Behind Her Badge
Jamila Gales remembers when she was ten years old, Officer Kenneth Gaines - dressed in blue, a gold badge, and a gun holstered at his hip, led the D.A.R.E. program curriculum in her fifth grade classroom. He would become a constant in her life through the police activities league, an array of police programs that work to build relationships between the police and inner city kids in Boston. Officer Gaines continued to watch Gales grow up and attend her basketball games long after she aged out of the program.
Now, almost 30 years later, Officer Gales works alongside Gaines, her lifelong mentor, at the Boston Police Department as a Community Service Officer.
As a Black woman, the mother of two Black sons, and a police officer, Jamila Gales is at the intersection of tension between police and people of color in Boston. Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, she was raised in a family of five brothers. She always said she wanted to be a pediatrician, as most of her family was already working in the medical or educational field. “A pediatrician, or a cop,” Gales added abruptly. “The only cop in the family is my uncle back in Jamaica. He is definitely one of the reasons I wanted to be in law enforcement.”
A triple major at UMass Boston in Biology, Criminal Justice, and Sociology, Gales would both appease her parents wishes as well as her own outlying interests in criminal justice. After graduating in 2003, four and a half years later, while playing college basketball - remaining on the top ten list of the 1,000 point club to this day, Gales had to make a decision. Between chances to play basketball professionally overseas, an opportunity to study biomedical forensics at the Boston University Masters program and applying for the police academy, she was torn. “Sometimes I still wonder if I made the right decision,” she laughed.
Gales chose to attend Boston University and study biomedical forensics while working at the Framingham Heart Study, a longstanding research institute, that would pay for her schooling. During her studies Gales applied to the police academy twice, a two-year-long application process of intensive testing and investigation into her past, medical records, and possible biases. In the last semester of her master’s program, she was accepted into the police academy and joined without a second thought, leaving school. She would, years later, go back to earn an advanced degree certification in forensics at UMass Lowell.
“My mother cried when I graduated from the police academy and she’s not one to cry at all. She is the one in the family that doesn’t really show emotions, she didn’t even cry at my undergrad but at my academy graduation she was balling, ” Gales said remembering her mother’s tears of joy the day she was sworn in. “I didn’t even tell her I applied.”
For several years, Gales worked on the night shift patrol from 11pm to 7am in her own community, District C-11 Dorchester. “I think it’s really important that officers are patrolling and showing up for the communities and neighborhoods they grew up in. But, I got sick of always seeing kids that look like me at booking."
‘I can’t do this anymore,’ Gales said as she walked into her supervisor's office, placed her belt and badge on the desk after a police killing of a young black man in Boston.
“I was so exhausted, I couldn’t remember what I was doing this for. It felt pointless, I was asking myself ‘why am I here’. It was where my dual identity as both an officer and a black person collided.”
Following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Black Lives Matter protests took place in full stride across the nation. Gales, along with every other Black officer in the country, was stuck in an identity tug of war, ‘a them versus us’ mentality taking place on both sides.“ I felt like there was less trust from the department. I was losing a lot of friends who couldn't get past my profession,” Gales said.
“I know exactly what that fear feels like. I have five black brothers and, you know, they’re over six feet tall. I worry about them everyday and now having two Black boys of my own, I worry for them.” She remembers being on the front lines during a BLM protest seeing a white girl hold up a sign that read ‘All cops are bastards’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’.
“I’m just standing there thinking to myself how is this girl, who lives in the suburbs, going to call me a bastard and then say my life matters. After I’ve been crying all night for my brother and sons, I had to come to work and see that.” Gales shook her head, exasperated. “It’s my job, it doesn’t matter what my beliefs are, even if we are protecting KKK members, it's the job. The needs of the city are more important than yours.”
“I decided my purpose was to use my position to be the positive interaction these kids have with the police. ”
Moving from patrolling to community policing that same year, Gales began working, across all districts. She worked in the same police league programs she was involved in during her youth alongside Officer Gaines, her lifelong mentor and now, friend.
Through connecting with girls across the Boston Public School system, she realized that these programs should be working with students far earlier. “The programs needed to intervene in the last few years of middle school rather than in high school, it’s more important in their earlier years,” Gales said. Gales began forming a thorough plan for her own program, G.R.O.W., or Girls Reflecting Our World, that would work to mentor girls from 13 to 18 years old.
In 2018, almost a year following the establishment of the Bureau of Community Engagement led by Police Superintendent Nora Baston, Gales began operating GROW as a community-based mentorship program for 25 young Black and brown women attending middle and high school in the Roxbury, Dorchestor, and Jamaica Plains area. The Boston Police Department headquarters- a tall, gray and intimidating building, would soon transform into a place of positive familiarity for young Black and brown students.
“For the longest time community policing meant playing sports with kids. But what's different about GROW is that there are so many ways we work to build those relationships,” Gales explained.
“It’s not about a one-off experience but a lifelong connection with these kids. It’s about building a village of support.”
Some other police officers look down at the programs in the Community Engagement Bureau, which they see as officers just playing games, dancing, and playing basketball with kids.
“I’m working with kids and their families every day, I get calls at midnight,” Gales said, holding up one of her two phones. “It’s not just dancing with kids, it’s the hard parts that build that community and trust with parents and students across Boston. I’m an officer and a social worker and a therapist.”
GROW focuses on mentoring Black girls to excel through education, focusing on those who are not in the police system who face economic difficulties at home, from courses on financial literacy, self-defense, yoga, public speaking, community engagement, and self-empowerment.
It was through GROW that Gales found her purpose in law enforcement again. “I love my job, I love the girls like they are my own,” Gales said, grinning.
And they love her.
GROW runs all year-round, from Tuesday to Thursday routinely from 4 pm to 7 pm, and now alternates between meetings in-person and over Zoom. Most of the girls come straight from school to headquarters or other off-site locations where the lessons take place. Gales coordinates transportation for them as well.
“We take security measures to make sure the girls might not be targeted for working with the police, it’s something we have to worry about,” Gales said. The girls travel in an unmarked white van to and from different GROW locations and excursions. While Gales doesn’t like to carry a firearm when with the girls, there is always an armed officer for the girls’ protection. Gales continued, “I make sure that their GROW shirts,” which they wear on special occasions, “have the Police Activities League badge very small.”
Gales worries for herself too. “Being a parent on this job is a whole other thing. I have something to come home to now. Whenever I get into a situation, my boys are in the back of my mind.” After long days at work, Gales goes back home to her two sons. “Their father and my mom are absolutely amazing, they both take care of them until I get home. Sometimes, I get off as late as nine o’ clock at night.”
While raising her two boys, Gales dedication to her work never slowed, “I would say that I’ve dealt with more sexism than racism in the department,” Gales said. She gave birth to her son late last summer, while still running GROW. “I’m more than qualified for certain positions I’ve been rejected from. There’s a lot of nepotism across the department.” Gales said she has experienced, on multiple occasions, losing a higher position to male officers with far less experience and understanding of the community.
It is the female officers she met along the way that kept her success with GROW alive. From Superintendent Nora Baston to Officer Kerline Desir, who runs her own program in the Community Engagement Bureau.
Somehow while building a village of support for her GROW girls, Gales managed to find one of her own. Amongst the inner struggle of such a complex dual identity, Gales says she has found a balance in her purpose to be“the position to be the positive interaction’ between the police and her community through building and fostering GROW.
