Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell said Thursday she would “absolutely" reallocate $60 million from the Boston Police Department overtime budget to community-based organizations, as protesters across the country continued to call for a wide range of police reforms.
“We need to think critically around: is policing the model we want to use when eradicating health disparities, preventing violence, getting at poverty, creating greater economic opportunity through schools?" she told Jim Braude on WGBH News' Greater Boston Thursday evening. "No, we don’t want to do it through our police department. We want to do it through our health commission. We want to do it through other organizations on the ground."
On Sunday, during an interview with WCVB’s “On The Record,” Boston Mayor Marty Walsh waivered on the idea of cutting the police budget.
“I think that we have to really think about, if we’re making cuts and we’re reallocating money into different parts of our budget, what are those programs, and are they going to make a difference?” he said.
Campbell, who also chairs the Committee on Public Safety and Criminal Justice, called Thursday for the Mayor to make a definitive plan for reallocating funds from the department.
“The time now is to develop a specific action plan, and that is my expectation of the mayor,” she said.
Campbell believes that the $60 million from the overtime budget would be better used to fund “community based organizations that are doing work with the root causes of violence.”
Calls for extensive reform and to defund the police have been growing increasingly louder since the police killing of George Floyd. Nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice have forced many leaders in the country to reexamine the efficacy of the policing system.
Campbell’s views on the police and justice system have been shaped by the death of her twin brother Andre, who died in the criminal justice system at 29.
“I think about him and the tragedy and the circumstance under which he died in the criminal justice system, and I say all of these systems need to be reimagined and created a new,” Campbell said.
Thursday was Campbell’s birthday. It would have been her brother’s as well.
