From Other Sources (#35): News For And About Amherst. Featured This Week: Alternatives To Policing (#2)

This feature offers links to selected articles that might be of interest to Amherst readers. I favor in these postings, with a few exceptions, material that is not hiding behind a paywall. Hence, I have reduced my postings from sources like the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, which are doing some great reporting but which make their articles inaccessible without some sort of payment. But on occasion, an article seems too important to not mention, and in such cases I will post it, and leave it for the reader to decide whether to pay for access. 

If you have read something that is germane to what I’ve been posting in this feature, please share the link in the comments section below.

This week I share more writings on the epidemic of murder of Black men by the police and on efforts across the nation to abolish, defund, or reform the police in the face of this unrelenting violence. For my first collection of articles on the subject, look here. 

LOCAL
An Introduction To Police Abolition For Amherst Residents by Defund 413 Amherst (4/30/21). Last summer, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbury, and Breonna Taylor by police, Defund 413 Amherst formed with the aim of redistributing funds from the Amherst Police Department to community services. In other words, our goal was to “defund” the police. Defunding the police is the first step toward abolition, because it allows us to invest in our communities rather than in punishment. The more our people are supported and the more they thrive, the less desire there is for policing.We know that there’s a lot of confusion and misinformation about abolition and the movement to defund the police. So we wanted to share an introduction to these topics from our perspective as a resource for Amherst residents interested in learning more. (Amherst Indy)

Alternative Police Services Proposed In Amherst by Scott Merzbach (4/24/21).
An unarmed and civilian program whose workers would respond to many calls for service in place of town police officers is being proposed by the Community Safety Working Group. The group is also proposing a robust Civilian Oversight Board to monitor police. At its meeting this week, the working group, created by the Town Council to address racial inequities in policing, finalized the idea of creating a Community Response for Equity, Safety and Service, or CRESS program, at a cost of $2.2 million. The seven-member panel approved the recommendations unanimously. Their proposal is going to Town Manager Paul Bockelman as he prepares the fiscal year 2022 municipal budget that will be delivered to the Town Council for its May 3 meeting. (Daily Hampshire Gazette).

Public Tells Northampton City Council It’s Time To Act On Policing by Brian Zayatz (4/25/21). At the April 15th meeting of the Northampton City Council, members of the public turned out to speak to the Councilors’ mandate for police reform, the proposed new animal control facility, and other topics. Twenty-nine speakers called on the Mayor and City Council to cut the police budget by 50% in the upcoming FY2022 budget draft and fund the creation of a new Department of Community Care, as recommended by the Policing Review Commission.  One speaker identified herself as a former Servicenet worker who witnessed the ways that police used brutality against her mentally ill clients. She spoke about her current work with people with alzheimers and dementia, and how police routinely respond inappropriately with this group, as well (the following day, video was released of a 2020 incident in which police in Colorado hog-tied a woman with dementia who had been picking flowers).  (The Shoestring)

Mayor, Council Air Northampton Police Review Panel’s Report by Greta Jochem (3/31/21). “The biggest [recommendation] is a new Department of Community Care that exists independent of the Police Department, and includes peer responders that are going to be housed within the city,” he said, adding that peer responders would be unarmed. The new department would respond to nonviolent calls through the city’s dispatch system. “This is just giving them another tool and another place where calls can go,” Cannity said. Mayor David Narkewicz and the City Council created the police review panel last summer and asked its members to review the Police Department and make recommendations on changes to policing and public safety. The moves came in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, which prompted many area residents to call for Northampton to cut the Police Department’s budget — something the council did by 10 percent. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

Easthampton: Mayor’s Pledge To Reimagine Policing. Work Group Recommendations. (March 2021). Immediately following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the killing of Breonna Taylor by Louisville police in the spring of 2020, people around the world joined American voices to press for accountability, justice, and an examination of the role and function of police in communities. Locally, in Easthampton, Northampton, Amherst and beyond, groups of residents organized and mobilized to call for more than symbolic actions. In light of a national call to examine local police practices, Easthampton Mayor Nicole LaChapelle (the Mayor) signed the Mayor’s “Reimagining Policing Pledge.” ¹ The pledge calls on Mayors to review use of force policies, engage local communities, report findings to the community and solicit feedback, and finally reform law enforcement practices. This report tackles the first two parts of the pledge, the review and engagement phases.

