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The Somerville Human Rights Commission is committed to protecting the “constitutional, civil, and human rights of all people in Somerville.” We envision a city where people of all backgrounds and identities find safety and community, and where residents commit to caring for their neighbors, and treating one another with respect and dignity.
In this new chapter of the HRC, we have an opportunity to strengthen how we put these commitments into practice, with a focus on transparency, accountability, meaningful community engagement, and respect for the dignity and rights of every resident.
We are also committed to collaborating with the residents of the city in upholding human rights. This includes being responsive to resident concerns and being transparent with information and insights we have gathered about the state of human rights in the city.
In June, 2026, after many months of advocacy, the HRC received data from human rights complaints filed in 2024 and 2025. This data gave us a window into the challenges we must address in the coming months.
Reviewing this data has also prompted us to think about the role of the HRC with respect to resident complaints. In the past, complaints have generally been addressed privately at the individual case level by the Department of Racial and Social Justice, without involvement of the HRC. The HRC now seeks to create more transparency around complaints and aims to work with complaints at two levels: we will both investigate individual complaints and also synthesize complaints data to identify patterns and opportunities for intervention. While privacy may prevent us from sharing every detail of individual complaints, we are committed to explaining how we approach complaints and what we have learned from the information available to us. We aspire to take a transformative justice approach to complaints handling that seeks collective accountability, addresses underlying reasons for harm to prevent future harms, and we aim to avoid punitive measures that may perpetuate further harm and cycles of violence.
The data we have received so far shows that out of 83 complaints, nearly half (40) were filed in relation to Jews, Muslims, Israel, or Palestine. Of those, exactly half were reported as either antisemitic, anti-Israel, or anti-Israeli. The other half were Islamophobic, anti-Arab, or anti-Palestine or anti-Palestinian.
These complaints include graffiti, vandalism, verbal assault, and social media posts among others. While not everyone will agree that each of these complaints constitute hate, they were sufficiently hurtful to someone in the community to warrant a public complaint.
The HRC acknowledges that issues related to Israel and Palestine include both personal and political dimensions, and intersect with public policies at the local, national, and international levels.
We stand against instances where political opinion or advocacy has extended into physical harm or verbal assault in Somerville. We urge that all discussions and debates proceed from the knowledge that we are all neighbors, we are all striving for what is right based on our own experiences, knowledge, and perspectives, and we all have something to learn.
In response to what we have seen in the complaints data, we at the Human Rights Commission are partnering with the City to create a program for both city staff and residents that address these and other forms of violence and dehumanization. We know that this is just a start.
As part of our commitment to transparency we are sharing a new complaints investigation process which is available on our website. We welcome input on how we can continue to improve this process in the interest of serving all residents.
We also want to manage expectations for what the HRC will be able to accomplish as we take on future complaints investigations. We are all volunteers, and the city has not given us a budget to work with. We will do our best to serve the community effectively despite these resource constraints.
Let us strive to uphold each other’s dignity and let that guide how we express our core values to each other and to the wider world.
We welcome your feedback: please reach out to us at hrc@somervillema.gov and follow us on IG @friendsofsomervillehrc
Complaint Investigation Process
https://tinyurl.com/ComplaintInvestigation
Complaint Form
https://tinyurl.com/HRCComplaintForm
-Somerville Human Rights Commission
