Boston's mayor has declared racism in the city a "public health crisis" and moved to reallocate some of the police budget to public health initiatives.
Marty Walsh says $4.4 million (AUD) of the police’s overtime budget will now be funnelled into the Boston Public Health Comission, and he will propose moving a further $13 million to measures to support health, housing and counselling for the black community in his city.
“I want to declare racism to be a public health crisis in the city of Boston. The health impacts of historic and systemic racism are clear in our COVID-19 case numbers, and the impacts go far beyond the current crisis,” Mr Walsh told reporters on Friday.
"We're determined to accelerate our work towards systemic change. What I'm announcing today is the beginning.”
It comes in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests which have swept the United States following George Floyd’s death in custody.
Mr Walsh promised that city officials would start "a conversation that can produce lasting, systemic change to eliminate all the ways that racism and inequality harm our residents".
He also announced reviews of the police department's use of force guidelines and other policies which he said disproportionately affected residents of colour.
The already-reallocated money from the police budget represents around one per cent of the overall funding the department receives.
In response to the move, Boston Police Commissioner William Gross said his officers wore "too many hats anyway".
Organisers of some of the protests that have taken place in Boston have described the reallocation of funds as a “pittance”.
"The main reason why the protests are happening is to demand the prosecution of police," Brock Satter from Mass Action Against Police Brutality said.
"They can defund all they want, but if they don't punish police for the crimes they commit, police are just going to keep committing crimes."
The US has seen ongoing protests in response to racism and police violence following the death of black man George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Source: Getty
The governor of Massachusetts, the state where Boston is located, wouldn’t say whether he would follow Mr Walsh’s move in shifting state police overtime funding towards other programs.
"I'm not a big believer, at the end of the day, that the right way to solve a number of problems is to so-called 'defund the police',” Charles Baker said.
In the wake of Mr Floyd’s death, several major cities, including New York and Los Angeles, have moved to partially defund their police forces.
Boston is not the first jurisdiction to declare racism a public health crisis.
Several counties and city councils across the US have made the same declaration, but Boston was the first large city to do so. Others are expected to follow suit.
