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September 9, 2004

Candidates tout endorsements in race for Suffolk sheriff seat

Yawu Miller

Andrea Cabral’s campaign for sheriff has received endorsements from every elected official of color in the city. Sen. Edward Kennedy and Massachusetts Democratic Party Chairman Phil Johnston are behind her effort.

But no supporter is worth more than one who will go to work for a candidate.

Lisa Doe, who spent four months in South Bay last year on a probation violation, was at Cabral’s Roxbury office last week, folding campaign literature for the sheriff. For Doe, the decision to help Cabral was not a hard one.

“She’s the only sheriff I saw walking around the unit,” Doe said of Cabral. “She walks around and introduces herself.”

Doe said she first saw Cabral while she was eating in the mess hall. The corrections officers, who then allowed the prisoners five minutes to eat their meals, were calling on the inmates to finish when Cabral came in.

“She said ‘no, they should be allowed to eat until they’re finished,’” Doe recalls. “‘No one should be forced to eat their food in five minutes.’”

Cabral’s campaign, which has kicked into high gear with the September 14 primary less than a week away, has attracted scores of volunteers in the black community.

Political observers interviewed by the Banner say the infusion of community support is sorely needed by the campaign, which has suffered from an onslaught of bad publicity in the daily papers.

News articles have blasted Cabral for allegations she prevented military reserve officers from accruing sick and vacation time while overseas, fired an officer who questioned the department’s preparedness for the Democratic Convention and missed payments to the city’s pension fund.

Cabral inherited problems, including a $5 million settlement for illegal strip searches, from the administration of former Sheriff Richard Rouse. During Rouse’s administration, guards were found to have beaten and had sex with inmates.

While Cabral says she has cleaned up many of the problems that festered under Rouse, her campaign has apparently had difficulty getting that message out in the media. Challenger Stephen Murphy’s web site is plastered with articles critical of Cabral and her administration.

The Rev. Eugene Rivers, a Four Corners activist, garnered a story in Monday’s Boston Herald for his endorsement of Murphy, yet endorsements from every elected official of color, announced the preceding Friday, received no mention in the news.

Mukiya Baker Gomez, who came on Cabral’s campaign in August to run field operations in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, said the endorsement was the first time ever all elected officials of color backed the same candidate.

“It’s extremely significant,” she said. “Clearly the issue of the number of people who are incarcerated is critical to all of them. Ninety percent of the inmates who are in the jails are people of color. How these people are treated and how they come out of the institutions is important to elected people of color.”

Like Doe, ex-convicts volunteering on the Cabral campaign gave Cabral favorable marks for improving the conditions in the jails.

“In 2000, there weren’t really any programs,” said a volunteer who identified himself as Arthur, but would not give his last name.

“Before her, it was like hell,” he said. “It was constant lock-down and disrespect. The guards were allowed to beat people up, disrespect inmates, violate all the civil rights of inmates. They even disrespected the visitors.”

Arthur, who was released a month ago, said Cabral brought in so-called re-entry programming, aimed at helping ex-inmates find jobs and housing, as well as substance abuse counseling.

Cabral has also kept the guards at bay, according to Arthur.

“I’ve seen the difference with the officers,” he said. “When she’s in there, they’re on point. They know they have to answer to her.”

In addition to the support from the former inmates, Baker Gomez says Cabral’s campaign will receive support from the elected officials’ political organizations.

“All of them have pledged to help out on election day,” she said. “That allows us to have a much more significant presence in the communities of color.”

In addition to Rivers, Murphy has received endorsements from luminaries in the black community including perennial candidate Roy Owens, former city of Boston personnel director Roscoe Morris, BRA board members Clarence “Jeep” Jones, former Area B. commander Billy Celester and political activist Boyce Slayman.

Slayman, who worked for nine months last year as Cabral’s campaign manager, said Cabral was disconnected from the black community.

“The primary reason I’m supporting Stephen Murphy is that he’s the kind of person the community can work with,” he commented.

Murphy campaign manager Steve Cence said the endorsements demonstrate broad support for the candidate in the black community.

“I think Rev. Rivers’ endorsement speaks volumes to the amount of support we have in the community,” he told the Banner. “We’re ceding no ground and leaving no ward untouched.”

Cence said Murphy’s experience running at-large races will benefit him come election day.

Cabral supporters say that given the city’s history of racially-divided voting patterns, it is likely that a large turnout in the black community will benefit Cabral. But blacks have rarely turned out in large numbers for primaries in Boston.

In 2000 — an election year with no state-wide candidates on the ballot, just 10 percent of the voters in Boston turned out for the election. Irish-American candidates usually do better in low-turnout primaries as their bases in South Boston, West Roxbury and Neponset tend to turn out in greater numbers during primaries.

Cabral will need an unprecedented turnout in Suffolk County’s communities of color, according to George Pillsbury, policy director for MassVote.

“The voter base in Boston is changing, but the question is, who will turn out,” he said. “This is a major test for the Boston area, to see whether voters of color will turn out for the primary.”

Going in Cabral’s favor is the Voter Participation Civic Engagement Initiative, an effort aimed at increasing turnout in low-voting areas. The effort, coordinated by the Commonwealth Coalition, is poised to engage a get-out-the-vote mobilization for Tuesday’s primary.

Participating organizations include ACORN, Viet Aid, Project RIGHT, the Allston/Brighton CDC, the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, the Jamaica Plain-based Coalition to Educate, Mobilize and Vote, the Chinese Progressive Association and the Chelsea Latino Coalition.

Whether or not the initiatives efforts are successful, Baker Gomez is pulling out all the stops in her field coordination effort. Baker Gomez, who has gone undefeated as a campaign manager in Roxbury, knows it’s not just her reputation on the line, but Cabral’s candidacy.

“This is her base,” she says. “If she can’t turn out her base, she’s going to lose. It’s as simple as that.”

 

 

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