Violence

Although violence is common in the entertainment industry, found ubiquitously in fictional movies,
television shows, and video games, it is an issue that greatly impacts population health. Studies have
reported that 1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men will be assaulted during their lifetime, and at least 50% of
transgender people have experienced sexual violence. The majority of these assaults will go unreported.
The American Public Health Association states that gun violence is the leading cause of premature death
in our nation. Despite the alarming rate of gun violence in the U.S. and the devastating consequences,
research in this field has been historically starved of funding.

Violence is not only physical, though it is often thought of in these terms. The World Health Organization
defines violence as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself,
another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting
in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.” Other forms of violence may
include emotional, verbal, political, institutional, religious violence, and various forms of terrorism.
Neglect and stalking can both be considered acts of violence, as well. Where else do we see examples of
violence in our society? Is violence preventable, or is it simply a part of human nature? Does the media
play a role in desensitizing us to violence, and if so, should the government intervene? Do video games
influence a child’s tendency towards violent behaviors later on in life? How can encountering violence
have profound effects on an individual’s health? What about the health of a population? How can we help
communities to prepare for and handle violent encounters? What is the best approach to mitigate violence
and prevent it from occurring in the first place? Consider these dilemmas as you move through the
material for this week.

Resources:
● Violence Policy Center - http://vpc.org
● A Safe Place - https://www.asafeplace.org/
● Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network - http://www.rainn.org
● Gun Violence Archive - https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
● American Public Health Association: Gun Violence -
https://www.apha.org/topics-and-issues/gun-violence
● Protecting Children From Violence - http://unicef.org/protection/index_violence.html
● National Crime Prevention Council - http://www.ncpc.org
● Futures Without Violence - https://www.futureswithoutviolence.org/
● The Community Guide: Violence Prevention -
https://www.thecommunityguide.org/resources/what-works-violence-prevention
● CDC Violence Prevention - http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/index.html
● Youth.gov: Violence Prevention - https://youth.gov/youth-topics/violence-prevention
● Washington Post Police Shootings Database -
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/
● Amnesty International: Police Violence -
https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/police-brutality/

Statistics:
● According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network):
○ Every 68 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted.
○ On average, there are 463,634 victims (age 12 or older) of rape and sexual assault each year
in the United States (2019).
○ Among undergraduate students, 26.4% of females and 6.8% of males experience rape or
 sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation (2020).
○ 13% of all students experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or
incapacitation (among all graduate and undergraduate students) (2020).
● During the first half of 2020, European countries recorded 218,755 new asylum seekers, nearly a
third of whom (69,010) were children (UNICEF).
● By the end of 2020, 82.4 million individuals were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of
persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations. That was an increase of 2.9 million
people since the previous year (The UN Refugee Agency).
● In a 2019 study conducted by the Cyberbullying Research Center, 37% of participants reported
being the victims of cyberbullying in their lifetimes, and almost 25% of participants had
experienced cyberbullying in the past 30 days.
● According to the Washington Post, since 2015:
○ There have been more than 5,000 fatal shootings by police officers recorded by the
Washington Post alone. Though they account for less than 13% of the U.S. population,
Black citizens are killed by police by more than twice the rate of white Americans.
○ About 1,000 people have consistently been shot and killed by police each year.
● According to the Gun Violence Archive, in 2020, a record number of Americans, nearly 20,000,
were killed as a result of gun violence. Additionally, according to the Washington Post, 23 million
guns were purchased, a 64% increase compared to 2019.
What Gun Violence Does to Our Mental Health
nytimes.com/2022/05/28/well/mind/gun-violence-mental-health.html

May 28, 2022

Heather Martin was a senior at Columbine High School in 1999 when two gunmen, also
teenagers, killed 13 people and wounded 21 more before taking their own lives. She ended up
barricaded in a room for three hours. And although she wasn’t physically injured, she
witnessed the aftermath of the shooting, which she described as “horrifying.”

Despite having survived such a traumatic event, she did not consider how deeply her mental
health might have been affected. “I minimized my own experience and always thought,
Someone has it worse. I should just be fine or be better,” she said.

But she wasn’t fine. Ms. Martin had recurring nightmares for years and eventually dropped
out of college after developing an eating disorder and taking recreational drugs.

It wasn’t until the 10th anniversary of the shooting that she finally found the support she
needed and reconnected with some of her classmates “who got it, who were also struggling,
who didn’t judge me,” she said.

