are wearing, the BRIC is making assumptions about what that could mean for them being involved in organized crime,” they told Bolts. They have also seen people in this situation receive additional federal charges or have immigration enforcement looped in.

madabushi also noted that from the experience of the community members the bail fund works with, the collateral consequences of inclusion on the gang database don’t necessarily end when someone’s name is removed. “The demand is not to purge names from the database, the demand is to completely shut down the database and shut down the entity that is carrying on this kind of racist surveillance,” they said.

While Wu has pointed to changes in the gang database to justify backtracking on the BRIC grants, she has also gestured to broader police oversight and accountability reforms that have been implemented since 2020. 

In both her letter to council and a recent interview with WBUR, the mayor cited the creation of new state and local police oversight bodies—the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission, as well as its local counterpart, Boston’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency. 

The state commission, established by a 2020 police reform law, is supposed to standardize training, certification and disciplinary standards for police, as well as maintain a public database of police disciplinary records, but its work has been beset by delays and debate over how much information about officers should be posted online. Some worry the commission is essentially toothless since it can’t compel agencies to disclose records or mandate that they remain public. And since it’s only tasked with oversight of sworn law enforcement officers, it’s unclear how the new state police commission could provide more accountability for the many civilian analysts who work at BRIC and feed information to local law enforcement. 

As for Boston’s Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, which was created in January 2021 to review police policy and investigate civilian complaints against officers, it has faced staff turnover and criticism that it has done very little. Of the 107 complaints submitted since its inception, only three were sustained (47 were still pending as of publication, according to the database). Of these, two involved officers posting inappropriate information or comments online—information that is more or less objectively verifiable.

Ahmad with the Muslim Justice League questioned whether the new office would have any impact on BRIC operations. How could people surveilled or targeted by BRIC even know enough about the center’s actions to submit a successful complaint?

To her, recent reforms like the state police commission and Boston’s police accountability office largely seem like window dressing to make a weary public feel better about law enforcement. “These task forces and commissions and, you know, call them whatever name you give them—it doesn’t address the root problems,” she said.

The post Boston Mayor Backtracks on Ending  Controversial Police Surveillance Center appeared first on Bolts.

Within a month of taking office, Hayden pumped the brakes on his predecessor’s most emblematic policy—a public list of lower-level arrests that the DA’s office would decline to prosecute—sparking concern among local progressives who want to decrease people’s ensnarement in the criminal legal system. Among Hayden’s critics is a prominent Rollins-era staffer who monitored reforms in her office but says he was pushed out of his job within days of Hayden’s arrival this year.  

Progressives are now aiming to reclaim the office in the 2022 elections. Ricardo Arroyo, Boston councilor known for left-leaning politics, is challenging Hayden. The two are expected to meet in the Democratic primary in September (other candidates could jump until May).  

Rollins’s approach was in the national spotlight last fall as Republican U.S. senators opposed to Biden’s appointment attacked her list; in 2022 its fate will be in the hands of Boston voters.

Arroyo told Bolts that he would “preserve” Rollins’s reform. “The data clearly has shown that policies of declination have made communities safer including Suffolk County,” he said.

Arroyo, a former public defender who has championed police oversight measures while on the council, is also calling for other changes like the elimination of the Boston police department’s gang database, which Hayden supports. During her time as DA, Rollins was repeatedly targeted by police associations, whether over her declination policy or over remarks on police brutality.

After three years as DA, Rollins left behind an office more invested in restorative justice and progressive policies than it had been previously, though she drew criticism from public defenders and court-watchers for not implementing reforms consistently. Her crown jewel was the “decline to prosecute” list, which she rolled out during her 2018 campaign and then confirmed in March 2019. 

The list included theft under $250, breaking and entering vacant property, and low-level drug offenses. It aimed to cut down on the number of people who are prosecuted and potentially saddled with criminal convictions, let alone jail time, over behaviors like substance use or homelessness. Many reformers oppose criminalizing or punishing such behaviors in the first place, saying they should be addressed through services like public health or housing programs. 

“There are other mechanisms by which we can try to cure these alleged problems or social ills.” Rollins said recently to explain her approach.

John Pfaff, a Fordham University law professor who studies prosecutor policies, says a “Do Not Prosecute” list can reduce the harm of arrests and potentially trickle down to pushing the police to arrest fewer people. “Police interactions are fraught, people can often find themselves locked up between arrest and dismissal, and arrests themselves produce permanent criminal records,” he told Bolts.  

