We create the conditions that necessitate police
We create the conditions that necessitate police
Plus, bikeshedding the budget gap
Hello hello! On the docket today: a tale of two budget hearings, starting with the cops and then the schools. Guess which one was contentious and which one wasn’t! Also, announcing a new video essay series!
Here’s a meme that sums it all up.
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Birthday party this week!
On Friday, a birthday party for this newsletter, which is turning four years old on the 19th! (I’m turning 33 on the 16th too). Fun fun! Chris Robarge will be doing a DJ set, and I’ll be giving a little talk on the state of the newsletter and hosting a short open newsroom event (like a proper newspaper pitch meeting, with anyone who wants to participate).
We recently decided all proceeds for the party are going to victims/displaced residents of recent fires via a new disaster emergency fund (details to come later this week).
And unfortunate update: we were supposed to have a ribbon cutting for Rewind / Cordella’s on Wednesday, but Etel has a personal matter and needs to be with family right now. So we will announce a new date soon.
Introducing: Rewind Video Club Presents!
I have an experiment in a new local journalism format (for me) up on the Rewind Patreon which I’m calling Rewind Video Club Presents! I think it has huge potential, and it was fun to make. The video is titled “What Does the Supreme Court Homelessness Case Really Mean For Cities” and it’s 40 minutes long so don’t think you gotta watch it all now.
Sign up for the Rewind Patreon for free (or paid if you want to support us :-) ) to get this essay and future essays in your feed.
Really want to know what you guys think about it, though! And you'll notice at the end that all our paying Rewind Video Club members are credited!
The idea here is that the Rewind Video Club pays not just to support the Worcester Community Media Foundation, but also for a steady stream of video journalism, using the store as a neat studio space/media lab, and the Patreon as a hub for the content!
I wrote a lot more thoughts on the idea behind this essay if you’re interested over on the Rewind Patreon page!
We create the conditions that necessitate police
The review of the police department budget Tuesday night was at the same time completely pointless and extremely revealing.
The council made no attempts at cutting anything from the $60.5 million budget, which is increasing 9 percent over last year. Not that we expected them to. Most councilors who spoke asked the expected questions—what do you need? what more can we do for you?—and couched them between obligatory shows of fealty. For instance...
“It’s amazing the amount of calls you go on,” said Councilor Kate Toomey. “The events that you deal with. The incredible job that you’ve done and you all deserve huge applause.”
The show was going as planned—every councilor saying some version of the above quote and asking non-confrontational questions—until Khrystian King had the floor. He pressed the chief about ShotSpotter—asking actual questions about an actual budget line item and whether it’s money well spent. It was not in the script, and that made people angry. Especially Kate Toomey.
With Mayor Joe Petty absent at the time and King being vice chair, the chairman responsibilities fell to Toomey (highest vote total) while King was asking his questions. She started with a chip on her shoulder. King took his budget book with him from the podium down to his seat. Presumably, he had notes in it. Toomey expected him to leave his book at the podium. She went up, saw it wasn’t there, walked back to her desk and grabbed hers. “I guess we’re playing musical books now too,” she said. Someone who took actual notes on the budget would have understood why King took his book with him, you have to imagine.
So you had King asking real questions for the first time after 45 minutes of compliments dressed as questions, and you had #1 Cop Fan Kate Toomey with the power to talk over him, interject, and object to questions. She did all three. Every time King broached a touchy subject for the WPD, Toomey interjected. She was wearing a black polo shirt with a circular black sticker covering whatever logo was on the lapel. Likely, it was her work shirt at the Sheriff’s Department. It threw the whole thing into cartoonish relief.
The first time Toomey interjected, King had asked a question about the findings of the equity audit. Cutting him off mid-sentence, Toomey asked Interim Police Chief Paul Saucier “Weren’t a lot of things in that report already covered?” In reality, only a small handful of the roughly 40 recommendations have been adopted. Saucier said “A good portion of them are done.” Toomey replied “Thank you for that confirmation.” What he was confirming is anyone’s guess.
King then asked about ShotSpotter Connect, now called ResourceRouter—the AI that the company claims can “forecast crime” which the WPD has been using since 2022. He asked whether there was any data showing that it’s useful. Saucier’s answers revealed a lot.
Every day, the AI “creates an area or a box” around a neighborhood, which the WPD then assigns officers to patrol on foot, Saucier explained. The location of the “box” changes every eight hours, as the AI synthesizes WPD data and other analytics and spits out a location it thinks that crime is most likely to happen. The patrols then serve as a “deterrent,” he explained.
“As far as prediction, it doesn’t really predict,” he said.
The first factoid he cited to support the software was, bewilderingly, that “officer-initiated” contacts have risen dramatically—a 23 percent increase year to date, from 8,071 to 9,989. In cop jargon, interactions are either “resident initiated,” meaning someone called the cops, or “officer initiated,” meaning no one called the cops. It’s a 23 percent increase in cops making “contact” when no one asked them to. To cite it as a good thing is crazy. Who has ever enjoyed “contact” with a police officer? To cite it as proof of the AI’s merit is evil. If the AI is leading to more unprompted interactions with residents in the neighborhoods where it expects to find criminals, it is doing exactly what critics accuse it of doing. It’s reinforcing racial and class biases.