Mass shootings have become more common during the pandemic, and so, too, have other
types of gun violence. So far this year there have been more than 200 mass shootings in the
United States, including the one that caused the deaths of 19 children and two teachers in

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Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday. But beyond the statistics is a number that is harder to quantify:
The large swath of people grappling with the psychological effects that stem from the
violence.

The mental health toll doesn’t just affect those closest to gun violence. It also ripples through
a community and the nation, said Erika Felix, an associate professor of clinical psychology at
the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has studied survivors of shootings.

Understand Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

The invasive symptoms of PTSD can affect combat veterans and civilians
alike. Early intervention is critical for managing the condition.

Understanding E.M.D.R.: The once-experimental trauma treatment might look

bizarre, but some clinicians say it’s highly effective against PTSD. Here’s how the
therapy works.
Removing the Stigma: Misconceptions about how PTSD develops and its symptoms,
can prevent people from seeking treatment.
Psychedelic Drugs: As studies continue to point to the therapeutic value of
substances like MDMA, veterans are becoming unlikely advocates for their
decriminalization.
Healing Power: Despite weight lifting being associated with violent bursts of brawn,
many people find pumping iron to be a valuable tool in addressing PTSD.

“It’s felt everywhere,” she said. “We really have to look at this as a public mental health
crisis.”

For survivors, victims’ families and those who live near the location of a shooting, the
psychological effects can be intense and prolonged. They may include post-traumatic stress
disorder, substance abuse, self-harm and major depressive disorders.

But even among those who do not frequently experience gun violence or who have never been
directly affected by a mass shooting, feelings of fear, anger or helplessness can arise. And
studies have found that continually consuming news media after a tragedy can lead to acute
stress.

“It affects our perceptions of vulnerability and risk,” Dr. Felix said.

Could have happened to any of us

In a 2018 survey conducted by the Harris Poll for the American Psychological Association, 75
percent of young people between 15 and 21 said that mass shootings were significant sources
of stress for them. Most adults ranging in age from 22 to 72 said the same.

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The fact that the shooting in Uvalde could have happened to any of us “is deeply unsettling,”
said Dr. Sara Johnson, a professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine who has studied how chronic stress affects child development and behavior.

Some people may develop a sense that the world is not a safe place, that others cannot be
trusted “or that they are powerless to change the circumstances in which they’re living,” Dr.
Johnson said. “These kinds of mass shootings really tear at the fabric of society.”

But despite the potential for far-reaching psychological effects, there is limited data on what
firearm injury does to our collective mental health.

This is in part because agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not
fund gun violence research for more than two decades after a provision called the Dickey
Amendment prohibited the use of federal money to “advocate or promote gun control.”

What experts have found is that directly after mass violence, most survivors and responders
will have stress reactions that gradually decrease over time, according to the National Center
for PTSD. But some people — and especially those with specific risk factors — may
experience lasting consequences, including PTSD.

PTSD symptoms can be similar in adults and children, said Nicole R. Nugent, an associate
professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown
University and an expert in PTSD identification and treatment.

Those with PTSD often have trouble sleeping and may become emotionally numb,
continuously on edge or easily startled, she said. The world will often feel unsafe to them, and
upsetting memories may intrude on their daily thoughts. Some people may try to avoid
things that remind them of their trauma. Teens and adults might turn to substance abuse.

Younger children may experience stomachaches or headaches,andlower-grade anxiety that

causes them to misbehave or have trouble concentrating. They may also engage in “traumatic
play,” acting out the trauma they experienced, Dr. Nugent added. If the behavior persists, she
said, “then we start to worry that it could be signaling something significant like PTSD.”

Proximity to violence
Much like those who experience gun violence, those who live near it may also suffer.

Dr. Aditi Vasan, a general pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, decided to

investigate how children in her community were psychologically affected by nearby shootings
after speaking with patients who had anxiety, depression or difficulty sleeping.

“When I asked them when these symptoms started, they told me it was after a classmate or a
friend or a neighbor was shot,” she said.

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The resulting study, published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2021, examined emergency department
admissions between 2014 and 2018 and found that children and teenagers in west and
southwest Philadelphia who lived within about four to six blocks of where a shooting had
occurred were more likely than other children to use an emergency room for mental health
reasons during the two months after the shooting. The odds rose among children who were
exposed to multiple shootings and among those who lived closest to a shooting’s location,
within two or three blocks. Their symptoms included anxiety, panic attacks, suicidal ideation
and self-harm behavior, Dr. Vasan said.