“Absent changes on the police front, prosecutors can at least use Do Not Prosecute lists to minimize some of the harms from aggressive low-level arrests, which given their volume are not ‘low level’ in the aggregate,” Pfaff added.

Observers like Pfaff said in 2018 that Rollins’s campaign announcement pushed the envelope of what prosecutors were doing to fight mass incarceration, but it has since grown more common for DAs to run on platforms of declining to prosecute specific charges. 

But Hayden appears to be heading in the other direction. The new DA told Commonwealth in January he may not maintain Rollins’s “do not prosecute” policy; and in February, The Boston Globe reported that Hayden would not set up or commit to a list of his own 

In an exchange with Bolts, Director of Communications Matthew Brelis said Hayden has “made no changes to the list.” Nevertheless, Brelis explained that the office objects to blanket approaches. 

“The concern with making decisions based primarily on charges is that they too easily become formulaic,” Brelis said. “We are dealing with human beings and they must be looked at as unique individuals, not part of an equation.” Pressed for clarification, he added, “Each case, each individual and the circumstances they bring with them are different.” Brelis also said Hayden wants to “provide the services and resources necessary to address the underlying factors contributing to low-level, nonviolent crime.” 

In response to Hayden’s February interview in The Boston Globe, CourtWatch MA, a group that monitors local prosecutors, said Rollins’s commitment to a public list at least enabled accountability for her actions. 

“The list of charges to be declined was just a beginning. We continued to see those charges pursued in Suffolk County courtrooms, and we pushed back,” CourtWatch MA tweeted on Feb. 16. “But announcing a list allowed for that kind of public accountability and pushback!”

Jonathan Cohn, the political director of Progressive Massachusetts, a state group that supports criminal justice reforms, says Hayden’s backtracking is a major mistake. 

“There’s a strong and growing body of research that shows that declining to prosecute nonviolent misdemeanor cases not only minimizes individuals’ current involvement with the criminal legal system, but also substantially reduces the probability of future involvement,” Cohn told Bolts. 

A study of Boston released in March 2021 found that declining to prosecute lower-level charges reduced crime. Using two decades of data in Suffolk County, the study established that people who were arrested but then not prosecuted over lower-lever offenses were less likely to commit a crime later. New York University Professor Anna Harvey, one of the scholars who conducted the study, explained the findings to the Boston Globe: “Keeping these individuals out of the criminal justice system seems to have an effect; it seems to stop the path of criminal activity from escalating.” 

“This data shows the policies we proposed are working,” Rollins said when the study was released.

Still, Boston activists say Rollins failed to implement her list in a way that solved the underlying problems it was meant to address. The need to audit Rollins’s promises led Massachusetts Bail Fund and Families for Justice and Healing to create Courtwatch MA early in Rollins’s tenure. Massachusetts Bail Fund Executive Director janhavi madabushi told Bolts that the program’s promise and reality haven’t necessarily lined up. 

“It’s 2022, and MBF can tell you that we haven’t stopped paying $1, $25, $100 bails in Suffolk county and bail people all the time for the charges that exist on the decline to prosecute list,” madabushi said. “The DAs office has continued to push narratives that they are working to keep communities safe while jailing mostly Black, Brown, disabled and poor people for the crimes of being houseless, using substances, and existing with trauma.”

Bobby Constantino worked in the DA’s office under Rollins to assess data regarding her policies and communicate with researchers. Constantino drew national attention in 2013 after he got himself arrested to make the case against overcriminalization, and he points to data collected by Rollins’s office that shows the declination rate of low-level arrests increased after her election, though it remained well short of 100 percent. Violent crime went down in Boston in recent years. 

To Constantino, Hayden’s statements on the “do not prosecute” list show a disrespect for the public because this was the approach that Bostonians voted for in 2018.

“That’s what the voters are signaling to you,” he told Bolts. “They want it.”

But Constantino is now stuck watching the office from the outside; he stopped working there shortly after Hayden’s arrival. 

Constantino says he was fired, though the DA’s office disputes that characterization. In an email exchange reviewed by Bolts, Constantino wrote to Hayden soon after the new DA’s appointment to say he was at his service, but the office leadership told him his last day at work would be two days hence. The office said Constantino had already handed in his resignation; Constantino denied that, replying he had indicated he would leave once he secured another job with insurance for him and his daughter. Hayden’s office declined to address this exchange, saying it did not comment on personnel matters, while adding it had not terminated anyone.

