I found Mayor RoxannWedegartner’s and Police Chief Robert Haigh Jr.’s responses to the guilty verdict in the recent discrimination suit brought by former Greenfield Police Officer Patrick Buchanan against the Greenfield Police Department not in keeping with the leadership positions they hold in this community. Rather than acknowledging the uncomfortable conclusion reached by the jury that the Greenfield Police Department acted with “racial animus” towards one of its own officers as a red flag requiring their attention, both the police chief and mayor were quick to state their belief that at the end of the day the chief would be exonerated.
Racial bias, both conscious and unconscious, are endemic in our culture. Given our country’s history, how could they not be? Acknowledging that a person’s or an organization’s actions have caused harm to a member or members of a particular racial group does not automatically make them racist, but it does make them accountable for those actions and what they choose (or not choose) to do about them.
Rather than dismissing this guilty verdict, I believe what is required of this moment is for the police chief and the mayor to accept this verdict and hire an outside agency to conduct a thorough internal review of the Police Department’s policies and procedures in relation to personnel matters in general, and how they were applied to Officer Buchanan’s employment in particular. Such an assessment would determine where and how discrimination occurred and, depending on the findings, could include recommendations for policy changes and racial bias training. There is no shame in recognizing that harm has been done, however unintentional it may have been. The only shame is in being unwilling to fully explore the possibility that discrimination has happened, and then taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Susan Olmsted
Greenfield