Another study, in California, looked at the effects of police killings on several communities in
Los Angeles. It showed decreases in high school students’ academic performance, learning
deficiencies related to PTSD and higher levels of depression and school dropouts that
correlated to how close students lived to where the shootings occurred. These problems were
most pronounced among Black and Latino students who lived near the locations of police
shootings of Black and Latino people.

“The fear overcomes the need to connect with other people, and that’s the real tragedy of
what violence does to communities,” said Dr. Joel Fein, an emergency medicine physician at
Children’s Hospital Philadelphia, where he co-directs the Center for Violence Prevention.

Addressing the psychological effects of gun violence

For younger children affected by violence, Dr. Nugent recommended keeping as much
structure in place as possible, like regular bedtimes and mealtimes.

“They are looking to us for those subtle signals that things are OK and things are safe,” she
said.

It’s also important to allow ourselves to feel grief, rather than to bottle it up, and to allow our
children to acknowledge it, too, said Dr. Megan L. Ranney, an emergency physician and the
academic dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University.

Finding the things that give us a sense of control can help us cope as well. Plan on
disconnecting from the news media from time to time, Dr. Ranney added, so as not to “re-
traumatize yourself over and over.” And consider making a positive contribution to your
neighborhood, like getting involved in organizations such the Boys & Girls Clubs of America
or planting a community garden.

Shortly after the shooting in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., in 2012, Ms. Martin and one of
her high school friends co-founded the Rebels Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan peer support
group for those directly affected by mass violence. With about 1,700 members, it is one of the
largest organizations of its kind, she said.

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People will “push down their trauma and their experiences, and it can lead to some really
dangerous places,” said Ms. Martin, now 41 and a high school English teacher in Aurora. “It’s
really about acknowledging that you are impacted.”

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Women Are Calling Out ‘Medical Gaslighting’
nytimes.com/2022/03/28/well/live/gaslighting-doctors-patients-health.html

March 28, 2022

Jenneh Rishe could easily run six miles in under 45 minutes — until suddenly she couldn’t.
In the spring of 2019, Mrs. Rishe, now 35, began finding her daily jogs a struggle.

Years earlier, she had been diagnosed with two congenital heart conditions that, she said,
doctors told her would not affect her daily functioning. Yet she was getting worse: Intense
chest pains woke her up at night, and she started using a wheelchair after passing out too
many times.

Mrs. Rishe, who lives in Los Angeles, found a highly recommended cardiologist in the
Midwest and flew there to see him. He immediately dismissed her symptoms, she said.
“People who have these heart conditions aren’t this sick,” she remembers him saying. He
prescribed a new heart medication, told her to exercise and sent her home.

Unsatisfied with her care, Mrs. Rishe saw yet another doctor, who ordered extensive tests
that found her arteries were spasming from a lack of oxygen. “I was basically having mini-
heart attacks, whenever I was having chest pain,” she said. Two months later, she had open-
heart surgery to correct the problem, which she later learned may have saved her life.

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“I constantly still think about how any run I went on quite literally could’ve been my last,”
Mrs. Rishe said.

Research suggests that diagnostic errors occur in up to one out of every seven encounters
between a doctor and patient, and that most of these mistakes are driven by the physician’s
lack of knowledge. Women are more likely to be misdiagnosed than men in a variety of
situations.

Patients who have felt that their symptoms were inappropriately dismissed as minor or
primarily psychological by doctors are using the term “medical gaslighting” to describe their
experiences and sharing their stories on sites like Instagram. The term derives from a play
called “Gaslight” about a husband’s attempt to drive his wife insane. And many patients,
particularly women and people of color, describe the search for accurate diagnosis and
treatment as maddening.

“We know that women, and especially women of color, are often diagnosed and treated
differently by doctors than men are, even when they have the same health conditions,” said
Karen Lutfey Spencer, a researcher who studies medical decision-making at the University of
Colorado, Denver.

Studies have shown that compared with men, women face longer waits to be diagnosed with
cancer and heart disease, are treated less aggressively for traumatic brain injury, and are less
likely to be offered pain medications. People of color often receive poorer quality care, too;
and doctors are more likely to describe Black patients as uncooperative or non-compliant,
which research suggests can affect treatment quality.

“I recall playing it over and over again in my head trying to figure out what I may have done
to cause him to react this way,” said Mrs. Rishe, who is Black, about the Midwest cardiologist.
“And, yes, racism crossed my mind.”

Women say doctors frequently blame their health problems on their mental health, weight or
a lack of self-care, which can delay effective treatment. For instance, Dr. Spencer’s research
suggests that women are twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with a mental illness when
their symptoms are consistent with heart disease.