Constantino believes that his quick departure is part of a pattern of Hayden turning the page from Rollins’s reforms, back to a more law enforcement-friendly approach to criminal justice. 

Arroyo, Hayden’s challenger, is similarly critical of the new DA. Hayden “effectively dropped one of the central pieces of policy enacted by former District Attorney Rollins,” he told Bolts. “I don’t believe these early decisions show any intention to continue the policies put in place.”

“Diversion and intervention done correctly more effectively address the long term and short term needs of public safety and put individuals on a path to wellness and stabilization,” Arroyo said.

Whomever wins the election this year, madabushi vows that their group will keep fighting the criminal legal system’s interventions. “Every solution worth pursuing to address root causes of harm and violence and to further racial and class equity exists outside of the DA’s office,” they said.

The post Boston Progressives Fear Rollback of Reforms After DA’s Early Exit appeared first on Bolts.

Chetan Tiwari, who has lived in Boston since 2015, says he would like the chance to weigh in on the local education policies affecting his family. He and his wife are from Canada, recently had their green cards approved, and have two daughters who are American citizens. “The level of education, the quality of education that my daughters are getting, is a conversation my wife and I have every single day,” he told Bolts. “Voting on those issues would make us very happy, it would be very important to us.”

This push gained new allies in November. Bostonians elected a new mayor, Michelle Wu, and new city councilors who said they support the effort. Now in power, they may pave the way for Boston to revisit the issue, and join a growing movement across Massachusetts. 

In recent years, the cities of Amherst, Brookline, Cambridge, Newton, Wayland, and Somerville, have all passed ordinances to enable noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections, though their efforts have stalled due to this state’s peculiar rules. In Massachusetts, unlike in New York State, cities must file a home-rule petition and the state lawmakers and governor must approve it. The Democratic legislature has for now ignored these cities’ petitions. Proponents hope that a breakthrough in Boston can give them further momentum.

The state’s 2022 elections, in which voters will select their lawmakers and a new governor to replace the retiring Republican incumbent, could also clear their path further.

More than a dozen communities across the U.S. already allow immigrants with legal status to vote in local elections, including 11 municipalities in Maryland and two in Vermont. Chicago has given noncitizens the right to vote in local school council elections since 1989, and noncitizens in San Francisco have cast ballots for the local school board since a citywide referendum succeeded in 2016. (Undocumented residents were also included in San Francisco’s measure.)  New York City brought many more eyes to the issue last winter when it enabled residents to vote in all municipal elections such as for mayor and city council if they hold a green card, are authorized to work in the United States, or are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. San Jose’s city council also voted last month to study the issue.

This practice was once common in local, state and even federal elections. For the first 150 years of American history, white, male property owners—regardless of citizenship status—were allowed to vote in many states, though the tide began to turn following nativist backlash after the War of 1812. Arkansas was the final state to end noncitizen voting in 1926. Efforts to shut the door to local reforms have also grown in recent years; Alabama, Colorado, Florida, and North Dakota all passed ballot amendments to embed in their state constitutions that only U.S. citizens can vote in local elections. 

Boston’s city council also has dealt with the debate in the past before. In 2007, Felix Arroyo, the first Latino councilor ever elected in the city, proposed a measure to allow legal residents to vote in local elections but it failed. The issue faded after Arroyo lost his re-election bid. In 2018, then-City Council president Andrea Campbell organized a hearing to discuss the idea. 

Campbell’s proposal would have granted the right to vote in local elections to immigrants who hold green cards and work visas, and to DACA recipients. The Boston Globe estimated that the proposal would enfranchise 48,000 Bostonians, which is about 7 percent of the city’s overall population. 

Campbell said at the time that the reform  could be a way to empower local immigrant communities who felt threatened and marginalized by the Trump administration. The idea was backed by Ayanna Pressley, who was then a Boston councilor and has since joined the U.S. Congress. “Our immigrant communities contribute to our economies, they contribute to our tax base, contribute to the vibrancy of our communities,” Pressley said. “I believe they deserve a say in who represents them at the municipal level.”

But not all councilors were on board. Ed Flynn maintained then that voting “is a privilege reserved for U.S. citizens.” Michael Flaherty also opposed the idea, saying enfranchising noncitizens to vote in local elections runs “watering down” the benefits of citizenship, “by either allowing folks to come in the back door or cut the line or expedite the process.” 

