At almost every Black Lives Matter protest she has organized in Boston, activist Monica Cannon-Grant repeats the same demand to the crowd: “Don't just come to the rally, go home, eat a cheese sandwich and check off the box that says 'I marched and rallied with the Negroes' and do nothing."
Since last summer's protests over the police murder of George Floyd produced headlines, activists have continued their work behind the scenes on community organizing, preventing violence, charity fundraising and meeting with lawmakers.
Last year, Cannon-Grant presented former Mayor Marty Walsh with a proposal to reform the Boston Police Department and redistribute a portion of its funding to community-led programs. One year later, she said her plan has changed.
“Initially, I felt like we could take the majority of the money that they received from their budget and allocate it to other places,” Cannon-Grant told GBH News.“But I have to be honest — watching everything that transpires in this country, defund the whole damn department. You cannot reform racism.”
Abolition — the total removal of funds from Boston police — was already being demanded by other local activist groups, including Black Lives Matter Boston, the Muslim Justice League, the Freedom Fighters Coalition and Black Boston. As police killings, and protests, have continued across the country. Even activists who took a more moderate approach, like Cannon-Grant, are getting on board.
“The notion that this is impossible, it's only because they've been entrenched into a system of white supremacy so long that we don't know what it looks like for them not to control us,” she said.
Boston essentially invented policing in the United States as the home to its first police department: the Watchmen, a volunteer force established in 1631.
Today, police officers are some of the city's highest paid employees, with no cap on overtime from the department's budget of $414 million. Boston police even earned nearly $5.8 million in overtime covering last summer's protests over defunding the police.
Fatema Ahmed, an organizer with the Muslim Justice League and a group called Defund Bos Cops, said that policing is so ingrained in the country that it has become difficult to envision alternatives.
“It only seems crazy because we're wasting a lot of money on policing people,” she said. “And that doesn't work. We know that that doesn't work.”
Daunasia Yancey, an organizer with the Boston chapter of Black Lives Matter, has long supported abolishing the police department gradually over a period time.
“I don't know that any abolitionist thinks that we're just one day going to wake up and not have police. That's not going to be the case,” Yancey said. “Brick by brick, wall by wall, the whole system has got to fall. We need to just keep at removing power, removing credibility, exposing the police for who they are so that people actually understand that they are not keeping us safe.”
Yancey said abolition isn't as impossible as some claim.
“It sounds radical until you also understand that we've consistently been defunding education,” she said. “Every single year, we’re slashing education budgets. So defunding is not a radical idea. It's something that happens all the time.”
Doing that to police, Yancey said, would be a way to level the playing field and give some of the department's budget to underfunded programs that serve the community.
“We would apply it to education, to mental health services,” she said. “We apply it to systems that we know keep people safe, that we know are supporting communities to to be their best, as opposed to continuing to fund police that continue to harm us, that continue to not solve cases, to have these scandals erupt.”
Systemic problems become police issues because they are not prevented, Ahmed said. Instead, she wants more programs to fund housing, education, violence prevention, mental health treatment and gun control.
“Literally anything to address that would be better than continuing to spend a ton of money on policing people,” she said. “Policing is a violent response, even to violence. It's not something that is going to dampen violence. It's not going to prevent it.”
Ahmed said alternatives could look like the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets program in Oregon, a community-based public safety system designed to handle mental health emergencies. The city budget could start from zero and allocate funding to what's needed instead of the same things that have been done before, she said. Even finding alternatives to calling the police for minor violations like illegal fireworks could make communities safer.
“It needs to be a reframing of this issue,” she said. “People can't just be talking about how we are going to get more police and more diverse police.”
In a statement, a Boston Police spokesman said the force is committed to reform and cited recent actions like extending the time that body camera recordings are made available, issuing new guidelines on the appropriate treatment of transgender people and mandatory reporting of how many miles officers drive while transporting prisoners.
“The BPD will continue to work on police reform, de-conflicting state legislation with task force recommendations, while also listening to the community regarding their priorities,” Boston Police Sgt. John Boyle said in an email. By "de-conflicting," he meant working to ensure that recommendations from state and city task forces do not conflict.
Ahmed, with the Muslim Justice League, said a large part of the community doesn't feel heard, or protected, by the Boston police.
“It's not just that they keep white people safe and they don't keep people of color safe,” she said. “They hurt people of color. They are surveilling and policing and repressing people of color.”
Ahmed said she’s often asked about how the city would handle crime, a possible mass shooting or another Boston Marathon bombing without police. Her response to GBH News did not explain how but instead focused on preventing violence in the first place.