When Sarah Szczypinski, a journalist in Seattle, began experiencing knee pain and swelling
in 2016 after giving birth to her son, she said that one doctor told her she had postpartum
depression, while another told her she needed to lose weight and do squats — when in fact
she was suffering from hip dysplasia exacerbated by her pregnancy.

She felt as though the doctors were telling her that her excruciating pain “was something that
a woman needs to just live through,” she said. The condition had gotten so bad it ultimately
required surgery, in 2020, to saw her leg bone in half and realign it with her hip. When she

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finally got the diagnosis, “I felt vindicated in a lot of ways,” she said. But ultimately, “it took
three years to get a diagnosis and another two to heal.”

Some patients are more likely to be ‘gaslit and ignored’

Women may be misdiagnosed more often than men, in part, because scientists know far less
about the female body than they do about the male body, even though “there are biological
differences that go down to the cellular level,” said Chloe Bird, a senior sociologist at Pardee
RAND Graduate School who studies women’s health.

In 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began recommending that scientists exclude
women of childbearing years from early clinical drug trials, fearing that if enrolled women
became pregnant, the research could potentially harm their fetuses. Researchers were also
concerned that hormonal fluctuations could muddle study results.

Today — thanks in large part to a law passed in 1993 that mandated that women and
minorities be included in medical research funded by the National Institutes of Health —
women are more systematically included in studies, yet there are still huge knowledge gaps.

For instance, women with heart disease often have different symptoms from men with heart
disease, yet doctors are much more familiar with the male symptoms, said Dr. Jennifer
Mieres, a cardiologist with Northwell Health in New York. When “women show up with
symptoms that don’t fit into the algorithm we’re taught in medical school,” she said, they get
“gaslit and ignored.”

By the time Michelle Cho, 32, was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease in
which the body slowly attacks its own tissues, she had developed kidney failure, a heart
murmur and pneumonia — yet the first doctor she went to diagnosed her with allergies, she
said, and the second doctor thought she was pregnant.

“I left each time feeling disappointed, sad and uneasy, because I knew they had not solved my
problem or helped me in any way, and it had been yet another wasted day,” said Ms. Cho, a
New York City-based medical student. “It felt like they were saying, ‘It’s all in my head.’”

When Raimey Gallant, a 42-year-old writer who lives in Winnipeg, began dropping weight,
losing her hair and breaking out in a full-body rash in her 20s, she said her male doctor told
her she was “young, healthy and just lazy,” when in fact, later that year she was diagnosed
with Graves’ Disease, an autoimmune disorder in which the body produces too much thyroid
hormone.

She also struggled for 20 years with disabling period pain before finally getting diagnosed
last year with endometriosis, an inflammatory disease characterized by the presence of
endometrial-like tissue outside the uterus. “I’ll never get back the pieces of life I’ve lost to
medical neglect,” she said.

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How doctors and patients can elevate care
It’s hard to know how to begin to address these systemic problems, experts said, but
scientists argue that at the very least, there needs to be more research on women’s health
conditions.

Doctors should also be given more time with their patients, and see fewer patients overall,
Dr. Spencer suggested. Research has shown that when people are juggling many cognitive
tasks, they are more likely to make biased decisions. One study found, for instance, that male
doctors were less likely to prescribe pain medications to Black patients with lower back pain
when the doctors were under stress.

Physicians are often working under difficult conditions that “make it easy to make mistakes
and oversights,” Dr. Spencer said. “It’s like a gauntlet of problematic systems and processes
that invite bias.” Researchers have also called for more training in medical school about
unconscious bias and racism in health care. In 2019, California passed a law requiring
hospitals to implement implicit bias programs for all health care providers who provide
perinatal care.

Until more changes occur, women and patients of color might want to consider bringing a
friend or relative with them to their medical appointments, said Dr. Alyson McGregor, co-
founder and director for the Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine division at Brown
University. “It really helps if you have an advocate there that can intervene and say things
like, ‘She is not normally in this much pain,’” she said.

And “see another doctor if you feel dismissed,” Dr. McGregor said. You might even want to
consider seeking out a woman physician or a provider with better cultural competence, who
may better “understand your perspective and language.”

Four months after Mrs. Rishe’s surgery, she wrote a letter to the doctor who dismissed her
symptoms. “I drafted a whole message about how that interaction left me really upset and
that I felt really small,” she said. She is relieved this particular doctor is out of her life, but
she worries she might have a similar experience with another physician one day.

