Since the mayor has taken the time to respond directly to one of her constituents in a Sept. 9 My Turn in the Recorder, I wanted to take my own opportunity to raise some objections to how she characterizes the current situation.
The mayor is clearly aggrieved by the accusations that many have leveled against her. She claims that “far from ignoring the good faith efforts of citizens,” she has “listened carefully to them.” As one of the citizens who has been making good faith efforts to engage the mayor, I can confidently say that this is not true.
In the summer of 2020, a strong political movement led by young Black residents of Greenfield tried to work with the mayor on several concrete ideas for making our town a safer and healthier place for marginalized people of all kinds. After a huge demonstration attended by around 1,000 people, this group delivered several well-researched, clearly worded, and reasonable “asks” to the mayor and City Council. I attended every meeting at which these issues were discussed, and never once did the mayor respond directly to any of them.
When she did come to meetings, she repeated vague statements about “listening” and about her commitment to racial justice, but she refused to talk about any of the specific things that her constituents were directly asking her for. In fact, each time, she expressed surprise, as though this was the first time she was hearing about any of it. This has been her attitude for the past two years: refuse to engage, then act hurt when people get frustrated with her.
The mayor’s only real interest seems to me to be attracting money to our downtown, in the form of promoting tourism and incentivizing businesses and development. She now has a long documented history of supporting projects without any input from the people such projects would impact (the marijuana farm, for example); wasting enormous amounts of our town’s money (appealing the Buchanan verdict; hiring out her own outside “investigation” of Police Chief Robert Haigh Jr. without any oversight from City Council; and remaining bizarrely committed to protecting a police chief who has been found guilty of racial bias in a court of law. Most mayors would have been appalled by the pages and pages of evidence of police misconduct (including racism as well as other forms of harassment, dereliction of duty, and criminal activity) that were made public in the Buchanan trial, to say nothing of all the other evidence of misconduct various residents’ public records research and personal testimony has brought to light.
Our mayor, by contrast, has never responded meaningfully to any of this, and indeed her only public statement on the verdict was made in support of Chief Haigh.
The pretense she is now trying to build around the public safety task force and police audit — that somehow they are all her idea because she’s so invested in transparency and change — is a total sham. If she actually cared about these issues she would have leapt into action in 2020 when so many of her constituents were telling her directly that they were being harmed and endangered by the Greenfield Police Department, and she would have responded when the Buchanan trial evidence came out. She has agreed to consider this task force/audit only after two years of nonstop pressure from local advocacy groups, and I have no doubt that she is going to try to control the process, in order to ensure an outcome favorable to the police and to herself.
The only way the task force and audit will have any legitimacy is if:
■The mayor agrees to allow City Council, in consultation with members of marginalized communities in our town, to select all the members.
■There are no current or former police officers or administrators, or current or former members of the Public Safety Commission appointed.
■The mayor publicly commits to implementing the recommendations these groups come up with.
Anything that does not fulfill all three of these conditions will not have buy-in from the public or from any of the groups working toward real public safety in our town. I have very little faith that these three conditions will be met under our current mayor.
Marianna Ritchey lives in Greenfield.