In removing $425,000 from the Greenfield Police Department’s budget, the City Council challenged the mayor and, the citizens of Greenfield to rethink how public safety is protected. The decision of how to effect the reduction of nearly a half million dollars is up to the mayor. The mayor could fire the people whose salaries the council symbolically eliminated from the budget, or she could use the-last in-first-out requirement of the contract to lay off eight young officers likely, due to their training, men and women aware of and sensitive to the growing diversity of our community and the social pressures of our times.
My preference would be to keep eight young officers employed, but neither keeping them nor firing those found responsible for racism in the department would solve problems inherent in policing. Assuring public safety entails more than police departments. Greenfield’s public safety budget also funds the Fire Department, emergency management, a dispatch center, parking enforcement, building, plumbing, and wiring inspectors, civil defense, and animal control, although it is the racism a jury found at the heart of our Police Department we must first confront.
Policing in the United States has always been designed to keep order. But what is order? Who defines order? Always militant, police departments have become increasingly militarized as recipients of surplus martial weaponry and equipment from the federal government. It is these militarized police forces we ask to impose order, not just to get the bad folks, but to deal with complex social problems that should be managed by other first responders.
How we define public order and public safety is central to how we define ourselves as a community. The mayor needs to create an independent Commission on Public Safety to conduct a public, thorough examination of how Greenfield structures and governs its various public safety departments. Such a commission must be representative of the growing diversity of the community and conduct all its business in public. I suggest an eleven member commission, its make-up determined by the mayor in consultation with the City Council. In examining the role of police in public safety, the commission would need to hear from all parts of our community, including people who study policing and criminal justice, people who feel abused by police, people who support police.
In the movie, Barfly, Faye Dunaway’s character, Wanda says to Mickey Rourke’s Henry, “I hate the police, don’t you?” Henry replies, “I don’t know, but I seem to feel better when they’re not around.” I believe most people feel better when the police aren’t around. No one wants to need a cop. Unless, of course, we’re being mugged, burgled, or otherwise threatened with physical harm and/or by criminal activity. But criminals are the least of what our police deal with. Among the first questions a commission needs to ask are, what is public order? and what areas of public safety our police are charged with overseeing should be managed by other types of emergency responders? Mediators. Licensed social workers. Mental health workers. Paramedics.
We cannot fall into a defund/disband the police mentality. We need carefully constituted police departments with strong civilian oversight. A commission on public safety charged with studying all aspects of public safety could lead to Greenfield establishing an appropriate role for the police in keeping us all safe. I hope the mayor and the City Council will agree.
Wilson Roberts lives in Greenfield.