An open letter to the Greenfield City Council:
Dear councilors,
Thank you for all your hard work, particularly during this challenging budget season. You have a tough job, and I’m truly grateful for you all.
I’ve been struggling with some of the comments made during the police budget discussion on May 18-19, and wanted to offer further food for thought. Councilor Terounzo offered a fitting metaphor about the “head and tail of the snake,” and several of you made comments to the effect that we all want to cut off the head, given the recent jury verdict against Chief Haigh and the city, but the proposed budget reductions would just cut off the tail, thus having an unfair and unnecessary impact on innocent junior officers.
Please know that those of us pushing for significant budget cuts understand quite well what we’re asking for. We want to cut off the head and the tail, and more than that besides. If we can only get part of the tail this time, at least it’s a start. This is not because we hold any particular ill will toward individual officers or blithely wish unemployment on anyone; quite the contrary. And it actually has nothing to do with the current discrimination case, though the case is a dramatic example of the racism and problematic power dynamics built into policing itself. We simply want fewer police, and ultimately greater community investment in services and supports that help keep people out of poverty and crisis in the first place.
There is no magic “right” budget number, but as Councilor Bullock pointed out, Greenfield’s police budget is bloated compared to literally every comparable town. No one has offered reasonable justification for why that is. I actually don’t think members of the public should have to run in circles trying to justify spending less on a disproportionately expensive department; I believe that department should have to justify — specifically — why its budget should not be cut. And the answer cannot be saving jobs or that Greenfield would otherwise be vaguely “less safe.”
Workforces get expanded or cut all the time according to need; it’s a fact of the working world. Just as it’s not the council’s job to fire anyone in particular, it’s also not the council’s job to protect anyone in particular, regardless of your feelings toward them. The City Council is not tasked with preventing layoffs; it is tasked with responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.
Where is the proof that Greenfield is safer because people with guns are responding to mental health crises, directing traffic, mediating disputes, etc? We are all conditioned to believe that such matters require police, but what else have we tried? The vast majority of people interacting with — and injured or killed by — police in this country and in our community are people of color, people living in poverty, and/or people experiencing mental health crises. In addition, Councilor Lapienski’s story about destructive and harmful police intervention is not unique; police in Greenfield and elsewhere tear apart the lives and property of innocent people every day. Why is all of that considered simply the cost of doing business? I believe it is not a reasonable price to pay. I do not accept the idea that policeequals safety, or that my (white, middle class) safety requires state violence toward less privileged people. I also do not believe that anyone taking part in policing is entirely innocent of the harm that police cause, regardless of how good their intentions might be.
I know that we all hold different views on this issue, and that some of you think that those of us calling for less policing are simply naive. I do not, in fact, believe or desire that we will “all hold hands and sing kumbaya,” as Councilor Jarvis suggested. Having spent nearly a decade of my professional life working in war zones and with survivors of violence and mass atrocities, my view of human nature is neither naive nor particularly rosy.
I ask you to consider that a belief in the inherent goodness of police might actually be the rose-colored view, and that holding that view depends on a lot of privilege and/or luck, at the expense of a lot of less lucky people.
Thank you for making the decision to cut the police budget, for whatever reasons you each made it. This is an important first step. I sincerely hope there will continue to be community dialogue about this messy, complicated, and extremely important topic, and that we might wrestle with it and learn together.
Respectfully,
Rachel Gordon lives in Greenfield.