Re: Question for candidates!

[Alan Ball]

Thank you for stepping up and asking these important questions!

Al

On Sun, Sep 28, 2025 at 10:07 AM Kenda Mutongi <kmut...@mit.edu> wrote:

Dear All,

Thank you for attending the meeting yesterday.  As promised, I am giving you a chance to answer in writing the question we posed yesterday.

"For two years, Davis Square has been dangerously neglected. Statue Park and Seven Hills Park—spaces meant for children, families, and commuters—are now littered with trash, dirty clothes, and feeding rats. What were once community spaces have been overtaken by frequent brawls, drug dealing, open drug use, and filthy encampments.

Parents no longer feel safe walking their children through the parks. Commuters rush through instead of stopping. Businesses are losing customers. A place that should feel like the heart of our neighborhood now feels hostile and unsafe. 

Police want to help, but they say the city’s policy to “de-prioritize arrests for drug possession” leaves them powerless. 

We would like to know SPECIFICALLY what you will do to help local voters and taxpayers feel safe again so they can enjoy Davis Square and its public parks?

If you can, please provide detailed answers to this question by October 21 so that I can send them to Davis Square residents before the election. 

 Looking forward to hearing from you.

Kenda

__________

Kenda Mutongi

Ford International Professor of History

MIT History Faculty, E51-296d

77 Massachusetts Avenue

Cambridge, MA 02139

 

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[Jack Perenick]

Kenda and all, 

Thank you very much for organizing the Seven Hills speaking event at the end of last month. I appreciated the opportunity to share my perspectives, speak to the change in direction I think we need, and afterwards speak directly with unhoused residents to hear from them directly. My response to your questions is as follows:

Let me start off by saying I visit Davis Square at least 3 times each week, it's a quintessentially Somerville part of our city, and it deserves a city government that enables it for success. particularly in the face of its current challenges. I believe we need to acknowledge that the city's current response to public drug use has failed some of our most vulnerable residents. We need to look at what other communities have done that have proved effective. One change in approach I've suggested is that Somerville adopt a Drug/Recovery Court program. I've decided as a candidate to come out strongly in favor of a proposal I believe will make us more successful in helping people gain stability in their lives and improve the safety of Davis Square. I believe Somerville needs to host a Drug/Recovery Court, here's what that means:

1) Why the current binary approach doesn't work:

In 2015 the Council voted to "de-prioritize arrests for drug possession" because they saw the failure of incarceration to solve the fundamental causes (and therefore prevalence) of drug addiction; however, ignoring the problem simply is not the correct solution either. A Drug/Recovery Court program changes our options from beyond the binary (make unhelpful arrests or ignore) and fundamentally changes what the nature and effect of police involvement in instances of public drug use means. 

2) What a Drug/Recovery Court is and why it is a different, more effective response:

A Drug/Recovery Court combines public health and public safety responses to public drug use. Under this statewide program, which is present in a number of cities including, an arrest for public drug use is made—but instead of a prison sentence followed by a return to our community on even more unstable footing—residents who committed non-violent drug crimes are connected to treatment and other recovery support services in connection with follow-up or parole services. 

This system is a better way to connect residents in need with resources they would benefit from, but are unlikely to voluntarily pursue long enough to reach meaningful stability. Hosting Recovery Court program services in Somerville would move us away from a carceral response in favor of evidence-based approaches that have shown dramatic benefits for residents suffering from drug addiction. The National Institute of Justice, the research and evaluation service of the US Justice Department, found that a community increasing placements in a Drug/Recovery court program resulted in a 58% increase in incidences of employment, education, family functioning, and financial stability and reductions in recidivism for participants. (Source)

3) What I want to see Somerville do:

We need to work with DA Ryan to separate Somerville's legal process of enforcing state narcotics laws from the wider county system and join 30 other MA cities in hosting a Drug/Recovery Court; right now we have changed our police response, because we cannot control what happens after an arrest; a Drug/Recovery Court with jurisdiction for Somerville enables us to respond to these cases differently than other Middlesex County cities and towns want to. This is an existing and well presented response that opens Somerville residents and our community to more state-funded resources. 

I wish I had space to detail other responses to our current mental health and crisis services, because this is just one approach I believe we need to change. I've written a bit about them here: www.jackforsomerville.com/priorities#helping-homeless-residents We would also substantially benefit from facilitating by request transportation for residents who want to access our area's Community Behavioral Health Center at CHA in Cambridge, a state-funded program that connects people in crisis with medical and wrap-around services that are geared towards both insurance-free crisis intervention and helping people make long-term plans for stability. It's a critical way we could expand the spectrum of assistance to residents who want help and are more likely to accept it if we reduce structural barriers. 

Homelessness and crime are incredibly complex societal issues, and so unfortunately so too must our responses to them be. Davis Square's future success depends on so much more than just addressing this issue as well. I'm looking forward to addressing some of those when I come to speak at the DSNC meeting on Monday the 27th. In the meantime, please feel free to get in touch with me at my website: JackforSomerville.com.

Thank you all for being dedicated members of our community!

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Cheers, 

Jack 

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