Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cambridge Police Department (Massachusetts)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep, withdrawn by nominator. (non-admin closure) Safehaven86 (talk) 23:32, 19 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cambridge Police Department (Massachusetts)[edit]

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Fails WP:ORG. John from Idegon (talk) 00:02, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Law-related deletion discussions. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 01:11, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Organizations-related deletion discussions. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 01:11, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Massachusetts-related deletion discussions. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 01:11, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Delete, fails WP:ORG as noted. Shelbystripes (talk) 03:34, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to Cambridge, Massachusetts#Police department instead of deleting. Per Brea Police Department. -- MorbidEntree - _{(Talk to me! (っ◕‿◕)っ♥)}(please reply using {{ping}}) 03:37, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Redirects are WP:CHEAP. Do so here, per MorbidEntree. Fieari (talk) 05:00, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - Redirect would be a satisfactory outcome. John from Idegon (talk) 05:37, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Keep It is a paltry article, however, Cambridge is a significant place not at all comparable to Brea California. It is emphatically not a "suburb". It is an old industrial city (a factory in Cambridge brought you Fig Newtons, another brought you Polaroid) now a city of over 100,000 adjacent to but not a suburb of adjacent Boston, rather, it is a hotbed of tech start-ups with a number of major corporate headquarters located there, not to mention the campuses of 2 of the world's leading universities - MIT and Harvard cause security problems unknown to most far larger Amercan cities. Like regularly cooperating with other security services to protect assassination/kidnapping targets like scions of the families that run whole countries in Asia and Latin Americs (Benazir Bhutto) they do their studies; cooperating with the feds on security when heads of state drop in. Cambridge police deal routinely with international and national security that lots of much bigger cities never see. Plus, there have been in the national news cycle for arresting Henry Louis Gates arrest controversy and chasing down the Boston Marathon bombing who lived on a quiet side street in Cambridge. This is a significant police dept that needs a better article.E.M.Gregory (talk) 18:23, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What does any of that have to do with notability? Every police department cooperates with other agencies when needed. If they didn't and it was written about that might be one piece toward notability. Crime stories are not sources in detail about the subject, they are passing mentions, quite akin to story about an athletic event. A particular player may be mentioned in said story, but the story is about the game; not detailed coverage of the player and of no use to show the players notability. A place where something might turn up for notability would be the department's long existence. If a book (note I didn't find any) has been written on its history, that would show notability. The size of the city is not a factor, altho some have argued that in other discussions. But Cambridge isn't even that big of a city. The Gates thing seems to be a one event thing and again not coverage in detail, altho I've only cursorly investigated it. It's possible a story came out of it that discussed the department in detail. But without other sources separate from that event, I'm still not seeing notability. John from Idegon (talk) 19:06, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I brought up size because User: MorbidEntree asserted that Cambridge is comparable to Brea, California. It's not. "all of this" matters because the security problems Cambridge police cop with are more comparable to those of major cities, including neighboring Boston, than to those of cities it's size, or of larger cities without the constant comings and goings of major international figures. You are correct, someone needs to bring sources, but, this Dept. underwent intense national scrutiny in the wake of the (very very different) Gates and Marathon bombing incidents.E.M.Gregory (talk) 20:27, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Again, any assertions about the importance of this department are inappropriate to this discussion. There is no notability guideline that equates importance with notability. Coverage of events generally do not provide the coverage in detail required to show notability. Show me three plus sources covering the department in detail, at least one of which is from outside metro Boston (which, despite your unreferenced assertion, Cambridge is a part of. See Metropolitan Boston), and I'll withdraw this. Despite a fair search, I found none. Hopefully your results are better. John from Idegon (talk) 22:49, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Richard Norton Smith, The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation, Harvard University Press, 1969, covers the events of April 1969, when undergraduates took over Harvard administration buildings to protest the Vietnam War, and were removed by the city police
Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Black Panthers and their Legacy, Kathleen Cleaver, George Katsiaficas, Routledge, 2014 covers the Cambridge police response to the 1970 Black Panther march. The Campus and a Nation in Crisis: From the American Revolution to Vietnam; Willis Rudy, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1996, Chapter 5 also covers this incident. It was a Black Panther protest march that got out of hand and turned into a significant civil disturbance, with stores set on fire in Harvard Square which is not part of the campus, but a downtown shopping district. Extensive coverage of the way the Cambridge Police handled it exists.
Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies, Jeremy Peter Veron, University of California Press, 2004, p 153, covers charges brought against the Weather Underground after shots were fired at Cambridge Police building
Although our article on the Henry Louis Gates arrest controversy is so inadequate that it cites the wrong police Department (Boston instead of Cambridge, the incident has generated a mini-industry of academic analysis, much of ti focused on racism and policing: ("Afterword: The Inescapable Socio-Political Weight of Race: A Critical Analysis of President Barack Obama's, Professor Henry Louis Gates's, and Sgt. James Crowley's Racial Controversy." Counterpoints 351 (2010): 203-11. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42980556.)
I suppose most major American cities have police departments that have been the subject of significan media and scholarly attention. Cambridge certainly does.E.M.Gregory (talk) 01:48, 11 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Largish (over 300 employees) police department of a significant city. No good reason here for deletion. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:41, 14 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment - I'm not acquainted with any notability guideline on any subject that equates size with notability. Please educate me. John from Idegon (talk) 19:32, 14 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  - It's that one that's increasingly absent from Wikipedia: common sense! -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:55, 19 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 11:54, 18 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I hadn't realized that the Henry Louis Gates arrest controversy is associated with the Cambridge police department, but I immediately thought of the policeman shot after the Boston Marathon bombing.
I looked at WP:ORG and it doesn't use the word "government", so the argument in the nomination may be bogus because a police department is a part of the city government. As part of a larger organization, and given the requirement that WP:DEL8 deletions are subject to the WP:ATD, there is never a theoretical case for deletion of a city department.
A WP:BEFORE review of the "What Links Here" shows the MIT Crime Club, which might have been a clue that a city police department receives more attention from the public at large than a university crime club that relies in part on the Cambridge Police Department radio transmissions.
The results from WP:BEFORE D1 are numerous. A search on Google books for ["Cambridge Police Department" Massachusetts] yields the top link as

David J. Degou (1 April 2009). Cambridge Police Department. Arcadia Publishing. p. 130. ISBN 978-0-7385-6201-8.

One shouldn't be surprised, knowing the schools in the area, to find academic attention at Google scholar. Google news is rich with sources. The article itself shows that the topic has existed since 1859, and the nomination shows no evidence of checking the archives of the leading Boston newspapers for 150 years. Unscintillating (talk) 22:22, 18 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Withdrawn - Finally, a reliable source on the department as a whole. Thank you. John from Idegon (talk) 22:35, 18 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.