What is TBR?
The Black Response (TBR) is a civic association consisting of Black and African residents of Cambridge, MA, working to replace policing and other carceral systems with community-grounded solutions for public safety. We promote principles of transformative and disability justice and also call for investing in the social fabric of communities to foster lasting safety and well-being. We focus on the devastating impacts of the carceral state on Black and Brown people, and we seek to uplift Black and Brown voices and promote the channeling of resources to create alternative community safety infrastructures. All people's dignity, self-determination, and well-being must be at the center of any long-term solution to public safety. While our primary focus is local, we also contribute to statewide and national struggles for police and prison abolition.
The Black Response Cambridge works in two central issue areas: Criminalization and criminal justice reform / Community Care & Racial Equity/Justice. The Black Response works to build community resilience by conducting research and educating on community care organizations as well as advocating for resources and responsibilities to be transferred to community care and alternative public safety programs. In order to build community resilience within communities of color, TBR engages gatekeepers and stakeholders in complex discussions toward shifting public discourses of structural racism, especially racism within carceral institutions like police and prisons (the prison industrial complex).
Our Mission
The Black Response is an abolitionist research and advocacy organization that envisions and works toward building a world free of carceral and harmful responses. We seek to uplift the Black, brown, and otherwise marginalized communities in Cambridge and everywhere by working to unbundle and abolish policing, defund the police to invest in communities, and support the building of alternatives to public safety and the development of community care initiatives.
Our Vision
We call for the construction of community-based mechanisms with transformative and restorative justice agendas that address and prevent the root causes of harm. We also call for investing in the social fabric of communities, such as mental health support, housing services, job training, quality education, and healthy food, to foster lasting physical safety and generate community well-being.
People in the projects do not need to be over-policed; they need more jobs, childcare, free internet, business start-up funds, their student loans forgiven, their kids’ college tuition paid, and other educational services. Use CPD funding to pay for public services that will keep everyone safe and thriving, including poor Black Cantabrigians.
Cambridge has a discretionary fund of over $250 million. Let us use these funds and redirect resources away from CPD to build a Cambridge where everyone thrives, including low-income Black people. Prove that our reputation as a progressive city is, in fact, the truth of Cambridge, not just rhetoric. Let us be on the cutting edge of the national movement to defund the police by creating a community where people are genuinely safe and where all Cambridge residents are treated as deserving of the same standard of living.
Here we are, Black Cambridge residents. We are actively calling on the Cambridge City Council to #DefundThePolice!