Community Defined Public Safety
Brookline, MA
Population: 50,000 - 100,000 | Government type: City | Topic: Invest Divest
Protesters march down Route 9 in Brookline on June 6, 2020. (Photo: Abby Patkin / Wicked Local)
The Program
In the wake of the nationwide uprising over racist police violence, the Brookline Select Board approved the launch of a Task Force to Reimagine Policing in Brookline. The charge of the Task Force is to use a data-informed approach that was deeply informed by residents’ experiences to analyze its current policing model and provide an alternative approach to public safety. The task force was approved alongside a separate Committee on Policing Reforms. This was critical to allow the reimagining task force to focus on novel solutions, without the distraction of more modest reforms.
The task force is charged with the following:
Understand the city’s current approach to public safety
Seek to understand how the most impacted populations (including, but not limited to, BIPOC, Women, and LGBTQ+ people) experience policing in Brookline
Explore alternative models of public safety in the US and abroad
Conceptualize new models of public safety that have yet to be imagined
Consider which police functions are better suited for other departments
Solicit public feedback and ideas through robust community engagement
Make recommendations for meaningful changes that can be enacted by the Select Board, Town Meeting, School Committee, or other relevant bodies
Make legislative recommendations to the state and congressional representatives
One of the most contentious points of negotiation was the makeup of the taskforce. While those opposed to changes to the police department lobbied to include pro-police advocates on the task force, Board Member Raul Fernandez and his coalition remained deeply committed to ensuring the task force remained focused solely on reforming and reimagining Brookline’s model of public safety and ensuring that diverse voices from the most impacted communities served on the body.
What makes this work bold is that there is no predetermined goal; the outcomes are defined by the process itself. The project’s mandate is to consider new, unexplored possibilities, and to center the victims of the traditional public safety apparatus whose voices are consistently excluded from the community safety discussion.
Collaborative Governance
It took several Select Board meetings to get this task force approved. During the final meeting, the task force design failed on a first vote. However, Raul Fernandez, who proposed the original measure, refused to participate in the watered-down process that was proposed as an alternative. It was the constant drumbeat of the community’s voice—through emails, public comment, and on the streets—that put pressure on the rest of the Select Board to acquiesce to the demand for a robust design. At the end of the meeting, the task force was approved on a second vote in its original form.
The work of Brookline’s task force sets a new standard: that police should only be used when there is no other reasonable alternative. The work ahead of them is to imagine what these reasonable alternatives should look like. This requires community input and oversight, and it requires centering those most impacted by discriminatory policing. Most importantly, it provides opportunities for the city to engage residents in imagining a community in which we all feel safe and welcome.
Emphasis on equity
The task force centers the experience of BIPOC communities in its research, analysis, and policy recommendations. Each decision is considered through an antiracist lens, and no policies are proposed unless they are expected to result in better outcomes for communities of color. To further this goal, Brookline is partnering with Tufts University on a community-wide survey in which people of color will be oversampled, and the city is designing focus groups and forums to amplify Black voices.
This work of the task force is based on a simple premise: that a community should get to decide its own approach to public safety, not the police. More importantly, community input should be widely representative, not solely based on those residents that are regularly engaged and frequently participate. For the first time, the Select Board required that at least half of the members on the Task Force be from communities disproportionately impacted by policing (including BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ people). The task force not just met, but exceeded that goal. Of the 11 voting members, six are people of color including three Black, one Latinx, and two Asian members, as well as five women, and one transgender member. These members, with the support of Brookline Town staff, will decide the path forward, and will keep the task force’s recommendations grounded in community needs. The non-voting committee membership includes additional community consultants and staff, as well as outside consultants and staff as needed.
Analysis
Preemption: The city is exploring if and where there is a need for state authorizing language.
Local government dynamics: The Select Board is divided with one outspoken progressive.
Policy impact: This is still to be determined as the process continues. It will largely depend on the outcome of the reimagining process and its subsequent implementation.
OTHER POLICY EXAMPLES
Seattle’s 2021 budget cut approximately 20 percent from the city’s police department budget, some of which will get redistributed to community groups, including an unprecedented $30 million fund for participatory budgeting on community-based public safety initiatives. While the mayor and city council are likely to retain some oversight of the community spending, the process gives residents an increased opportunity to define public safety priorities and alternative investments they would like to fund. The budget also moved civilian positions, including 911 call takers and parking officers out of the department.
In October 2020, Rochester, NY announced that they hired social workers and an advisory committee would develop a pilot plan for a Crisis Response Team by December 2020. $1 million dollars was transferred from the police department budget along with some general fund money; this funding is split between crisis response and a homicide response team. The team will consist of social workers and EMS, all city employees that will be housed within the new Office of Crisis Intervention in the city's Department of Recreation and Human Services. The committee is still assessing how best to route calls regarding mental health distress and domestic violence emergencies.
Last updated: January 19, 2021
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