Still, much has changed in the last four years and activists say the conditions are more favorable now. It’s also not unusual for this type of issue to take a few tries politically. In San Francisco, voters rejected noncitizen voting for local school board elections in 2004 and 2010, before ultimately approving it in 2016. 

Beginning in 2019, Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots advocacy group, began asking local candidates in Boston if they would support noncitizen voting if it came up at the council. Ricardo Arroyo, Kendra Hicks, Ruthzee Louijeune, and Julia Mejia have all newly joined Boston’s city council since 2020 after telling Progressive Massachusetts that they support it. Wu said the same during last year’s mayoral race.

“I think you could get 10 out of 13 votes on the Council [today],” said Jonathan Cohn, political director for Progressive Massachusetts, who helped run those questionnaires. His experience resembles that of Beth Huang, executive director of the Massachusetts Voter Table, a voting rights group that has asked candidates around the state in 2021 for their views on noncitizen voting. “Eighty out of 126 candidates who responded to our questionnaire said they supported it,” she said. 

Boston is currently experimenting with other measures meant to bolster local democracy. In November, more than two-thirds of Boston voters approved a ballot question to overhaul the city’s budget process, which contained a provision to  establish a new participatory budgeting process for a portion of the budget. Wu, the new mayor, also supported participatory budgeting.

On the same day, nearly four out of five Boston voters also backed a nonbinding referendum to switch their appointed school committee to one elected by city residents, adding new pressure on the government to democratize local school decisions. This change would require a home-rule petition, though.

Carolyn Chou, executive director of the Boston-based Asian American Resource Workshop, says the successful local organizing for an elected school committee and participatory budgeting is creating new opportunities to promote noncitizen voting. “Immigrant organizing groups and SEIU32BJ have been focusing on this, and I’m hopeful that with this new city council we may be able to move it along,” she said.

Kathy Henriquez Perlera, a community organizer with Neighbors United for a Better East Boston, also told Bolts her grassroots group would absolutely support noncitizen voting. Members of her organization have recently been exploring the idea of getting the city to grant municipal IDs for all city residents, similar to a program that exists in New York City.

Some immigrants’ rights activists have major reservations, however. 

During the 2018 debate in the Boston city council, Veronica Serrato, then executive director of Project Citizenship, said her group had worked with two immigrants in Massachusetts who had mistakenly voted in an election, disqualifying them from future citizenship. Allowing immigrants to vote in some elections may lead to errors—for instance, if poll workers give them the wrong ballot and they vote in an election they were barred from voting in—with potentially major consequences.

Mitra Shavarini, the current executive director of Project Citizenship, told Bolts this remains a worry for her organization, though she said they would abstain from taking a stance this time if a new bill came up in Boston. “We also aim to safeguard green card holders against possible issues that may jeopardize their ability to naturalize,” she said. “We therefore believe that it’s far more important to remove obstacles that impede immigrants from naturalizing than to solely push for voting rights.” 

Huang pushes back against this worry, noting that she heard a similar concern when voting rights proponents in Massachusetts were pushing automatic voter registration (AVR). “That was not a good reason not to do AVR, and it’s also not a good reason to oppose noncitizen voting,” she said. “Of course we also need to have crystal clear expectations and communications.”

To address these risks, cities that have enabled non-citizen voting often set up separate processes, including alternative local registration forms and voter rolls that are specific to voters who should only have ballots for local elections. They may also offer to provide residents a letter to submit alongside a naturalization application, as Takoma Park does. Local governments have also partnered with immigrant advocacy groups, to distribute non-citizen voting information in multiple languages.   

Damali Vidot, a city councilor in Chelsea, has championed the issue  in both her own city and statewide. “I tried to introduce a conversation on this on the city council a few years ago and people voted down a discussion, but at the beginning of last year, with Trump finally out of office, I decided to try again,” she told Bolts. She reached out to city councilors in Cambridge, Somerville, Brighton, Lawrence, and Boston to talk about the idea, and connected with a local immigrant rights group in her city, La Colaborativa. “I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get a consortium of resolutions or get different municipalities to pass it all at once?” she said.

Huang said noncitizen voting has not been a “front-burner priority” for local groups that are in coalition with the one she leads; groups are more focused right now on getting driver’s licenses for undocumented residents. But she says there is growing support for the idea in cities with high concentrations of immigrants and working-class people. “We’re talking about the post-industrial cities that have now been inhabited by a lot of refugees,” she said, naming Worcester, Springfield, Lowell, New Bedford and Chelsea as examples. 

