|
To the Cambridge community,
Our community is still grieving the untimely shooting death of Xavier Bautista, and now we have learned that a man died at the hands of Cambridge Police last Friday. These incidents are two sides of the same coin.
On Friday, August 21, Cambridge Police shot and killed William Woodworth, 64, on Temple Street in Central Square.
There is still a lot we do not know about what happened. But we do know that William Woodworth was a human being. We send our deepest thoughts and sympathies to everyone who is grieving his death.
Whatever circumstances brought him into contact with Cambridge Police on Friday, the encounter should not have ended with his death. We believe a just system must be organized around preserving human life and dignity; in this instance, we have lost both.
The Cambridge City government owes the public answers. As we await more information, some initial questions we have for CPD and City Government are:
- What brought the officers there? What did officers know about the situation before they arrived, and what information did they receive once they were there?
- What happened from the moment officers first encountered William Woodworth to the moment he was shot? We need a clear and complete timeline.
- What attempts were made to slow the situation down, create distance, de-escalate, or otherwise avoid taking a life?
- What alternatives to lethal force were available, and were any of them considered or attempted?
- When will body-camera footage, dispatch records, and other available video or audio be released to the public?
- Who is investigating the shooting, and what role will Cambridge Police have in an investigation of its own officers?
- What has actually changed in CPD's practices, training, and approach to de-escalation since Cambridge Police Officer Liam McMahon shot and killed Sayed Arif Faisal in January 2023?
- After the police response to Princiano Faustin in 2025, Cambridge again discussed the limits of armed police responses to people in crisis. What lessons did the City say it learned from that incident, and were any of those lessons relevant to the encounter with William Woodworth?
- What does accountability look like when reforms, training, body cameras, and new policies are put in place and someone is still killed by police?
- Most importantly, what will Cambridge do differently so that the next person in crisis who encounters police has a better chance of coming home alive?
Cambridge has been here before. In January 2023, Cambridge Police Officer Liam McMahon shot and killed Sayed Arif Faisal, a 20-year-old Bangladeshi student experiencing a mental-health crisis. For nearly ten months, Cambridge officials did not publicly identify McMahon as the officer who shot him. When his name was finally released, the announcement came alongside the news that he would not face criminal prosecution after a judge found his actions "objectively reasonable."
Now, Cambridge Police have killed William Woodworth.
We cannot pretend Woodworth's killing happened in isolation. Cambridge has spent years telling us that reforms, training, body cameras, and new approaches to crisis response would help prevent another death like Faisal's. But last year, when Princiano Faustin was in profound mental distress, Cambridge Police chased him through the streets to his home and then surrounded his apartment building for 18 hours. Police fired chemical projectiles into his apartment that spread through the building’s vents, forcing neighbors from their homes and sending several people to the hospital. Faustin survived, thankfully.
But now William Woodworth is dead.
Xavier Bautista is dead too.
Xavier’s death was a tragedy of a different kind. Of course he deserved to live, and his loved ones deserve to grieve him as a whole human being rather than continue to watch his death become an argument for expanding police power and surveillance. Yet almost immediately after his killing, the police union invoked his death to argue for the return of ShotSpotter microphones, asking the public to believe that another surveillance technology might have saved him when that is simply untrue. This is precisely why critical voices like ours matter.
Again and again, the public is asked to trust that each new power given to police will make us safer: the authority to use lethal force, networks of microphones that supposedly only listen for gunfire, drones as first responders circling overhead, patrol robots, chemical projectiles and other “less lethal” munitions, surveillance cameras, and whatever technology comes next. But time and again, research and experience show that these reforms not only do little to meaningfully create safety: they are primarily used to increase surveillance and cause further harm.
Again, Xavier Bautista’s death should compel us to confront gun violence and ask what could genuinely prevent another family from suffering such a loss. But William Woodworth’s death reminds us that police violence is also gun violence, and that the ever-expanding power we give police carries its own dangers. We should not have to accept more surveillance and more police power simply because we are afraid of gun violence. We can create safety from interpersonal violence while still asking hard questions about state surveillance, police violence, and the tools we place in the hands of police. One tragedy should not be used to justify policies that may create the conditions for another.
When police kill a community member, we are asked to wait for an investigation, trust the process, and consider another round of training or reform. In both local cases, Faisal and Woodworth, we are discouraged from asking a more fundamental question: What would it take to build a Cambridge in which fewer people are harmed, fewer crises become deadly, and fewer situations require police at all?
That means investing in non-police crisis response. It means accessible mental health care before someone reaches a breaking point. It means stable housing, youth programs, community-based violence prevention and interruption, restorative and transformative justice, and resources that help people survive conflict and crisis without an armed response becoming the city's answer. And if any of this is going to work, it cannot be led by the police.
| 
