Arif Sayed Faisal Inquest response - October 2023
To the family of Arif Sayed Faisal,
We send you love and strength for this injustice. We stand with you in your continued fight for justice and accountability.
To the Cambridge Community,
Please accept this message on behalf of The Black Response.
We had hoped it would not come down to this, but a member of our community was killed by the Cambridge Police Department (Cambridge Day). As individuals and as an organization, we do not believe in capital punishment. And yet we feel compelled to remind you all that Arif Sayed Faisal committed no crime.
The community should not rest. Faisal may not have been our son, brother, or friend, however, we should fight for justice for Faisal. We should now know that this incident is not an accident but protocol and lawful under Graham v. Connor (1989).
The recent inquest confirms the city’s belief that the police officer who pulled the trigger did nothing wrong. We are not surprised by this finding. For years now, we have been saying that the police should not be responsible for responding to people in crisis. If the procedures are followed, Faisal is dead; why aren't the reformists joining us in our call to change the procedure? Complicity in this matter condemns the next person in crisis to the same fate, death. Whoever the person may be.
However, as we said in January, being in crisis should not be a death sentence!
The inquest and the bureaucrats behind this finding have come to the consensus that no wrong was done. Therefore, Faisal's killing is just, in the eyes of the law. We should all be outraged.
Faisal is dead. His family is in mourning. They have to sleep at night knowing that if this mourning sent any of them into crisis they too could be next. After all, the police are trained to follow the protocol. They are trained to shoot and kill.
We cannot knowingly condemn anyone else to this fate. We have to remind and encourage everyone, never call the police (call these organizations instead). We need to educate the community to call for alternatives instead (call HEART instead).
The city government has thwarted us in the development of alternatives too. In 2020, we called for alternatives. In 2021, we coordinated a community process and shared all of our data with the City of Cambridge (see the report). They let us down by walling off the task force and ignoring community calls for autonomous community care. Instead of creating an independent community care initiative, the city government had then Police Commissioner Bard coordinate the process to develop the government-based alternative.
After Bard left, Commissioner Elow played an open and significant role in the discussions toward the creation of the city’s alternative. The former head of the program, Emergency Communications Director Christina Giabetti has worked and continues to work closely with the Cambridge Police Department. Now, former Domestic Violence Initiative Director Elizabeth Speakman leads the city’s department, and is working closely with the police department to do it.
Why do the police have to be involved in the alternative? We cannot continue to wonder why these government-based alternatives to public safety fail. They fail to serve hard-to-reach populations. These are the populations most in need of an alternative, yet they remain underserved by public safety initiatives. The police have their hands in all ‘community care’ in the city. So, of course, undocumented people, formerly incarcerated people, sex workers, drug users, and unhoused people all avoid those systems. The police insist that police must be the first responders to mental health care, despite the fact that they have killed someone in crisis. The police, of course, mandate that they should be the respondents to potentially dangerous individuals. Yet, they make no distinction between an object and a weapon. So long as that is the case, even if there was an alternative in full operation at the time of the Faisal police killing, we would have the same outcome. We should all be outraged!
The Black Response invites the Cambridge community to join a very different conversation. If you want to remove the police as first responders to mental health crises, please join us. If you would have wanted a different outcome for Faisal and you wish for a different outcome for anyone and everyone in crisis—fight for change.
Sign our petition below and join the conversation.
In community with deep sadness,
The Black Response Cambridge
We, the undersigned, demand the following:
The City of Cambridge removes police as first responders to mental health crises. We demand instead that crisis responders first come without police (if they need, they may call the police as second responders).
The Cambridge Police Department alters its protocols from shoot to kill, to shoot to wound. (Ideally, we would never have people with guns responding to people in need. As we cannot hope for that at the moment, we should ask that the police not kill our community members.)
The City of Cambridge issues an apology in writing to the Faisal family and pays out the family from the pensions of the police officers of the department, and not other city employees or other tax dollars.