Huang stresses that keeping noncitizens from voting significantly skews the electorate toward white residents, especially in cities where the population that is eligible to vote is majority white but not the overall population. “That was not quite clear to me until I looked at the data community by community,” she said, in reference to census estimates updated last year.

The city of Lynn, for instance, has an overall population of more than 90,000 residents that is barely a third white. But of the residents who are eligible to vote, the majority is white. Latinx residents make up more than 40 percent of the city’s population, but only about 25 percent of the electorate. 

This pattern is very prevalent in the dense stretch of municipalities between East Boston and the North Shore, Huang added. “I think that presents a really good case for why we absolutely need non-citizen voting,” she said.   

For proponents of expanding the franchise, the biggest barrier they cite is the state legislature. Its Democratic leaders have not brought the home-rule petitions of recent years to the floor. Advocates in the state have long complained that state lawmakers have shied away from strengthening immigrants’ rights. During the Trump years, advocacy organizations like Progressive Massachusetts kept pushing for the “Safe Communities Act,” which would have limited how local and state law enforcement could enforce imigration law, to no avail. Three of the chamber’s leaders, state Senate President Karen Spilka, House Majority Leader Claire Cronin or House Speaker Ronald Mariano, did not respond to a request for comment.

State lawmakers are all up for re-election in 2022, and so activists see new opportunities to apply pressure on them. Cohn, of Progressive Massachusetts, also noted that voting for immigrants with legal status was included in the state Democratic Party platform last year for the first time, thanks to the rising organizing around the issue.

But the upcoming governor’s race is what may give the issue the most impetus if an ally is elected and uses their pulpit to support the local ordinances. The wide-open race has drawn a crowded field, yet so far, few are willing to comment. Bolts did not hear back from Democratic candidates Danielle Allen, Orlando Silva, and Sonia Chang-Díaz. Maura Healey’s campaign declined to comment. 

Josh Caldwell, a socialist running for governor in the Democratic primary, told Bolts that he strongly supports enfranchising noncitizens. “The fact of the matter is, that not giving representation to those that participate in taxation seemed to be a core argument to a certain historical revolution,” he said. “Our systems have and will always find a group to otherize.”

Keeping up local pressure will be key, proponents say. Vidot, the Chelsea councilor, is confident the issue is moving forward. “Progressive politics basically means we’re ahead of ourselves,” she said. “It will happen and we just have to keep pushing.”

The post Boston Emerges As a New Frontier For Noncitizen Voting in Local Elections appeared first on Bolts.

Today, BPD is more politically weakened than ever in recent memory. Civil rights activists in Boston call the current moment a golden opportunity to fundamentally reimagine public safety. 

“Crime is down, arrests are down in Boston,” ACLU of Massachusetts executive director Carol Rose said. “This is the opportunity to take some of the reforms that have started and to really build them into the system.”

Boston has long been controlled by a white power structure that’s resistant to change, but the 2020 uprising following George Floyd’s murder increased public pressure to change policing in the city. In November, Michelle Wu, Boston’s new progressive mayor, took office in a landslide win after promising to make deep and systemic police reforms. 

Wu’s arrival in power in Boston is a new opportunity for the left to showcase the credibility of its policies in confronting police violence, though it also risks underscoring the limitations of municipal leadership and the entrenchment of police power, even when weakened. It was only recently that Bill de Blasio became mayor in New York on similar hopes that he would boldly reform the police after a hard-hitting campaign, only to largely surrender to police opposition. And in many other cities, municipal leaders vocally supported the 2020 protestors without putting their demands into policy. 

Thwarted by a mix of antagonism from police unions or by their own indifference, progressive officials have largely failed to chart a new path of municipal leadership on policing. In that context, Wu’s victory in Boston and promises for police reform beg the question: After decades of inaction from outwardly progressive leaders, what will it take to meaningfully change policing at the local level?

Wu is part of a new, diverse coalition demanding change in Boston. Her signs were ubiquitous in Boston’s Black and brown neighborhoods, which bear the brunt of aggressive policing in the city. In 2019, 70% of people stopped under BPD’s “Field Interrogation and Observation” program, similar to the infamous stop-and-frisk program by New York police, were Black, despite Black people comprising just a quarter of the city’s population. While the total number of stops went down in 2020, the racial disparity continued, with around 62% of those stopped being Black.

