Final proposals

The recommendations of the Committee on Policing Reforms center around a Police Commissioner Advisory Committee (PCAC). Greene said the PCAC will give the Select Board a much greater ability to exercise its Police Commissioner duties, as well as offer an external system for submitting and reviewing complaints and disciplining officers – essentially a civilian oversight board. A representative from the Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Community Relations (ODICR) would sit on this committee and help with receiving complaints, which until now has been difficult for the five person Select Board to do.
“That {liaison} would both provide assistance to complainants, but also be the one person that would receive outside comments from the public,” Greene said. “The PCAC is designed for Brookline and our situation. And it provides way more than we really probably need, but it’s still a way of connecting the Select Board to its oversight of the police department that we need.”
According to Brian Corr, the executive director of the city of Cambridge’s Police Review and Advisory Board and the former president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE), tailoring civilian oversight to a community’s needs is the most important thing to get it to work.
“The bigger picture is about making policing and law enforcement and public safety appropriate to the community, and providing that public safety in a way that really takes care of the whole community,” Corr said. “And civilian oversight is part of that.”
According to Reform Committee member Raj Dhanda, who voted against adopting the committee’s final recommendations, they stop short of meaningful, lasting change.
“It does not address the question of really ground-up conversations with people who have been at the short end of how the police treat people of color,” Dhanda said. “That’s what has been missing in this whole thing.”
Greene said that these conversations are hard to facilitate in practice, which is why the Reform Committee is focusing on smaller, more precise changes now and plans to continue its outreach work well into the future.
“The things that we’re proposing are not earth-shaking. They’re just improvements that are going to make policing a lot better for all residents,” Greene said. “{But} the PCAC will, I think, clearly show its value in helping the Select Board be more proactive in its role in policing.”
However, Mande said that a broader approach could be what leads to a meaningful change in policing.
“It’s not just about saying let’s patch something here and there, and do a duct tape job, and call it done,” Mande said. “No it’s about reconstructing. It’s about undoing, unfolding and redesigning. Reimagining the fabrics that we’re going to lay before us in the years, decades ahead. If we don’t do that, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, because we’re gonna get back to the same drawing board time and time again and then ask why we didn’t do things differently.”
Corr also said that civilian oversight has a limit to its impact, and that to truly achieve lastingly equitable policing, towns need to look upstream, working on solving the problems on the front end so that fewer complaints come in.
“One of the things that I think is so important about oversight in the big picture is this idea of front-end accountability,” Corr said. “Let’s work with the community to create the standards and make sure we’re doing the types of training that address the needs of the community, as opposed to waiting for things to go wrong, and then figuring out how we address the problems. Accountability is necessary, but really when you’re holding people accountable, there’s already been harm done.”
That front-end accountability is what the Task Force landed on after hearing from residents and doing extensive research. Fernandez said that addressing the needs of the community in a new way is the crux of the Task Force’s recommendations.
“We’re spending so much money on addressing the symptoms of inequities, rather than investing in programs that address the root causes of those inequities,” Fernandez said. “And that’s what we propose.”
The Task Force recommends a new social service department, Brookline Forward, that would be a new catch-all for any number of issues that people currently call on the police to do. According to Fernandez, it would oversee and coordinate the ODICR, the Council on Aging and more, as well as creating new departments to focus on on youth and family services and immigrant services.
“We’ve clearly identified, for the needs that we have, that we want to shift resources away from the police department,” Fernandez said. “That is strongly endorsed by the community, shifting away from the police engaging in things that aren’t explicitly about fighting crime and investigating crime, and towards other much needed services.”
In their town wide survey, the Task Force found that upwards of 80 percent of people supported moving response to mental health crises and homelessness away from the police department and towards social workers. Brookline Forward would hire such social workers, who would be unarmed and trained in these specific scenarios, to be available on call.
The resounding support for shifting these duties increased the Task Force’s resolve. People want these changes, Fernandez said, and it is the duty of the town government to follow through with them. The Task Force is determined to hear from everyone they can to extend the findings of their survey, before and after the crucial public hearing on Tuesday, March 16.
“I want to speak to as many people as possible, offer myself and make myself available,” Fernandez said. “I think people are engaging with the substance of our recommendations. And I want to keep doing that until the public hearing, but then even two more weeks until ultimately the Select Board vote, to just make sure that I’m available to talk to whoever wants to talk about this.”
Public conversation has been and remains crucial, both to raise awareness and dispel notions that the Task Force is overstepping in ambition. The plans are logical and feasible, Fernandez said, and there are simple steps he is asking for the Select Board to take now to set the direction for the larger work.
“We’re not going to eliminate the Walk & Talk program today, or the School Resource Officer today, but we’re going to commit to shifting resources from those programs to this other approach,” Fernandez said. “And we’re going to show that we’re committed to that by putting in this budget, the one that we’re going to pass in May, the hiring of a commissioner to develop and ultimately oversee this new department.”
Approaching the March 30 vote, the possibility that Brookline could be paving the way has been a source of excitement for Takinami and many others.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been this involved in local government until this point in time, because it’s something that connects a national conversation that’s happening to the local level, and realizing that we can’t let our community off the hook just because there hasn’t been a high profile police murder. We don’t want to get to that point. That’s not fair. And we know it’s happening here. We know there’s racism, we know there’s systemic racism,” Takinami said. “We have a huge opportunity right now to be part of leading the country around reimagining. Brookline could potentially be at the forefront, if we take on some of these reimagining goals.”