Students in Spencer Piston’s Race at the Center of U.S. Politics course with Lynn mayor Jared Nicholson (back row, third from left) and members of the Lynn Racial Justice Coalition in Lynn City Hall. Photo by Jakob Menendez

Classes

MetroBridge GRS Course Aims to Help Reshape Community Policing in Lynn

Spencer Piston’s Race at the Center of U.S. Politics students helped the city work to implement a civilian emergency response team

Lynn, Mass., made headlines in summer 2020 when Thomas McGee, then the city’s mayor, allocated $25,000 to the community organization Lynn Racial Justice Coalition (LRJC) to study creating an alternative to policing. The study, commissioned following nationwide protests in response to police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, was to explore the logistics of establishing an unarmed crisis response team to address emergency situations—such as individuals experiencing mental health crises—that police officers aren’t trained to address.

That crisis response team would eventually be named the All Lynn Emergency Response Team (ALERT). In 2022, a Boston University class joined the effort to bring it to life.

As part of BU’s MetroBridge Program, a learning program that combines real-world community projects with coursework, students in the Race at the Center of U.S. Politics course, taught by Spencer Piston, a College of Arts and Sciences associate professor of political science, spent this spring semester working to help Lynn and the LRJC shape the would-be response team.

The newly created course was for PhD students studying political science and criminal justice. It was a unique opportunity for the four enrollees to gain insight into policymaking, says Piston, who is also the BU Center for Antiracist Research assistant director of policy.

“The students were actually studying an implementation process on the ground,” he says. “On paper, an alternative to policing is a huge policy victory. But once it comes to implementation—these things aren’t easy to create. And so Lynn City Hall and the Racial Justice Coalition thought that maybe through an academic partnership we can figure out what this might look like, together.” 

As MetroBridge partners, the BU students’ job was to gather input from the Lynn community about what ALERT should look like. Students participated in community forums (both remote and in person in Lynn) throughout the semester.

For Erin Tatz (GRS’26), the course was an “obvious fit” for her research into carceral justice and race. “The design was absolutely brilliant; it let us explore a wide body of literature and put it in conversation with real-world work being done at this moment,” she says. Invaluably, the MetroBridge partnership also allowed her and her classmates to learn from and amplify leaders in the Lynn community.

“The role of academics and researchers can often drown out the work being done by activists and community advocates and organizations who are the real experts regarding the needs and interests of their community,” Tatz says. “Throughout the semester, one of our aims was to assess ways that we could amplify the demands of the LRJC, and advocate for the mayor’s office to incorporate and centralize their knowledge and experience, and the knowledge and experiences of the communities they represent.”

Outside of MetroBridge, the students researched policing programs across the country and the role of race in US politics. The course also featured core readings about race and racism throughout history as well as the effects of systemic racism today.

Lynn’s ongoing efforts with ALERT mirror movements around the country, Piston says. After Black Lives Matter protests led to a national reckoning with racism and violence in policing, many cities looked into reforming their police departments. Some cities cut police budgets. Other cities instituted bans on chokeholds, no-knock warrants, and weapons like tear gas and rubber bullets. Still others moved to create review boards to investigate allegations of officer misconduct. 

But Lynn is one of the few cities nationwide that promised to create a civilian emergency response team. (Locally, Northampton also has a team in the works.) Whether the Lynn team actually comes to fruition—and in what form—is still up in the air. Between a new mayor being voted in (Jared Nicholson was elected in November 2021) and questions over things like whose voices belong in the community forums and who exactly would comprise a civilian response team, the bureaucratic aspect of creating an alternative to policing has been messier than expected, Piston says.

“It’s not clear whether the mayor’s office is going to live up to the campaign promise of constructing a true alternative to policing, or if they’re going to go for some co-response model where police officers are still there, and claim it as an alternative to policing,” Piston explains. “So what seemed to be a policy victory is [not yet set in stone], but I think that’s a really important lesson for the students to learn, because versions of this have been happening all over the country. They’re getting an up-close look at the struggles of implementing [community initiatives].”