We don’t know what petty arrests or fines have come from these foot patrols that wouldn’t have otherwise happened. The cops aren’t releasing that data. But we do know that petty arrests and fines are things that keep disadvantaged people trapped in cycles of poverty and recidivism. Saucier’s decision to cite this data point as proof of merit says so much about the problems with policing in this country. He doesn’t even have to understand what he’s doing to do it.
He cited a few more data points comparing 2023 to 2024—a moot point because the department had this tool both years—and left it at that.
King said he failed to see how “predictive policing is responsible for that reduction.”
Toomey cut him off a second time. “Is that a budget question?” King said yes it was and kept going. It was one of the only real budget questions of the night. Toomey, for her part, spent 20 minutes asking nothing at all. Every other councilor who spoke took the same general approach as Toomey. They asked what the cops need that they don’t already have. None of them, besides King, asked the opposite: if they need what they have already.
ShotSpotter is expensive. At $572,000 annually, it’s almost six teachers. In a budget season when more than a hundred teacher positions are slated to disappear, the question of whether ShotSpotter is worth the money is a good one. I wish King pressed harder to ax it, though he would have failed for certain.
Candy Mero-Carlson and Donna Colorio joined Toomey in preemptively defending ShotSpotter by way of leading questions. Colorio even motioned to have the administration consider expanding the coverage area, and thus the expense, by three or four times, to the whole city. She said “constituents” told her they wished they had ShotSpotter in their neighborhoods. In doing so she tacitly acknowledged she hadn’t spoken to anyone who lives within the current coverage area—where people have less money and are less white. The word “constituent” is doing a lot of lifting there.
King also asked the only real questions about the primary gunshot detection product. Saucier wriggled and squirmed but finally said out loud that there were 517 activations last year, versus 70 confirmed shootings. That’s some 447 times ShotSpotter initiated a police response—two cruisers and a supervisor—that didn’t lead to any evidence of a gunshot. But the cops still went, still probed around, still hung flyers on resident door knobs asking for information about a shooting that only may have happened. They instilled the impression a gun went off, and all the anxiety for residents that entails, without knowing whether it was a gun or a firework or a car backfiring. They went into neighborhoods looking for criminality, and only found it 12 percent of the time. But each time was an opportunity to find something else. To do an “officer-initiated contact” or two to make the trip worth it.
The question that needs to be answered, and would be so easy for the cops and so difficult for anyone else, is how many unrelated arrests and citations have stemmed from ShotSpotter activations. And did those “contacts” make anyone safer?
King also finally introduced some of the damning research on ShotSpotter to the record. He asked the chief about a recent ACLU report on Boston that shows a similar ratio of dead ends to confirmed shootings with a much larger and more substantial dataset.
Toomey cut him off again. “Was that report on Worcester itself?” Like it’s different here somehow.
King ignored her and made a motion to have the WPD analyze the report.
Saucier took the opportunity to discredit the report. “Just one more thing,” he said. The ACLU report included incorrect information about one incident involving a piñata. The Herald, of course, broke that story. I checked it out and it looks like the ACLU issued a retraction of that one little detail. An unfortunate and unforced error, but only one in a dataset of some 1,300 incidents. For Saucier, it was grounds to write off the whole report.
“You gotta watch out where you get your information,” he said to King.
Saucier often repeats a claim made by the company about 90-95 percent accuracy (shifting between the two numbers depending on his mood) that have been widely discredited. The information is only suspect when it’s critical, I guess.
He and the majority of the city council do not want to earnestly think about the problems with ShotSpotter.
Like everything having to do with racism and policing, criticism is written off as “political” and reflexively opposed.
It’s the small dramas—like this one budget hearing in one unremarkable city—which, repeated over and over around the country, insulate the cops from accountability.
A private company, founded and run by members of the law enforcement community, is going to get another $572,000 of Worcester residents’ money. Once a year that happens. A half million dollars which could be spent another way. We can’t do anything about it, and this year our summer jobs program is short $500,000. Putting the ShotSpotter money toward that program—which actually reduces violence— is outside the Overton window. The schools are making cuts and the cops are getting a 9 percent budget increase.
We create the conditions that necessitate police. In Worcester and everywhere else all the time. In order to fight crime, you need to make sure it happens. The police exist to preserve a disorder that produces crime.City government exists to ensure they succeed.
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Now to the school budget, which went very differently than the cop budget of course...
“Don’t bikeshed the budget gap”
So on Tuesday night, as we’ve discussed, the police budget went past the council without a hitch. The school committee review of the WPS budget two days later was a much different story. We saw a push to significantly alter that budget from school committee member Dianna Biancheria. She was the first one to speak at the budget hearing Thursday afternoon, and with her very first words she chose to complain about a lack of school money spent on the police.