Here’s What’s In The Massachusetts Police Reform Bill by Steve Brown and Ally Jarmanning (4/7/21). Some of the biggest changes in years to law enforcement oversight and rules are coming to Massachusetts. That’s after Gov. Charlie Baker signed into law on Dec. 31 of last year a landmark police reform bill. Police lobbied hard against the bill. They say it gives too much oversight to people without law enforcement experience. Meanwhile, some progressives say the bill doesn’t go far enough to end things like use of facial recognition technologies and qualified immunity protections. But the new law is  the compromise lawmakers came up with. This year, we’ll be tracking whether the bill delivers on key promises. Here’s what those new rules dictate. (WBUR)

SGA Debates Motion To Defund UMass Police by Alex Genovese (4/29/21). At the final meeting of the University of Massachusetts Student Government Association for the semester, the Senate discussed a motion to urge Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy to defund the UMass Police Department. According to the motion, the SGA “implores Chancellor Subbaswamy to release and abide by a plan to defund UMPD” with the funds being reallocated to other organizations such as “CMASS, the Cultural Centers, the Stonewall Center, CWC, UHS, CCPH, Men and Masculinities Center, the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, and the Veteran Student Resource Center.” The motion set the deadline for the chancellor’s plan to be Sept. 1, 2021 and the complete defunding to be by Sept. 1, 2022.(Massachusetts Daily Collegian)

Students Seek To End Police At Amherst College by Scott Merzbach (4/16/21). Amherst College student leaders, who have been making appeals for disarming the campus police and reducing its size and responsibilities, are moving toward a request to abolish the department. The Association of Amherst Students is joining the efforts of the Black Student Union, which led a campus walkout this week in response to the April 11 police shooting of Daunte Wright  at a traffic stop in Minnesota,  in a call for disbanding campus police. While the student government has not formally made that appeal to the college’s board of trustees, members indicated during the walkout that they would endorse the Black Student Union’s demands. “Abolishing the department will allow for funds to be allocated to other vital aspects of student life that will help create a safe and inclusive community for all,” the Union wrote in its list of demands. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

NATIONAL
Police Reform Doesn’t Work by Michael Brenes (4/21/20). In the specific case of Minneapolis, for example, the failure to curtail police brutality—despite numerous waves of well-intentioned liberal reform efforts beginning as early as the 1920s—derives precisely from the limitations of those who sought transformative racial justice, not because of the efforts of reactionaries to undermine those reforms. At many points in the postwar history of Minneapolis, police reform efforts were led by the very progressives who had helped militarize the MPD in the first place. This was in no small part a result of progressive ideological commitments about the origins of racist policing. Believing that racist policing was mainly caused by what we’d now call implicit bias, Minneapolis progressives sought to remake the psychology of white police officers, compelling cops to interrogate their biases—all while encouraging greater presences of police officers in Black communities and while downplaying systemic and overt racism. Minneapolis progressives thus approached police reform with the premise that policing could be made more effective, more precise—and that better, not less, policing was essential to racial justice and improved race relations. (Boston Review)

Hidden In Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy and Far-Right Militantism In Law Enforcement by Michael German (8/27/20). Racial disparities have long pervaded every step of the criminal justice process, from police stops, searches, arrests, shootings, and other uses of force to charging decisions, wrongful convictions, and sentences. As a result, many have concluded that a structural or institutional bias against people of color, shaped by long-standing racial, economic, and social inequities, infects the criminal justice system.  These systemic inequities can also instill implicit biases — unconscious prejudices that favor in-groups and stigmatize out-groups — in individual law enforcement officials, influencing their day-to-day actions while interacting with the public.  Police reforms, often imposed after incidents of racist misconduct or brutality, have focused on addressing these unconscious manifestations of bias. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), for example, has required implicit bias training as part of consent decrees it imposes to root out discriminatory practices in law enforcement agencies. Such training measures are designed to help law enforcement officers recognize these unconscious biases in order to reduce their influence on police behavior. These reforms, while well-intentioned, leave an especially harmful form of bias entrenched within law enforcement: explicit racism. (The Brennan Center)