The recent shift in politics around policing in Boston reflects a more diverse and engaged electorate, said Toiell Washington, co-founder of the racial justice group Black Boston. City council has started to look more like the people they represent, rather than the old order. “They’re not these random politicians that nobody in the community knows, nobody knows what their plans are,” Washington told me. “They’re people who were actually doing things in the community before.”

Backlash to police abuses from the city’s grassroots organizers has been building for years, and Wu harnessed that energy during her rise in Boston politics. Previously, as a member of Boston City Council, Wu called for a 10 percent reduction in BPD’s budget. While running for mayor, Wu also called for banning police use of tear gas, rubber bullets and no-knock warrants. “It is all too clear that our city’s public safety structures have not kept all of us safe,” Wu’s campaign website stated. “We must take concrete steps to dismantle racism in law enforcement by demilitarizing the police.” 

Some activists in the city, like Muslim Justice League (MJL) Executive Director Fatema Ahmad, are skeptical of Wu’s committment to major change. Ahmad criticized Wu and other city leaders for failing to cut police spending after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. When Wu ran for mayor last year, she answered a MJL questionnaire asserting she was in favor of reallocating police spending, but entered zero for the actual amount she’d cut from the police department. When the group asked her to clarify, especially given her previous support for cutting 10 percent of the budget, Wu still wouldn’t commit to a specific amount, insisting cuts would have to be negotiated through collective bargaining with the city’s police union. “No candidate can honestly commit to reinvesting a specific dollar amount from the BPD budget into community services, because true reform necessarily runs through the police union contract,” Wu wrote at the time.

“There’s a disconnect between the language that she uses versus the details of what she’s actually going to do,” Ahmad said. Wu’s office didn’t make the mayor available for comment.

Despite those critiques, Ahmad remains hopeful that Wu can deliver on police reforms based on some of her early moves in power. Ahmad pointed to Wu’s support for dismantling the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, one of 80 multi-agency “fusion centers” that sprouted across the country during the ‘war on terror’ and whose surveillance operations continue to raise concerns about government waste and violations of civil liberties. 

“Mayor Wu has actually taken a stance that she supports abolishing the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, which would be huge,” Ahmad said. “That would be the first fusion center in the country to be abolished.”

The need for new leadership seems to have complicated—and slowed down—the pace of police reform in Boston. Dennis White, who replaced outgoing police commissioner William Gross last January, was suspended within 48 hours of taking office over a domestic violence allegation and fired in June. Wu has since launched a national search for the city’s new top cop.

Local civil rights attorney and activist Carl Williams said that whoever Wu picks should be an outsider; traditionally, Boston’s police leadership has come from within the ranks. 

“Boston is an old guard, old city—you look at all the chiefs and commissioners, these are people who started as patrol officers, they’ve never worked anywhere else,” Williams said.

City Councilor Andrea Campbell, a lifelong Bostonian who also ran against Wu for mayor, said the clock is ticking for police reform in Boston. After over a year of scandal and without clear leadership, she said Boston’s police are suffering from a loss of credibility in the communities they patrol. “If you have this lack of trust, lack of transparency, and most importantly, accountability, it erodes trust within the community and it makes it difficult for officers as well as residents, both players, to do their jobs effectively and to have true community policing,” she said. 

Black Boston’s Washington said she wants to see concrete proposals from the mayor and other city politicians to make departmental change a reality. 

“I want actionable items,” Washington told me. “I don’t want to just hear ‘our hope is, defund the police by this much.’ What are the steps, when is this going to happen?… I want to hear that.”

The post A New Mayor Makes Boston the Latest Test Case on Confronting Police Violence appeared first on Bolts.

On April 1, Mayra Molina didn’t have the $2700 she needed to pay rent. When the novel coronavirus started spreading in Boston, the families that employ her as a housekeeper called one after another to tell her not to come to work. Her two sons, with whom she shares her East Boston apartment, had their construction jobs canceled, too. 

When Molina heard that the city was launching a rent assistance program, she hoped it would help her cover next month’s rent, at least. But she has gotten no response since she applied weeks ago. Because she’s undocumented, she’s not eligible for the stimulus check, nor for unemployment benefits. The situation is causing her insomnia and severe anxiety, which spikes her blood pressure, she told the Appeal: Political Report. When she went to a clinic, a counselor told her  not to worry about the rent, she said. “Well, that’s what worries us all, I think.”

Molina is one of the 31 percent of Americans who couldn’t pay rent at the beginning of this month. With more than 22 million having lost their jobs in the last four weeks, that number is likely to be even higher on May 1. 

