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Cambridge Police Commissioner Christine A. Elow dispelled rumors that officers deployed tear gas to end a standoff in early August at a hearing on Wednesday, providing the City Council with the most comprehensive account of the confrontation yet.
Both the Cambridge Day and activist group The Black Response suggested CPD officials had used tear gas, which is illegal in Cambridge. But CPD spokesperson Robert P. Reardon clarified that a chemical irritant similar to pepper spray was the only agent used, and wrote the department has not bought or used tear gas since 2021.
The confrontation at a Broadway Street apartment building in East Cambridge followed a foot-chase after Princiano V. Faustin, a 51-year-old Cambridge resident, attacked a bystander with a machete in Central Square, according to CPD. Faustin later barricaded himself in his apartment for 18 hours.
Eight hours later, after a “prolonged period of non-engagement” with Faustin, officers deployed ten pepper balls into Faustin’s apartment around 2 a.m., Elow told the Council’s Public Safety Committee on Wednesday.
Officers waited outside the apartment overnight, and arrested Faustin inside at 1 p.m. the next day.
Elow said Wednesday that officers on scene believed that the building’s air conditioning system
had been shut off prior to deploying the irritant. But vapor quickly began to spread through elevator shafts and stairwells, forcing residents of the six story building to evacuate.
Units on the first floor of the apartment building were evacuated for the duration of the 18-hour standoff, and a shelter-in-place order was issued for the residents on the floors above. Residents of the upper floors of the building were displaced for roughly three hours.
The building was partially evacuated shortly after the standoff began, and a shelter-in-place order was issued for residents of the upper floors. The rest of the occupants were evacuated after the pepper balls were deployed, and three residents were hospitalized for respiratory distress, according to Elow.
“The impact on residents is deeply regrettable, and we recognize the concern it caused within the building and the larger community,” Elow said. “The department has taken this outcome seriously. We will not be deploying pepper spray in this manner again.”
The Black Response, a Cambridge-based police abolition advocacy group, published an account of the standoff a week after Faustin was arrested — compiling videos taken at the scene and recordings of online police scanners. TBR posted audio from a Cambridge Fire Department online scanner, where a person relayed that “Police have deployed OC and tear gas into the unit.”
Reardon wrote in a statement to The Crimson that the scanner information was inaccurate.
“In a large scale and rapidly-evolving emergency situation such as this, it is not uncommon for misinformation to spread or there to be inconsistencies in early reports, even among first responders,” Reardon wrote.
Elow backed her officers' decisions in the moment despite backlash from residents, commending their “restraint, professionalism, and constant real-time assessment.”
“For us, this was not a failure,” Elow said. “It was a success — a direct result of our officers’ courage, discipline, and commitment to protecting all of the members of our community, even in the most uncertain of moments.”
Councilors were also quick to question the lack of a mental health response at the hearing on Wednesday. The majority of the incident occurred outside of the operational hours for CPD’s co-response model, which pairs a clinical social worker with an officer, and the city’s own civilian alternative response team. But CPD officials noted that it is unlikely that a mental health worker would have been dispatched to a violent incident.
“This was not a situation when we were looking to make a mental health evaluation,” James Barrett, a social worker and director of CPD’s Clinical Support Unit, said on Wednesday.
“It was someone who had just committed a serious violent act who was going to be taken into custody, so that’s much more appropriate for our crisis response than it would be co-response,” Barrett added.
Faustin was arraigned on eight felony counts of assault last week. A Cambridge District judge found Faustin mentally unfit for trial, and committed him to Bridgewater State Hospital, a facility in southeastern Massachusetts that houses inmates awaiting pre-trial psychiatric evaluations.
He appeared for a closed-door mental health hearing on Tuesday, and will remain at Bridgewater State Hospital until a hearing in mid October.
—Staff writer Laurel M. Shugart can be reached at laurel.shugart@thecrimson.com. Follow them on X @laurelmshugart.
