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Last weekend, four organizations convened at the Cambridge Innovation Center and The Foundry to host the Abolition and Alternatives Conference on housing injustice, police dependency, and non-violent alternatives.

The three-day event was organized by the Cambridge Housing Justice Coalition, #StopShotSpotter Camberville, the Massachusetts Community Care Network, and The Black Response. Panelists, speakers, and attendees explored themes surrounding anti-racism, the carceral system, and police surveillance.

The conference opened on Friday with a panel on the Black Lives Matter Movement. Panelists included BLM leaders who discussed their reflections of the movement and directions going forward.

Vanessa Lynch, founder of the Western Massachusetts BLM chapter said “the best way to show some of the philosophy of what we were doing is actually to show the action, because we were really all about that action.”

Spencer Piston, an associate professor of political science at Boston University, talked about police dependency during his keynote speech.

“The number of police has increased dramatically,” he said. “But now we have mass transit police, hospital police,” as well as “campus police for colleges and universities.”

“And so, we got to claim some domains, is the idea. Here’s a domain where police cannot go, where they will not go,” Piston added.

Over the next two days, participants selected one of four thematic tracks — Housing Justice, ShotSpotter and Police Surveillance Technologies, Alternatives and Community Care, and Community Concerns — and attended organizer-led workshops. Sessions included “The Local Housing Fight”, “Allies for Palestine”, and “Forensic Snake Oil: Shotstopper is Untrustworthy and Dangerous”.

Earl Miller, former head of Amherst’s Community Responders for Equity, Safety And Service program — “an unarmed public safety department that supports the Amherst community, rooted in trauma-informed and anti-racism frameworks”— co-led the Alternative and Community Care track. The initiative focused on movements that build community-based institutions to provide care and safety outside of traditional policing.

“I went to the schools where they were calling these kids, you know, they’re all vaping and misbehaving, and saw a lot of kids who didn’t have mentorship like that,” Miller said. “The school treated them like a problem,” he added.

Attendee Heidi J. Meyer said, “I just hate the system, the caste system, so that it just seems like there’s a ceiling, you know, and not a floor.”

“This was the stuff that doesn’t get talked about. I was so blown away,” Meyer said.

Virginia Cuello, Secretary of The Black Response Core Team, talked about her vision for the future. “We dream of the day when our community has everything it needs,” she said.

“We want to make our community inviting, accessible to working class, and we strive to create multicultural spaces where everyone feels welcome,” Cuello said.