The stimulus money that is now arriving in people’s bank accounts will do little to quell the crisis. With the median monthly rent in the nation hovering at just over $1,600, $1,200 government checks won’t cut it for many renters. 

Cities across the country have taken quick action to try to fill the gap. From Louisville to Albuquerque to New Orleans, they have quickly shuffled around their budgets to pool funds for renters in need during the COVID-19 crisis. 

According to a list compiled by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), more than 20 municipalities and counties are now rolling out some form of emergency rental assistance. A handful of states are setting up relief programs as well. These initiatives, which are either wholly new programs or expansions of existing ones, have tended to take the form of cash for renters who can show that they’ve been economically impacted by the shutdowns. 

Thousands are already benefiting, or will soon. But insufficient funding and a lack of tenant protections have housing advocates worried that these initiatives are falling short in addressing the magnitude of the present housing crisis, especially as long as the federal government fails to step up. 

In nearly every case, temporary rental assistance programs have been immediately overwhelmed. In Orange County, Florida (Orlando), a $1.8 million renters fund meant to aid 1,500 was flooded with more than 20,000 applications within 10 days. The online application portal in Santa Clara County (San Jose) collapsed after receiving more than 1,500 applications in three hours. And in Boston, the city’s emergency rental assistance program received 5,500 applications from people it verified as city residents, but only 800 residents will be able to receive a slice of a new $3 million fund. 

“We all realize that it’s just a tiny drop in the bucket,” said Steve Meacham, organizing coordinator at City Life/Vida Urbana, a grassroots community organization in Boston. “Really tiny.”

**

Boston’s city council announced its emergency initiative in early April by expanding an existing program designed to assist families at risk of evictions. Bostonians who demonstrate financial need can apply for a one-time payment of up to $4,000 to be used for rent. The city will send a check directly to landlords, said Katie Forde, operations manager for Boston’s Office of Housing Stability. Forde added that the program is restricted to people ineligible for the newly extended federal unemployment benefits so as to gear support toward undocumented people and people with informal employment cut off from those federal funds. Elsewhere, similar programs are open either to anyone, or to anyone who can show a documented loss of income.

In Boston, the rush of applications immediately after the system opened proved just how much more was needed. 

Given the huge demand, the city converted the program into a lottery system within a couple of days, confirming that many people who fit its criteria would not get assistance.

Boston City Councilor Lydia Edwards, chair of the Housing and Community Development Committee, told the Political Report that even the lottery system plays favorites. Landlords who own more property, and so have more tenants entering the lottery, are likelier to end up recouping the rents they are owed and benefiting from the program. “Why weren’t landlords who live in their units prioritized because we’re also saving them from foreclosure?”, she asked.

San Jose has one of the largest pots of rental assistance funds in the country, after it received millions from private companies like Cisco, Facebook, and Zoom. The fund of more than $11 million was distributed among 4,000 families. Still, even here, more than 9,000 families remain on the waiting list, and calls keep flowing in, said Matt King, an organizer with Sacred Heart Community Service, a nonprofit that administers the fund.

The vast numbers of tenants who lack assistance show, advocates say, that any rental assistance program strong enough to keep families in their homes will require significant federal intervention. 

The NLIHC estimates that it would cost approximately $76.1 billion over the next 12 months to provide relief to the 11.5 million people who are or will become severely burdened by the costs of housing, which it defines as spending more than 50 percent of their income on rent. If relief were extended to renters experiencing less severe burdens—defined as spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent—the cost could reach $99.5 billion.

The CARES Act added $3 billion to federal housing programs such as Section 8 vouchers, which help the lowest-income Americans. But these funds are insufficient to meet even pre-COVID demand, and millions who are newly unable to pay rent will be ineligible to apply. Congressional Democrats proposed allocating $100 billion to short-term rental assistance, but that did not make it into the CARES Act. Groups like NLIHC are pushing for such funding to be included in future stimulus packages. 

The CARES Act also provided $5 billion in supplemental Community Development Block Grant funding, which are federal grants that localities can use for housing or economic development projects. Some have said they will use it towards rent assistance. But there’s no requirement to do so, and no guidance for cities in how to administer such assistance should they choose to. 

“We’re kind of in this difficult place of trying to fit some square pegs into round holes,” said Greg Payne, director of the Maine Affordable Housing Coalition, which worked with the state to develop a $5 million assistance program.

