Policing improvements in Cambridge: reform or rhetoric?

Fourteen years after policing in Cambridge attracted national attention, the city’s two police departments are again considering improvements to how they interact with the general public amid calls for reform.

Attempts at change by the Cambridge and Harvard University police departments share similar traits, such as soliciting reviews from outside experts and appointing committees. They also operate under some very different parameters.

 

In 2009, the Cambridge Police Department came under scrutiny after Sgt. James Crowley arrested Harvard University professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. on the porch of his university-owned house.

The incident and the reactions it drew provided a type of Rorschach test for race relations in America. It also prompted the appointment of a review committee and a 64-page report, “Missed Opportunities,” that answered few pertinent questions.

Cambridge officials announced in late February several measures designed to increase transparency and public safety. Meanwhile, the HUPD and its advisory board is preparing to update a previous activity report that drew fire when it revealed a disproportionate arrest rate of Blacks, The Harvard Crimson reported in 2021.

More than a decade removed from Gates’ arrest, the looming question is whether the latest round of reports and committees are performative or a prelude to long-awaited progress.

Knee-jerk reactions to specific incidents have previously lacked the needed staying power. The time for change in public safety protocols is long overdue, said Stephanie Guirand, a researcher for Cambridge-based The Black Response.

“People really want there to be a solution, rather than academic discourse,” she said.

Texas Startup Builds Software To Track Workplace Diversity

BOSTON — A Texas startup has developed software designed to enable greater inclusiveness in the employee recruiting and hiring process.

Austin-based Cambio LLC, a job-matching platform maker, plans to solve the diversity problem with technology. The nascent company is marketing software to enable users to shorten the hiring process and eliminate the “deep systemic rot” of discrimination.

“Diversity and inclusion have been talked to death for 20-plus years,” CEO Neil Patwardhan said. “Humans are biased in general and for a long time bias in hiring has gone virtually unchecked since there isn’t a clear way to measure it. Until now.”

Cambio built a diversity-sourcing engine combined with deep bias analytics for recruiting teams. Patwardhan considers the software to be a hybrid tool that operates between job boards and HR application technology systems.

Notably, the company’s origin was sparked by the 2019 acquisition of Dun & Bradstreet Corp. by a group of private equity firms. Dun & Bradstreet subsequently downsized its Austin operations, and that left marketing exec Patwardhan and veteran technologist Bob Richards — both D&B employees — considering their options.

They created Cambio but repeatedly heard in HR focus groups that diversity remained a persistent problem for recruiters. So Patwardhan and Richards refined and pivoted their business model by focusing on a viable solution to combat discrimination in recruiting.

Cambio, which now employs six workers, has raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round of financing from an undisclosed group of angel investors, Patwardhan said.

The tiny startup is going after a sizable market.

Globally, the recruiting software space is projected to generate revenue of more than $3 billion by 2025, according to Fortune Business Insights Pvt. Ltd.

Meanwhile, the broader human resource management industry is projected to generate in the United States revenue of more than $10.8 billion in 2020. Globally, it reached nearly $15 billion in 2018, San Francisco-based Grand View Research Inc. found.

The HR tech space is dominated by well-established players such as Accenture PLC, Automatic Data Processing Inc., Cezanne HR Ltd., IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp., Grand View reports.

It’s not unusual for a full-service legacy tech company to acquire pure-play startups focused on specialized and niche-based tools.

Early users of Cambio’s software have largely operated in three specific spaces: hospitality, events, and service businesses in the retail and food industries, Patwardhan said.

In September 2019, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) dropped the word “diversity” from its long-running conference to reflect the importance of more inclusive workplaces.

“For years, our profession and society have focused on differences. But we’ve all seen the news, and we know: The world is as divided as it’s ever been,” President and CEO Johnny C. Taylor Jr. said at the time. “We need a new way, and it starts with inclusion. By finding what unites us, rather than divides us, we can make workplaces where employees — of every kind — can come together and thrive.”

Year after Cambridgeport clash on race, class, no signs Harvard took steps to address issues

A Harvard University official sparked an outcry last summer when she made condescending comments to a Cambridgeport neighbor, a young mother tending to her mixed-race toddler.

The city of Cambridge responded by spending nearly $14,000 on a series of five remedial workshops – but Harvard did not participate, and it remains unclear that the institution has done anything to prevent another collision over race and class.

On July 14, 2018, Theresa Lund, executive director of Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, took issue with the noise created by a child playing outside her apartment in Cambridgeport while her own children were napping. Lund was captured on video confronting the child’s young mother, Alyson Laliberte, and asking if Laliberte lived in one of the complex’s affordable units. At a time numerous white people had been captured on video nationwide being insensitive to issues of race and class, the incident created a social media firestorm and provided a rare glimpse into the university’s commitment to inclusiveness.

Lund was placed on leave, and the initiative’s director, Michael VanRooyen, pledged to address such bias with additional staff training. One year later, a Harvard spokeswoman said VanRooyen wasn’t available to provide details about what, if any, training was provided to staff members. VanRooyen is also chairman of emergency medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, according to his online profile.

