I am writing to add context to the articles the Recorder published on May 27 and 28 concerning the recent cuts to the police budget. These articles quote statements made by Greenfield acting Police Chief William Gordon without questioning them or providing any background for the cuts.
I understand that the Recorder doesn’t have a big city paper’s resources to spend on investigative deep dives. However, when the issue is a hotly politicized one (like policing), it’s dangerous to simply print whatever those in power say as though such statements are politically neutral.
Chief Gordon wants to tell a story about a heroic and benevolent police department being cruelly targeted by a City Council that doesn’t care about public safety. But the council’s cut to the Police Department budget did not come out of nowhere; it was driven by the mountains of evidence documenting years of police misconduct that came to light during the Buchanan trial.
In the court documents, we see police officers leaving unsecured firearms lying around, driving drunk, failing to submit drugs and money taken as evidence, stalking and harassing civilians, and killing pedestrians with their cruisers. Evidence presented in court also determined that the GPD practices systemwide racial discrimination, not only citing and arresting Black people at disproportionately high rates, but also intentionally passing over the GPD’s lone Black officer for promotions and disciplining him for infractions that white officers are not disciplined for.
This context is absolutely crucial if the public is to understand why the police budget was cut. Is the city supposed to continually throw more money at a dysfunctional department that actively commits crimes, endangers so many members of our community, and mistreats its own employees?
Additionally, it would be helpful for a journalist to ask some questions about some of the supposedly neutral “information” GPD is spreading in statements and on Facebook. For example, Gordon announced that officers will lose their jobs because of a cut to the fiscal year 2023 budget, saying this means there will be fewer officers responding to the roughly 32,000 calls the GPD receives each year. Leaving aside the fact that the budget cut was determined based on the salaries of Police Chief Robert Haigh Jr. and Police Lt. McCarthy — the two highly paid senior officers at the center of this firestorm of controversy, who could resign if they actually cared about preserving the salaries of their subordinates — we should also be wondering about the nature of those 32,000 calls. What impact will cutting back on patrols really have on our community’s safety?
We at Greenfield People’s Budget spent months analyzing a year of GPD police logs, and found that the overwhelming majority of them concern nonviolent, non-emergency situations (like “skunk on porch,” or somebody sleeping in their car, or someone having a mental health crisis, or burglar alarms tripped accidentally, often by cats).
Gordon wants to make it sound like 32,000 terrifying crimes will now go unaddressed, but the GPD’s own data demonstrates that this is not the case. As we discovered, only around 0.8% of calls in 2019-2020 had to do with assault and battery; this means that officers spend roughly 90% of their call-response time responding to situations that would be better addressed by people with different kinds of training, like civilian mental health care teams, housing advocates, or wildlife management experts.
So the GPD spends almost none of its time responding to violent crime because — as their own data demonstrates — such crimes are exceedingly rare. Do we really need four officers on continuous 24/7 patrols just in case something bad happens? What if the Fire Department continuously patrolled the town looking for fires to put out? Would we consider that a good use of our limited resources?
We encourage residents to start doing their own research. So much data about our police can be accessed with simple searches and public records requests. We have begun compiling information at: https://peoplesbudgetgreenfield.com, if you would like a place to start. Go look at what your Police Department spends its time doing, and ask yourself if we really need to fund those activities so much more aggressively than we do the Fire Department, the DPW, public housing assistance, free clinics, or any number of other programs that would actually make our town a safer and healthier place for all of us.
Marianna Ritchey lives in Greenfield.