“It’s sad,” she said, adding: “We go in on the defense and ready for it to happen, because it’s
so common.”

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Reimagining the police
bostonglobe.com/2022/12/13/opinion/reimagining-police

By Spencer PistonUpdated December 13, 2022, 10:37 a.m.

Too often, when people call the police seeking help, they get responses that compound rather
than address a harm. What if they could be provided with other options? In addition to
meeting people’s immediate needs, what if jurisdictions could address the root causes of
problems citizens face?

One night in July 2020, Jacqueline Kung heard someone crying outside of her Cambridge,
Massachusetts, apartment. She stepped outside to see what was happening and saw five
police officers surrounding a handcuffed young Black man.

“I thought something’s really wrong here because it’s not like there’s some kind of obvious
crime going on and he’s crying,” says Kung, 42, an endocrinologist. “And why are there so
many police?”

Kung knew what to do. She whipped out her cell phone and started recording. She wasn’t the
only one: About 20 to 30 people from her building captured video as well, including children
and her husband.

It turns out the young man’s mother had just died inside their home. The look on his face and
his body language reminded Kung of times when her patients died from COVID-19, and how
their families keened in anguish: “The family can be distraught, hysterical; that’s

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understandable,” she says. “Sometimes they react in ways where they’re yelling, or they’re
trying to get into the patient’s room, even though we don’t think that’s a good idea.”

A police officer approached Kung, declaring, “There’s nothing going on,” and telling her she
didn’t need to record anything because the young man was “having a mental health crisis.”
Kung identified herself as a physician who could help, but the officer said, “No,” and again
told her to stop recording.

“I’m not recording him. I’m recording you,” she told the cop.

The officer’s response, and the fact that law enforcement canceled ambulance calls to the
scene that night, left a bad taste, says Kung, who filed a complaint with the police
department. She later channeled her angst into working with a policing alternative called
Cambridge HEART (Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team), a community-led,
proactive public safety program that aims to address the immediate needs of people in
conflict or crisis.

Kung believes mutual aid organizations like HEART could be a way to make sure people get
medical care or social services without police getting in the way or harming them further.

Cambridge has a reputation for being a highly educated, posh, and mostly White (64%) town.
It also has a reputation for instituting aggressive policing tactics, particularly against poor
and Black people (10%). One study found that across a 10-year period, more than 40% of
people arrested in Cambridge were Black. These behaviors by the police make the town
similar to places across the nation that grapple with everything from the slow violence of
profiling and handcuffing to more deadly forms. In many of these locations, “alternatives to
policing” programs have gathered momentum.

The people behind HEART confront racist policing in Cambridge, home of Harvard
University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cambridge police attracted
national attention in 2009 when officers arrested iconic Black professor Henry Louis Gates
Jr., while he was trying to enter his own home. In another incident, then-Cambridge Police
Department Lt. Shawn Lynch reacted approvingly to racist social media posts, including a
news article about police brutality, as well as a tweet about the 2020 police shooting of a
Black man, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

At Harvard, meanwhile, Anthony T. Carvello, a White police officer, has been criticized for
his use of violence in several separate incidents against Black men in 2020. He reportedly
used racial slurs and pepper sprayed one of the men.

When four police officers tackled an unarmed, naked Black Harvard student, an officer
punched him in the stomach several times. The Harvard Black Law Students Association
called this out as brutality. As in Cambridge, available data indicate that Harvard’s police

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department arrests Black people at a disproportionate rate, according to reporting by The
Harvard Crimson newspaper.

Cambridge city officials responded to resident calls for public safety alternatives by
establishing the Community Safety Department. And the city has signaled an intention to
outsource certain responses to HEART, according to Councilor Quinton Zondervan.

Cambridge HEART is a community-driven advocacy group dedicated to alternatives to policing. Residents

are doing EMT training and learning how to respond to crisis calls in an effort to keep their communities
safe, solve conflicts, and coordinate mutual aid where needed. Cambridge HEART members shown here
are: JaKyrah Pires, Dara Bayer, Gwenhwyfar Sadie, Nubian Meehan, and Bethzaida Otero.Jessica
Rinaldi/Globe Staff

Cities like Denver; Oakland, California; and Lynn, Massachusetts, have launched alternative
public safety programs in response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Residents
interested in a nontraditional path to public safety must also navigate politics and
government leaders who appear to only be interested in surface-level change.