Immediately after the incident, Lund wrote that she loved her community and was “committed to engaging in dialogue and actions about how to make it more welcoming and pleasant for all of us to live in together.” She’s now not listed on the Humanitarian Initiative’s website director. VanRooyen had tweeted in defense of Lund that the incident did “not represent who she is,” then deleted the tweet, Harvard Crimson staffer Caroline S. Engelmayer wrote.

Planning to dig

In October, Mayor Marc McGovern and city councillor Sumbul Siddiqui announced plans for “Cambridge Digs DEEP” forums with a plan to address “equity, power, privilege, diversity, inclusion and race.” In a news release, McGovern said the events represented a commitment to social justice: “We know that despite our reputation as a progressive city, Cambridge is not immune to issues of race and class.”

But McGovern also told The Harvard Crimson that the inclusion of university officials in such events was important so they could educate their employees who are in different financial situations than their neighbors. 

Even at the time, Engelmayer wrote in the Crimson, Harvard didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

Lawsuit: Dell worker claims being fired after revealing cancer diagnosis

A former Dell Technologies Inc. employee says the company recently cited for its ethical practices allegedly fired him days after he told a manager he needed a liver transplant.

In September, Pennsylvania resident Michael Zappacosta filed a federal lawsuit against both Dell Technologies and its Dell EMC division claiming unlawful discrimination and retaliation in violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to the filing with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Zappacosta, a former customer service engineer for Dell client SunGard Data Systems Inc. in Philadelphia, alleges that he was dismissed from his position on Nov. 1, 2016, five days after he briefed a manager about a cancerous tumor found on his liver. The suit alleges that Zappacosta told his manager the condition required a transplant. He was 51 years old and a 10-year employee of Dell and the company it acquired in September 2016, EMC Corp.

The manager later told Zappacosta his position was being eliminated because of redundancy. No other positions were eliminated at that time, the lawsuit alleges.

In January, Texas-based Dell and Zappacosta agreed to suspend the lawsuit during settlement negotiations, another court filing indicates. Neither Zappacosta nor his attorney, Brian Farrell, could be reached for comment.

Last month, Dell announced being recognized by the Arizona-based Ethisphere Institute as one of the world’s most ethical companies for the fifth consecutive year. The company was one of only three technology businesses cited by the institute “underscoring the company’s commitment to leading with integrity and prioritizing ethical business practices,” according to a Feb. 12 Dell news release.

“Global corporations operating with a common rule of law are now society’s strongest force to improve the human condition,” the release stated.

CEO Michael Dell said “Ethics and integrity matter at Dell. We work hard to earn our customers’ trust, improve our communities, and inspire our team members through sound, ethical decision making. Because at Dell, how we do our work is just as important as the results we achieve.”

In 1997, federal officials fined Dell Inc. $50,000 for selling personal computers in Iran, a violation of U.S. trade sanctions. In 2016, it violated the sanctions again by selling to Iran through its embassies in Germany and France, The Register reported.

In 2010, Dell and its executives agreed to pay the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission more than $100 million in penalties to settle accounting fraud charges related to supplier rebates used to inflate company revenue figures. Michael Dell and former CEO Kevin Rollins were fined $4 million apiece. They neither admitted nor denied the charges.

In mid-2009, Dell settled a $9.1 million federal gender-discrimination lawsuit filed by former company human resources manager Jill Hubley. The class-action case alleged that Dell “systematically denied equal employment opportunities to its female employees.”

 

Dell, which was founded in 1984, has attempted to transition from a company best known for personal computers to one offering a full line of tech products and services. The shift was sparked by the slim profit margins generated by commoditized computers versus the larger profits provided by software and storage. Dell is now structured with two segments: client solutions (computers) and enterprise solutions group (networking infrastructure such as software, servers and storage).

The company operates manufacturing plants in the United States, Malaysia, China, Brazil, India, Poland and Ireland. It employed about 138,000 workers at the end of its last fiscal year, SEC filings show.

Dell has posted declining revenue every year since 2011 (fiscal 2012). That trend changed during fiscal 2017 largely due to the late 2016 acquisition of Massachusetts-based EMC. The EMC deal boosted Dell’s revenue but hasn’t helped its bottom line. The company posted a $3.7 billion net loss ($2.1 billion of which attributed to EMC) on revenue of $61.6 billion during fiscal 2017, according to an SEC filing.

Dell also reported a loss of $1.1 billion on revenue of $50.9 billion during fiscal 2016 following a loss of $1.1 billion on revenue of $54.1 billion in fiscal 2015. (Although Dell is privately held, it reports quarterly financials because of the tracking stock it sold when buying EMC and VMware. It also hosts quarterly conference calls with Wall Street analysts.)

In November 2017, Michael Dell told an audience of Boston executives his company has invested $12.7 billion on research and development during the last three years. But that figure conflicts with Dell’s SEC filing indicating the company spent far less, just $4.6 billion: $2.6 billion in fiscal 2017, $1 billion in fiscal 2016 and $920 million in 2015.

Dell spokeswoman Lauren Lee subsequently said the $12.7 billion actually included the R&D spending of seven companies Dell Technologies acquired when it bought EMC. Effectively, the investments largely predated Dell’s ownership.