Indy Rewind: Public Comment: Town Needs Framework to Investigate Civil Rights Complaints

The following was presented as part of a public comment at the Community Safety and Social Justice Committee’s public forum on December 2, 2023. The concerns raised then have yet to be addressed and echo the concerns raised by members of the Community Safety and Social Justice Committee and the Community Safety Working Group, in an op/ed posted elsewhere in this issue concerning the town government’s attacks on racial equity.

I am concerned that this town lacks an address where residents can take complaints about civil rights violations, where they will be thoroughly investigated and acted upon.  The recent debacle at the Middle School, where LGBTQ students were harassed by both other students and staff, and where complaints from parents and children were routinely dismissed out of hand, is just one case in point.  The reports of investigations of that situation document how school administrators purposefully suppressed the investigation of such complaints and went out of their way to protect perpetrators. The school committee and the town council professed powerlessness and did nothing to address these harmful violations of civil rights. Parents had to resort to complaining to the state to get the ongoing harm investigated and had to turn to the state again to gain access to those damning reports. Unfortunately, those violations of civil rights in Amherst are not isolated occurrences. We might consider the case of the July 5 incident of 2022 (also know as the Amherst 9 case) or the struggles of the Black Business Association of the Amherst Area to have their complaints heard concerning the alleged inappropriate allocation of ARPA funds.  And there are plenty of more quotidian injustices that don’t make the headlines but nonetheless require redress as the CSWG hearings and the 7 GEN report informed us.

But the town’s Human Rights Commission is not empowered to pursue complaints and can only refer them to the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).  The DEI office, severely underfunded and under-staffed, to date, has not had the capacity nor shown an appetite for pursuing such complaints with any gusto. And the CSSJC, who often hear about these injustices, is not empowered to investigate them much less act on them. 

This is a town that is sadly, rife with inequality and that inequality often manifests as violation of rights.  The Resident Oversight Board (ROB), when it is created, will provide, we can hope, recourse for complaints about police misconduct that currently go unaddressed. But what of all the others injustices?  Must we turn to the Attorney General or the Secretary of State every time human rights appear to be violated in this town?  We need a town body, with a degree of political independence that is empowered to pursue complaints effectively and thoroughly on behalf of Amherst residents. This body probably is not likely to be CSSJC, but just as the work of the CSWG gave us CRESS and DEI and hopefully a ROB and a BIPOC youth center, the CSSJC can be the persistent political force that demands that the town have an effective address for human rights complaints, and the voice that demands that the rights of all Amherst residents must be protected.

Art Keene is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at UMass Amherst.   He was co-founder and co-director of two social justice-based civic leadership programs at UMass – The UMass Alliance For Community Transformation (UACT) and The Community Scholars Program. He is Managing Editor of the Amherst Indy.