“When you look at the SLOs, they’re being disband (sic). Those are our safety liaison officers,” she said. “Our security officers are being disband (sic). And we have climate and culture, and it’s a heavy price of a million.”
This stuff writes itself, people.
Translation: It’s bad that we’re cutting cops and security guards in schools and instead investing in youth behavioral coaches and adjustment counselors under the new Office of Culture and Climate. While parting ways with third-party security guards is in the budget proposal, school liaison officers aren’t.
Biancheria’s first complaint about the budget isn’t even in the budget. But it is, more generally, a grievance about the cops not getting enough money.
Later in the meeting, this school committee member who wants more school money directed toward the police department made a motion to cut $500,000 from administrative salaries, and divide the money across a variety of different accounts. Asked to specify which accounts, and how much, she couldn’t. “It was spread around,” she said. The committee spent a few minutes sorting out exactly what Biancheria wanted. Sue Mailman pointed out the amount she was trying to add was above the amount she was trying to cut by at least $100,000. “It doesn’t add up,” Mailman said.
Then they voted. The motion failed 3-6, falling along the expected lines. Only Maureen Binienda and Kathi Roy voted with her. Everyone else thought it was ridiculous, which it was. A purely spite-driven move aimed at the new superintendent.
A general note on the budget: This is a tough year, made tough by a $22 million shortfall in state funding. It is not tough in the way Biancheria and Binienda are making it out to be. This is not a story of administrative greed to the detriment of educators, as they would like to paint it. This is a story of the state failing to provide for Worcester students, and the administration being powerless to put together a budget that doesn’t include substantial cuts.
The Worcester Sucks Instagram admin put together a slide of anonymous testimonials from WPS staff. Each describes increasingly dire situations. Something has to give. But that something is out of the hands of anyone in Worcester, including the superintendent’s. It’s not helpful to make a villain of Rachel Monárrez, as Biancheria and Binienda are attempting to do for self-serving, political reasons. They took a $22 million state funding shortfall and turned it into ammo for their ongoing spite campaign. When Biancheria moved to cut $500,000 from administrative salaries, she wasn’t taking the $22 million situation seriously. She wasn’t proposing a solution. In fact, just the opposite. She was actively making it worse.
Tracy Novick put it best I think in her Whos of Who-cester post ahead of Thursday’s meeting, titled “Some hard truths on the FY25 Worcester Public Schools budget.”
I am absolutely certain that we are going to hear the School Committee spend a lot of time on slivers of the budget (and in some cases, probably self-righteously defend it as budgetary oversight), but unless you are actually grappling with the actual scale of the issue, you're not solving the problem.
Don't bikeshed the budget gap.
That’s exactly what Biancheria, Binienda, and Roy did Thursday night, and it helped absolutely no one.
Odds and ends
If you made it this far you must like what you’re reading hehe pls consider helping out.
In my hometown—Milford MA, which some have called the center of the universe (citation needed)—we have our very own Florida Man! And like any good Florida Man he is pissed the hell off about Donald J Trump being nailed to the proverbial cross.
His name is Kevin Meehan and he made the news this week for hanging an upside down American flag outside his mattress company (of course he owns a mattress company) calling it a distress signal. Meehan is more famous for owning basically the entire nearby town of Mendon via his obnoxious car dealership and complete regulatory capture of the little town’s little town hall (The conservation commission is worth a looksie if anyone’s motivated—a lot of new homes getting built on swamps with some interesting chains of ownership). He also owns a good chunk of Milford and let’s just put it this way: he has shlongstanding shmies to the shmafia.
Cafe Neo is back baby. After a long saga, which I wrote about last January, everyone’s favorote karaoke bar has reopened on Harding Street, a block away from the old location. They held a soft launch event on June 2.
There was a good quote from Director of Health and Human Services Mattie Castiel in a recent Telegram story about whether the city should have a day center for unhoused people (it should).
Worcester officials inside City Hall and the city's homeless advocates have the will to bring a day resource center to Worcester, said Castiel, but the challenge is finding a suitable spot. Some neighborhoods aren’t comfortable having a place that serves the homeless in their backyard.
"NIMBY (not in my backyard) has been the case all along,” said Castiel. "People need to understand the need to take care of folks who are homeless. We all have had bad luck in our lives. We need to be able to support one another. That’s my request to the community.”
In Weird Worcester News we have the Viral Spam Guy who tried to get some eight cans of Spam in his travel-on luggage through TSA, got stopped, took a TikTok video of the stop, and then went back to his Worcester home with all that Spam.
And lastly here’s a good tweet...
And then making it even more of an allegory for the WPD, I came across an Instagram video explaining that this vehicle which the Prosper Police bought from the DoD were basically more deadly to American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan than the enemy. In particular it has a negative air pressure feature in the cabin which means if it’s hit by some sort of fire bomb device, the fire gets sucked right into the cabin where everyone inside is sitting. Money well spent I say!
Ok bye bye
Great piece 👏