“Yes, of course violence is going to keep happening," she said. "That is not going to suddenly be eliminated. But one part of this is, how are we preventing it? They're not actually preventing it or really solving it. The police are not solving homicides in Boston, and they're not solving hate crimes either. It's not that we don't need safety and security. We actually do need it, and we're not getting it.”
Since Floyd's murder, the conversation around defunding police has shifted dramatically, Ahmed said.
In a GBH News poll last summer, just over 50% of Massachusetts residents supported reducing police budgets and transferring some money to social services.
In 2017, Ahmed's organization and a few others put out a questionnaire on issues in policing. “At the time, we couldn't even say the word 'abolition' without people just absolutely losing it,” she said.
Nearly five years later, Ahmed said the same issues brought up by the questionnaire — police brutality, racism and a lack of trust in the police — are now being talked about by city councilors and mayoral candidates.
“If you had told me in April of last year that we would force the city council to actually consider cutting the police budget, I wouldn't have believed it,” she said. “I think it's just clear that we need to ask for what we want, not for what politicians think is reasonable.”
Last summer, the council approved Walsh's proposal to move 20% of the police overtime budget into social services.
That didn't do much to help, Ahmed said.
“We advocated for [cutting] 10% of the entire Boston police budget, which is $40 million,” Ahmed said. “Twenty percent from overtime is $10 million … that's a fourth of what we were asking for.”
Boston police overtime is projected to exceed its budget by $15 million this year, according to the council's Ways and Means Committee. Ahmed said that as long as the department can go over its overtime budget, cutting from the allocation is lip service.
“It's not real until they back it up with real policies that are actually going to cut overtime spending," Ahmed said.
Cannon-Grant, through her nonprofit Violence in Boston, continues to push Boston City Hall and Beacon Hill, meeting with legislators like state Rep. Chynah Tyler, D - 7th Suffolk, to work on a plan to prevent youth violence.
Tyler said she'd support the reallocation of some police funding into other programs.
“When it comes to incidents that are happening every day here in the city of Boston, particularly in communities of color around homicides and just gun violence incidents in general, we're not getting our desired results,” she said.
But Tyler stopped short of supporting abolition or using the word "defund."
“The funds for our community to feel protected and served need to be reallocated,” Tyler said. “The unfortunate reality is that we do live in an environment that isn't always safe, so we do need some level of protection as far as public safety, a public safety front.”
Cannon-Grant has also met with Andrea Campbell, a city councilor and mayoral candidate, who released a plan to reallocate 10% of the police budget and address what she called "root causes" of what become policing issues.
“I'm not for the position of abolishing the police,” Campbell said. “What I am for, and I've always said, is that police themselves will not be able to solve the root causes of violence or the inequities that exist in education, housing, access to health care, job opportunities, all of these inequities that drive violence in the city of Boston.”
Acting Mayor Kim Janey has proposed a budget that would cut police funds by 5% and the overtime budget by 3%. One million dollars would go towards a new Office of Police Accountability and Transparency, another million to racial equity training and $2 million to the existing Boston Emergency Services Team of clinicians who respond when people experience a mental health crisis.
Her budget would also put nearly $2 million towards what she calls "alternative policing" models through the Office of Health and Human Services.
Under Janey's proposed budget, the Boston police would receive just under $400 million dollars.
“We want to think about how we move some of the services that are currently housed in the police budget out of the police budget to our areas and our city agencies in our city that are more ready to deal with those situations,” Janey told reporters at a news conference earlier this month.
At another news conference a few weeks later, Janey emphasized reform. “The murder of George Floyd and countless others demonstrate the urgent need to reform and reimagine how we protect and serve our communities,” she said.
Yancey, of Black Lives Matter, said that working within the system — meeting with legislators and politicians — isn’t a priority for her organization right now.
“A lot of times what happens with legislators is a dog and pony show,” she said. “We've been invited to many closed-door meetings that we've had to decline.”
Activists know these plans aren't the total abolition they are asking for, but Ahmed said she can see things slowly shifting and that it is significant that these conversations are happening on a legislative level.
“Five years ago, when Black Lives Matter took off, the conversation was at such a different place from where it is now,” she said. “A lot of that is because of the cultural organizing folks have been doing.”
This year, activists plan to put public pressure on the city through organizing and protesting, including a new demand for more cuts to police funding, with additional cuts over time.
In the meantime, Cannon-Grant said the community work, the work on the ground to push a cultural shift in attitudes, still needs to keep moving forward.
“I'm not going to be able to solve this problem by myself,” she said. “It's all about partnerships and support. That’s how we're going to be able to make real change. So anybody who thinks, 'Oh, we just go outside and yell and scream,' they're missing it.”
