Report Released from Independent Review of April 2018 Harvard Student Incident

Cambridge City Manager Louis DePasquale and Cambridge Police Commissioner Branville Bard, Jr. today announced that the City of Cambridge has published the results of an independent review conducted by Roderick L. Ireland, retired Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, on the April 13, 2018 arrest of a 21-year-old Harvard student. 

The 18-page report includes a summary of Chief Justice Ireland’s assessment, his method of evaluation, an overview of the materials reviewed, various articles and studies, legal standards, facts as reported by the responding Officers, the review, and recommendations. Chief Justice Ireland’s review concluded, “I carefully considered all of the evidence and circumstances and conclude that the officers of the Cambridge Police Department acted appropriately and I found no evidence that they used excessive force.” 

This conclusion aligned with the Cambridge Police Department’s Professional Standards Unit’s incident review, which concluded that the actions taken by the Officers “were reasonable and justified to de-escalate an unsafe situation that evening for all involved.” This was based on findings that indicated that the force used by the Cambridge Police Officers 1) complied with Department Policy #400.1 Use of Force and related policies; 2) was within state and federal legal standards; and 3) and adhered to state guidelines and training set forth in the Municipal Police Training Committee Use of Force Model and Totality Triangle.

“I want to thank Chief Justice Ireland, Commissioner Bard, and the men and women of the Cambridge Police Department for their professional and thoughtful approach to this review process,” said City Manager Louis A. DePasquale. “I know that the Cambridge Police Department takes great pride in serving and protecting the City of Cambridge. They are committed to ensuring legitimacy and procedural justice in their policing efforts. I have great faith in Commissioner Bard and the men and women of the Cambridge Police Department, and I am pleased that the Department has already been at the forefront of integrating the recommendations from the report into their training and operations.”

“I greatly appreciate the community’s patience on the results of this review,” said Commissioner Bard. “As we previously stated, our intention from the outset of this incident was to ensure a thorough, complete, fair and transparent internal review process. Bringing on someone with the track record of Chief Justice Ireland to independently review this incident was critically important and I want to thank him for his commitment to extensively reviewing the information and compiling such a detailed report. I also want to thank the City Manager for his ongoing support in this matter, as well as the exhaustive efforts of Chief Andrea Brown and our Professional Standards Unit, who went to great lengths to conduct a comprehensive internal investigation on this incident.” 

Among the recommendations made in the independent review report was a commitment to training to most effectively handle incidents, particularly those involving individuals in a mental health crisis. The Department has made this a long-term priority - even prior to this incident - and it continues to significantly invest in providing progressive training opportunities for its Officers, who are often the first to respond to a wide-ranging, evolving set of incidents. As part of this year’s annual in-service training program, which took place between January and April 2019, all Cambridge Police Officers participated in a new training program – ICAT (Integrating Communications, Assessment and Tactics) – that provides first responding police officers with the tools, skills, and options they need to successfully and safely defuse a range of critical incidents. Developed by Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), with input from hundreds of police professionals from across the United States, the Cambridge Police Department was just the second agency in Massachusetts and third in New England to initially receive the ICAT training when its Command Staff and supervisors participated in the training with select members of the community last fall. The innovative training takes the essential building blocks of critical thinking, crisis intervention, communications, and tactics, and puts them together in an integrated approach. During this year’s in-service training, all of the Department’s sworn officers also received “Police Interaction with Persons with Mental Illnesses” instruction from Dr. James Barrett, a nationally recognized expert in child and adolescent mental health and juvenile justice, who was hired this past year as the Department’s new Director of Clinical Support Services. 

These trainings have supplemented other ongoing trainings that the Department has been providing its officers for a number of years, including Youth Mental Health First Aid training (which addresses common mental health challenges for youth, reviews typical adolescent development, and teaches a 5-step action plan for how to help young people in both crisis and non-crisis situations), Crisis Intervention Team Training (which provides effective and appropriate response to incidents involving mental health issues), and Trauma-Informed Training (which is designed to help officers understand trauma as it relates to a victim, as well as tools and education to assist in managing their own trauma). A new implicit bias training will be offered for officers at the Cambridge Police Department and surrounding agencies on Monday, June 3 at Harvard University, as Professor Mahzarin Banaji, who is well known for her work popularizing the concept of implicit bias in regards to race, gender, sexual orientation and other factors, will lead the training. Last year, Professor Banaji facilitated a similar discussion for Cambridge residents and interested City of Cambridge employees at Cambridge Rindge and Latin. 

“As a follow-up to the issuance of this report, I look forward to building upon and advancing the conversations we have established with Harvard’s Black Students Organizing for Change,” said Commissioner Bard. “We are also committed to making Command Staff and other members of the department available to meet with interested residents in the City of Cambridge to discuss the report, its results and general inquiries about the Department, as we did in the weeks initially following the April 2018 incident.”

Those requests can be submitted to PIO@cambridgepolice.org and the Cambridge Police Department will do everything it can to accommodate inbound requests.