Protesters march from Somerville High School to the Cambridge Police Department, in January 2024. Liberation photo
From Bangladesh to the USA: South Asian Communities Call for End to Police Killings
By Tamanna Syed
Boston, MA
The police shoot-at-sight orders in Bangladesh that killed hundreds, mostly young people, reminded me of 20-year-old student Arif Sayed Faisal’s killing in the Boston area. Too many Black and brown people, including South Asians, have died at the hands of police in my adopted country. There is clearly a need for change in how law enforcement interacts with the public.
I was born in Khulna, Bangladesh, and my family brought me to live in Boston when I was just two years old. I consider both countries to be my home. I visit Bangladesh every few years, sometimes staying months at a time.
So, like many, I watched with horror as Bangladesh police followed shoot-at-sight orders against protestors, mostly students, who violated a curfew imposed by Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina shortly before her dramatic resignation.
The violent deaths of over 700 , mostly young people, reminded me of the killing of Arif Sayed Faisal , 20, at the hands of police in Cambridge MA in January 2023.
I have been following this story since the tragedy took place.
Faisal was born in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where he lived for the first eight years of his life. An only child, he was a student at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
The mainstream media painted him as a dangerous man carrying a machete trying to harm others. But as Cambridge Day reported later, he was undergoing a mental health breakdown and carried a kukri (small knife) with which he was attempting to self-harm.
When Cambridge Police officers confronted Faisal, he did what any 20-year-old brown man would do in such a situation – he ran.
This was a flight or fight action that is a normal reaction to the brain's nervous system, as a Cambridge HEART representative explained on a Zoom call last month. The organization provides trauma-informed care and resources locally.
The police chased Faisal. The encounter ended with the student dead, shot six times .
This is an all too familiar story in the US, where an encounter with the local police ends the life of a person in distress. Roughly half of all law-enforcement homicides involve people with mental health illnesses , according to the Virginia-based Treatment Advocacy Center .
Furthermore, among the disabled individuals killed by police, 24% were perceived as South Asian or of Middle Eastern descent, while 75% were identified as Black, according to the California-based Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board ’s January 2024 report.
Faisal would have turned 21 in May this year. He had many wonderful qualities, said a relative who did not want to be named. “Many love their mothers, but few take the time to express their love in such heartfelt ways as Arif did”. On his mother’s birthday, he would gather friends and family to honour her, “filling her wrists with golden bangles and her heart with joy… Arif gave even when he had very little. Yes, Arif struggled with his mental health, but he was never out to harm anyone.”
He was also a dedicated artist who decorated Nike shoes to donate, and created paintings that were auctioned at high prices. He had participated in the Somerville Mystic River Mural Project.
According to the South Asian Public Health Association, an organisation that aims to improve the health and social well-being of South Asians in the U.S., one in five South Asians here experience a mood or anxiety disorder in their lifetime. This is greater than the national average.
Organisations like Cambridge HEART have been working to provide trauma-informed care and resources to the Cambridge community and train the police but there is a long way to go.
My documentary ‘ No Budget for Bullets ’ attempts to restore Faisal’s image and advocates to reallocate the police budget in Cambridge, Massachusetts, towards training and mental health.
Embed Youtube Video: https://youtu.be/aQMmNs8RMcQ?feature=shared
Another Bangladeshi-origin youth killed by police while he was undergoing a mental health crisis was Win Rozario , 19, in Queens, New York, in March 2024. He had called 911 after battling with depression and brandished a pair of scissors to self-harm when two NYPD officers arrived. They said they Tased him and he fell to the ground.
His mother went to comfort him and “accidentally knocked the Tasers out of his body,” according to the police, and he came at them again with the scissors. The officers had “had no choice but to defend themselves” and discharge their firearms, said the police chief later.
However, Rozario’s 17-year-old brother Utsho, who witnessed the shooting, said in an interview that their mother had been holding his brother in her arms throughout the encounter and was still hugging Win when one of the officers fired.
Francis Rozario, Utsho and Win’s father, told the New York Times that the family had immigrated here from Bangladesh 10 years ago and that Win wanted to join the US military.
Police response
The NYPD released the unedited body cam footage of the tragedy in May, after massive protests , particularly by the Bangladeshi community.
New York City had begun a pilot programme in early 2021 to reduce the potential for emergency calls involving mental health crises, with mental health professionals and emergency medical workers responding to a portion of such calls in some police precincts. However, this plan was not in place in the precinct where Win Rozario was killed.
The Cambridge police is working on a similar program, pairing a clinician with officers in a patrol car responding to 911 calls that involve mental health, to help prevent tragedies such as the killing of Arif Sayed Faisal in 2023.
Robert Goulston, Director of Communications and Media Relations at the Cambridge Police Department, told Sapan News via email last month that the Cambridge Police Department has received a mental health grant from the Department of Mental Health to initiate a “co-response model” that is being added to the current “case management and follow up model” run by the CPD’s Clinical Support Unit.
The CPD had been working on the program since late 2022. Earlier, social workers would accompany officers on home and outreach visits in the community but were not stationed in a patrol cruiser to respond to 911 calls. Under the integrated model that began in Cambridge on 16 July 2024, a police officer and a clinician jointly respond to behavioral health calls for service.
The Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission certifies police officers to work in this state and can limit or cancel an officer's certification if they engage in misconduct or do not meet training and ethics requirements. The issue is that the Commission’s process highlights disciplinary action information, rather than officer employment history.
For the fiscal year 2024, the city of Cambridge’s police budget was increased by USD 5.3 million, bringing it up to over USD 78 million,
In comparison, the Cambridge Holistic Emergency Response Team (HEART) received less than half a million dollars (around US $ 300,000) out of the US $ 5 million they had requested to provide emergency services to people in mental health crises, as my documentary notes.
Cambridge residents complain of poor housing maintenance, low salaries for teachers, healthcare workers, and paralegals, and inadequate childcare, afterschool, and education programs. All these factors contribute to poor mental health and could do with increased funding.
This is a call for cities around the country to re-allocate their police budgets to alternative mental health response teams and other community resources, to ensure that such tragedies never occur again.
And the new order in my country of origin Bangladesh needs to ensure that no shoot-on-sight orders are ever given again.
(Tamanna Syed is a public healthcare consultant, writer, and digital media expert on healthcare communications and advocacy. She makes films about healthcare access for marginalized communities, addressing environmental racism, COVID-19 disparities, and education. She has published a poetry collection, 'The Falcon and the Dove' (2021), and directed 'No Budget for Bullets' (YEAR) a documentary on the police killing of Arif Sayed Faisal. Sapan News)