**

Even if an influx of federal funding materializes in later federal stimulus bills, it would still leave some housing advocates’ biggest questions about temporary rental assistance unanswered.

Tenants with the greatest needs for immediate relief may be the least able to access them, for one. Many of the emerging assistance programs require proof of COVID-related loss of income, which many low-income workers cannot provide. 

“For undocumented families or people working informally under the table, … it’s really hard to show that you’ve suffered a loss of income,” said Michael Trujillo, staff attorney at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, referring to San Jose’s temporary rental assistance program. “So any kind of documentation requirement is really creating a barrier.” King, the Sacred Heart organizer, said they are conducting outreach to undocumented people to help them apply for future rounds of assistance. 

Edwards, the Boston councilor, also worries that if relief funding is not tied to strong renter protections, it will function as a handout to landlords, without minimizing risks for tenants. “The check goes to the landlord,” she noted. “And if the landlord takes that check and still can evict somebody or raise their rent, I have a problem.” 

Housing advocates agree that rental assistance programs could backfire, paying landlords to keep tenants in their homes for a month or two, only to evict them a couple of months later for non-payment of back rent or future rent. 

Lawmakers in Massachusetts passed a long-awaited bill this week establishing a statewide eviction moratorium, which would stop evictions for 120 days or for 45 days after the state of emergency is lifted, whichever comes first. Dozens of states and cities now have similar moratoriums in place, in addition to a national moratorium on evictions in properties with federally backed mortgages. 

But most of these policies extend only through April or May, and some landlords are violating them or preparing to rush future evictions, which has left renters at continued risk. The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute estimated earlier in the month that more than 500 eviction cases had been filed since the state’s Housing Court closed to nonessential business; the same is true in other states. “It would be an utter embarrassment if we found out that despite giving out all of this money evictions still go higher,” Edwards said. 

Amy Schur, campaign director of Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, a housing justice organization, wants measures that ensure that those distributing rental assistance “get a commitment from the landlord to not move to immediately evict the tenant after the rental assistance ends. Or else it is half a Band-Aid, not even a Band-Aid.”

**

Such concerns are pushing some advocates to demand something unprecedented: canceling rent altogether. 

“It’s unconscionable to expect people to pay for things when you’re not allowing them to work, when the greater good of the public health relies on people staying in their homes,” said Dianne Enriquez, who directs housing campaign work at the Center for Popular Democracy. She argues that even broad rental assistance programs would leave too many without assistance, and set up mass evictions. 

She said, “the solution is to completely alleviate the burden, to completely take off the need to pay anything at this moment.” 

The idea of cancelling rents is gaining traction in some of the most rent-burdened parts of the country. In San Jose, councilmembers introduced a proposal to waive rent for three months. With monthly rent in San Jose averaging $3,941, tenants unable to pay rent for three months will likely owe nearly $16,000 in back payments, the councilors argue. Lawmakers in New York and Pennsylvania are now championing legislation to cancel rent payment responsibilities during the crisis; New York’s efforts are backed by prominent Democrats such as U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson. 

“If our solutions in this moment just include temporary rental assistance of the kind that we already had to get us back to normal, that’s insufficient,” said Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator at Housing Justice for All, a New York-based coalition that is pushing for rent suspensions. 

The coalition was fighting to promote affordable housing in the state well before COVID-19, and Weaver hopes that public authorities seize the moment as an opportunity to tackle longstanding challenges. “The housing problems that we have today existed before coronavirus and will exist after coronavirus, and we have an obligation in this moment to be demanding different things,” she said.

Housing Justice for All is also pushing lawmakers to include an option for landlords who are struggling financially to sell their building to the state government or else to turn them over to community land trusts, which are nonprofit local organizations that develop and maintain land for affordable housing. They enter long-term leases with homeowners to stabilize prices. 

This type of trust has been widely embraced by housing advocates in recent years as a way to take units out of the increasingly hostile private market and ensure affordability. In the present crisis, where mass foreclosures loom, the proposal has taken on a new urgency for those who wish to avoid a repeat of the 2008 crisis, when Wall Street took over such distressed properties. U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, has also introduced it in Congress. 

Edwards agreed that policies adopted today cannot just be reduced to temporary measures for an exceptional time. “We had a housing crisis before COVID and all COVID did was pour gasoline on a very hot fire,” she said of Boston. “That’s all it did.” 

The post Cities Roll Out Rent Assistance. Advocates Demand Bigger and Bolder Help. appeared first on Bolts.