In Denver, groups like the Denver Alliance for Street Health Response argue that the widely
popular Denver STAR (Support Team Assisted Response) co-opts residents’ initial vision for
a true alternative by not addressing root causes of harm in their communities. Citizens

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generally support STAR’s efforts but complain that the police department often makes
decisions without community input.

In Oakland, community members began researching and organizing for an alternative to

police response after officers shot and killed a sleeping, unhoused man in 2017. The Mobile
Assistance Community Responders of Oakland (MACRO), a community response program
for nonviolent, nonemergency 911 calls, was then adopted and funded to respond to those
calls. However, according to MACRO leaders, the city began undermining the program:
blocking community engagement and support, failing to dispatch appropriate calls, and
refusing to provide transparency.

Finally, in Lynn, near Boston, officials were praised for allocating $500,000 in 2021 to
develop the All Lynn Emergency Response Team (ALERT). But the activists who advocated
for this alternative worry that the city government’s approach centers police interests, such
as sending armed police to accompany the responders or even housing the new response
team within the police department. They also say a new mayoral administration cut the
community out of planning for and implementation of ALERT, while heavily involving police.

Likewise, Zondervan has called Cambridge’s Community Safety Department alternative a

“police approach” that is city-driven rather than community-driven. And Cambridge HEART
leaders, like Kung, criticized the approach, noting the department would have access to
police radios and relay calls to police. To what extent, she asks, is this a real alternative to
policing?

That night in 2020, Kung asked the police officer if an ambulance would be coming, and he
said, “Yes.” Kung recalls thinking, “OK, that’s good because I don’t think police are the right
people to respond.” She later found out officers canceled the call twice.

The officer, says Kung, “was aggressive” and continued to pressure her to stop recording.
Now afraid, she asked for his name and badge number, but he refused to give it. And because
Kung had seen similar situations before, she felt very strongly that aggressive policing was
not the way to deal with grief caused by the loss of a loved one: “If they’re yelling or crying or
trying to push their way into the patient’s room, we never handcuff them! It’s not necessary.
It’s not right.”

“They handcuffed him and walked him to his mother’s body like he was a criminal,” she says.

Kung was so shocked that she discussed the incident with a woman who also lives in her
neighborhood – only to be alarmed once more when the woman told her she had a similar
experience with police. The woman said when her mother died in a nursing home, she had
become distraught and the police officer told her husband he had better get her under
control, or the officer would have to do something.

That’s when Kung realized: “This is not a one-time thing.”

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‘I was thinking, I’m not a criminal, and I know that, but how are regular people going to be
able to voice their concerns with the police if this is the way they are treated?’

That’s also when Kung filed a complaint with the Cambridge Police Department and
contacted the city council. She asked to speak with the police officers involved, and the police
chief seemed eager to take her up on that offer. But when the civilian review board contacted
Kung, “They told me, the police chief said you wanted to withdraw your complaint.”

The review board official told her if she agreed to speak with the officers who were involved,
they would consider that mediation and would automatically withdraw her complaint. So
Kung decided not to speak with them.

Kung then gathered video evidence of the incident from her neighbors. But one neighbor, a
Black woman, asked her name to be kept out of it. She’d had a bad experience with
Cambridge police when she filed a complaint before. Just like that, Kung had now learned
about three bad experiences with police in her neighborhood: the young man in distress, the
woman whose mother had died, and now this neighbor.

Kung gave all the videos to the police, who didn’t seem interested in conducting an
investigation, asking, “What do you expect us to do, knock on every door?”

When asked by police to come in for an in-person interview, she arrived with her husband for
support, but the police refused to let him come in with her. Then officers took her to an
interrogation room, locked the door, and screamed at her.

“I was thinking, I’m not a criminal, and I know that, but how are regular people going to be
able to voice their concerns with the police if this is the way they are treated?” Kung asks.

Months later, Kung received a letter saying the complaint was resolved. While acknowledging
the officer’s rudeness and improper failure to identify, it essentially said the police did
nothing wrong.

Kung was changed by her experience and is especially wary of police power to override the
power of those who come to help.

“Even the 911 dispatcher was afraid or hesitant to allow the ambulance to come because the
police had canceled it,” she says.

Meanwhile, Cambridge HEART has privately raised over $900,000 and is already providing
mutual aid services in response to calls. One woman facing domestic violence and a dire
financial situation was connected to the Margaret Fuller House, a mutual aid organization
that helps people get out of debt. She received financial and housing support through other
mutual aid networks and has been connected to long-term services.

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Needless to say, though distressed, she was not arrested.

Spencer Piston is an associate professor of political science at Boston University.

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