Law Enforcement And The Problem Of White Supremacy by William Finnegan (2/27/21). The F.B.I.’s counterterrorism division warned, back in 2006, that white-supremacist groups were increasingly infiltrating local law enforcement, and federal agents working undercover against violent racist and far-right groups have long been instructed to keep local law enforcement in the dark because of possible links or sympathies. Some anti-government militias, notably the Oath Keepers, who claim a membership of thirty thousand and are among the groups being investigated for planning the Capitol attack, make a special point of recruiting members from law enforcement and the military, both former and active. The number of hate groups in America spiked after Barack Obama’s election and hate crimes have also gone up, but the appetite for prosecuting them at any level — federal, state, local — has been feeble in recent years. In 2017, the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security identified white-supremacist violence as a persistent lethal threat to Americans — in fact, the single most lethal domestic terrorism threat — and yet there is no national strategy to combat it. (The New Yorker) 

The Tactics Police Are Using To Prevent Bystander Video by Abby Ohlheiser (4/30/21). Filming the police has become a popular tool of accountability that is simultaneously essential and dangerous. Because of a video filmed by a bystander, we know that Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, a Black man in his forties, by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Without the video that 17-year-old Darnella Frazier took, it’s very possible Chauvin would not have been convicted: When police first described Floyd’s death in a press statement, they claimed that it had occurred “after [a] medical incident during police interaction.”  But as Kelley-Chung found, police officers aren’t simply letting filming of the police happen. Even though it is generally legal if it doesn’t interfere with police officers’  activities, and even though officers are increasingly carrying cameras themselves, a range of tactics are being used to prevent police actions from being documented.  (MIT Technology Review)

Police And The License To Kill. Why Efforts At Reform Are Bound To Fail by Matthew D. Lassiter (4/29/21). Detroit police killed hundreds of unarmed Blacks in response to the Civil Rights movement. Their ability to get away with it reveals why most of today’s proposals to make police more accountable are bound to fail. We can do better. (Boston Review)

Mapping Police Violence Database: A comprehensive database on police violence in the U.S. (updated 4/21/20). U.S. police have killed 331 people in 2021. Black people represent 28 percent of all those killed by police in the U.S. in 2020 despite being only 13 percent of the population.

Meaningful Police Reform Requires Accountability and Cultural Sensitivity by Howard Henderson (7/8/20). Policy makers have responded to the national call for justice with an array of proposals to reverse the legislative, judicial, and executive level of support for state-sanctioned assault and murder of Black people. Many of the proposed solutions involve changing the rules governing police behavior and increasing the punishment for officers who needlessly harm and kill. While those ideas are worthy of consideration, nothing will truly change until we recruit college-educated officers who don’t possess authoritarian personalities and who are free from implicit bias. The most recent findings indicate that just 30 percent of police officers have a four-year degree.  Despite admitting that they had no way of measuring success, 69 percent of police departments reported that they have implicit bias training. We also need to ensure that police training is culturally relevant and responsive to the true needs of the community. Ultimately, transparency and accountability must serve as guides along the path to police reform. There are simply too many officers on the street who are not prepared to be there. In fact, American police officer training is only a fraction of the time allotted in other civilized societies. Research also demonstrated that just under one-third of American officers have four-year college degrees. Degreed officers have been shown to have a 40 percent reduction in uses of force while also possessing greater levels of creativity and problem solving. Police officers with college degrees have also been found to receive fewer complaints, ultimately improving the overall quality of the police-community experience. (Brookings.edu) 

Here’s What The George Floyd Justice In Policing Act Would Do by Henry J Gomez (4/21/20). The federal bill, which has passed the House but has yet to be taken up in the Senate, aims to end certain police techniques, including chokeholds and carotid holds, two forms of potentially deadly force. Such practices would be banned at the federal level, and federal funding for local and state police agencies would be conditioned on those agencies outlawing them. The bill also seeks to improve police training and invest in community programs designed to improve policing and promote equitable new policies. (NBC News)

With Slow Progress On Federal Level, Police Reform Remains Patchwork Across U.S. by Becky Sullivan (4/27/20). A flurry of legislative and policy proposals at every level of government in the U.S. followed last summer’s protests. Cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle, and Austin committed to rethinking police funding. Lawmakers in all 50 states put forward more than 2,000 bills related to policing in the last year. But successes have been patchwork, mostly concentrated in blue states and cities facing outcry over local incidents of deadly force by police officers. Many other state houses have seen little concerted effort to reform policing. And in Congress, partisan disagreements have so far prevented any bill from passing. Reform in the U.S. has frequently come in bite-size portions as each high-profile death prompts scrutiny of a specific slice of policing. (NPR)