Saturday marks two years since the death of Sayed Faisal, a 20-year-old college student who was shot by a Cambridge police officer while experiencing a mental health crisis.

Cambridge police said Faisal was harming himself with a knife while they pursued him on a ten-minute foot chase through the streets of Cambridgeport in January 2023. Cambridge police initially withheld the name of officer Liam McMahon, who shot Faisal six times. McMahon was found not criminally responsible following a judicial inquest released later that year.

The case sparked public outrage. Community members protested, demanding greater transparency and changes in the way police respond to people experiencing mental health crises.

Cambridge City Council hosted community meetings and came up with  a set of recommend changes, including officers’ use of body cameras.

In early 2024, the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum released its recommendations for policy updates and new practices in the department.

Some of the proposed changes are now underway: a vendor for body-worn cameras has been selected and the city has begun the process of purchasing equipment and making changes to infrastructure to support the program, a spokesperson for the city told GBH News.

Attorney Marsha Kazarosian, who represented Faisal’s family and led an inquest for more information around the case, said if McMahon had been wearing a body camera at the time of the shooting, it could have brought more clarity to the case.

“Any additional evidence or additional information about what happened that day would have been tremendously helpful,” she said. “Even in what little video there was, there are huge gaps.”

The Cambridge Police Department plans to begin using the body cameras “during the current fiscal year,” possibly as early as April, according to department spokesman Robert Goulston.

“[The Cambridge Police Department] is excited to begin this initiative,” Goulston said. “We know this will be another tool that will go a long way to build trust and transparency with our community.”

The police department began negotiations with the Cambridge Patrol Officer’s Association over a year ago, and the union is “absolutely in favor of deployment of the cameras,” a union spokesperson told GBH News, but a proposed stipend for the “care and maintenance of devices” continues to be a sticking point.

The city’s fiscal year 2025 capital budget includes $1 million in funding for the purchase, licensing and storage costs of the body cameras, and anticipated costs with licensing data storage and staff time costs will be included in the operating budget, according to a city spokesperson.

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“If a department gets body cams, I think it’s great,” Kazarosian said. “Not that it’s going to save a life, because it may not, but it would help at least to have the information to put people’s minds at ease and hold people accountable.”

Fatema Ahmad, executive director at Muslim Justice League, said body camera footage can help shed light on fatal shootings after the fact, but more needs to be done to prevent these cases from happening in the first place.

“In this situation, after this young person was killed, maybe body camera footage could have been helpful,” she said. “But really what the family would have wanted is to not have people with guns show up and chase him.”

A 2017 randomized control trial of more than 2,000 officers in Washington, D.C., found that body cameras have “no statistically significant impact” on officer use of force, civilian complaints or arrests for disorderly conduct. A 2020 meta-analysis from George Mason University found the use of body-worn cameras does not have “clear or consistent effects on most officer or citizen behaviors,” and a 2021 study from NYU and the University of Chicago found that cameras “can be helpful on average, although by themselves they are clearly not a panacea.”

Body camera programs became widespread following protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd, who was killed in police custody in 2020.

“That moved so many people to go out into the streets and demand better, and city officials wanted to be responsive at that moment to what people were saying,” she said. “But we haven’t seen that bear out, we’ve only seen more money for police, for training, for body cameras. Community members are really asking if we can just invest less in that and invest more in literally anything else.”

Cambridge offers multiple programs to address mental health crises, including a Community Assistance Response and Engagement Team that responds to 911 calls that don’t involve safety concerns, and new co-response programs that send clinicians and mental health professionals along with police officers in responding to mental and behavioral health crises.

These programs are supplementary, when they should be prioritized with greater investment, Ahmad said.

“We need to really think about how we can respond to this kind of thing differently,” she said. “It’s the difference between implementing reforms that are just supporting a culture of policing versus reforms that move us away from assuming that people are violent or that violence is going to resolve the situation.”