Final Report of the Committee on Policing Reforms
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THE BROOKLINE SELECT BOARD COMMITTEE ON POLICING REFORMS FINAL REPORT Final Report Adopted on March 24th, 2021 TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD - by Bernard Greene, Chair of the Brookline Select Board and Chair of the Policing Reforms Committee 2 INTRODUCTION 5 SUBCOMMITTEE ON ACCOUNTABILITY 22 SUBCOMMITTEE ON CIVIL RIGHTS, MILITARY EQUIPMENT, AND MASS EVENTS 45 SUBCOMMITTEE ON COMMUNITY OUTREACH, YOUTH, NONTRADITIONAL ROLES 87 SUBCOMMITTEE ON MENTAL HEALTH AND SUBSTANCE USE DISORDER 106 SUBCOMMITTEE ON PERSONNEL AND GOVERNANCE 124 ADDITIONAL COMMENTS BY MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE Marty Rosenthal 151 Raj Dhanda 168 APPENDICES - IN SEPARATE VOLUME 171 1 FOREWORD This report of the Select Board’s Committee on Policing Reforms (the “Reforms Committee'') is written for the residents of the Town of Brookline, to describe in some detail what our very good, but not perfect Brookline Police Department (“BPD”) does for the community beyond being Cops on the Beat and to propose important reforms that will result in a more perfect police department and community. This report is only the most recent iteration of the Town of Brookline’s ongoing efforts to improve policing to better serve the community1 and, if adopted, the recommendations in this report will not only result in immediate benefits but will create changes to the structure of policing in Brookline that will have long lasting benefits. MAKEUP OF THE COMMITTEE. The Committee was intentionally organized to include racial and gender diversity, a diversity of life and professional experiences, and a diversity of viewpoints. Such diversity results in the creative tension that increases the potential for success of any undertaking. Members include individuals who have had negative experiences with police and a member of the police department, Democrats and Republicans, individuals who are ardently secular and who are from faith institutions that inform their approach to policing reform, individuals with technical and research skills, including current academic research in policing, and individuals with a range of professional expertise, including a lawyer who has litigated civil rights cases against the police and a retired judge who presided over such cases, lawyers long involved in social justice litigation and client services, and a former Commissioner of the State Department of Mental Health. The Committee started without agreement on key issues of our Charge and does not have unanimous agreement at the end. But the creative tension mentioned above has enabled us to produce a report with important and implementable recommendations to improve policing in Brookline. Committee members are Bernard Greene, June Binney,2 Elizabeth Childs, Raj Dhanda, Casey Hatchett, Jonathan Mande,3 Martin Rosenthal, Robert Sable,4 Dwaign Tyndal, Ronald Wilkinson, Paul Yee, Sassan Zelkha,5 Michael Zoorob. We also must acknowledge the Town staff and expert consultants who contributed so much of their time and energy to the quality of the research and recommendations of the reports of the Subcommittees. The person hired by the Town to lead this effort through to success was former Brookline Police Chief Daniel O’Leary. He contributed both his decades of policing experience 1 Earlier reports include the 1987 “Report of the Selectmen’s Subcommittee on Police and Community Relations” (Jeffrey Allen and Martin Rosenthal), the 1998 Community Relations Study (prepared by the BPD), and the 2009 Citizen Complaint Review Committee. The 1987 report discusses at length the BPD- community relationship, including public input on BPD policies. The 1987 and 1998 reports are included in Appendix A. 2 Stepped down as voting member of Committee but continued to provide expert consulting. 3 Resigned from Committee for family reasons. 4 Replaced June Binney. 5 Replaced Jonathan Mande. 2 and expertise and his ability to know who to go to in the police department to get information for the Committee and the Task Force. Other Town staff who contributed valuable knowledge and insight into the variety of issues addressed by the Committee were Ann Hess Braga, the Town’s Human Resources Director, Michael Downey, Assistant Town Counsel, Devon Fields, the Administrative Services Director, Melvin Kleckner, the Town Administrator, Caitlin Starr, the Assistant Diversity Director and the liaison from the Diversity Office and Felina Silver Robinson, the liaison from the Brookline Commission for Women. The Committee received the full support of the BPD who provided that support without hesitation or complaint to the Committee and the Task Force.They included Lt. Paul Campbell, the Internal Affairs Officer, Sgt. Casey Hatchett,a voting member of the Committee who was also the source of much of the data and other information used by the Committee and the Task Force, Annabel Lane, the department’s Social Worker, Sgt. Chris Malinn, and Lt. Jennifer Paster. Our expert consultants included the nationally recognized husband and wife team of June Binney and Richard Sheola who provided invaluable assistance in understanding and preparing recommendations involving policing and the behavioral health sciences. Janice Kahn, a trained social science researcher and Chair of the Subcommittee on Public Safety of the Advisory Committee, and Michael Keaveney, the Police Union president who provided invaluable perspective from the non-management ranks of the BPD. The Committee could not have accomplished any of its goals without the support and expertise of each one of these experts, as well as others in the fields of law enforcement and mental health, and members of the community who offered comments and insights I. Several factors converged to produce the Reforms Committee and a parallel Task Force to Reimagine Policing (the “Task Force”). These factors include the reports and cell phone images of the killing of Black men and women in police custody in communities across the country and the outrage and trauma those deaths cause to people of color and others, particularly youth, in Brookline. The report of the Reform Committee is not written to rehash those incidents or to delve into the sometimes sordid history of policing in America. The purpose of this report is improving the BPD. Police at all times and in all societies are a tool and a reflection of the community in which they work to enforce laws, including constitutional provisions, whether just or unjust, and maintain public order so that the community can function as the community and its political leadership wants it to function. Where the social order is oppressive, policing will be oppressive. Police have been used in America for many unjust purposes: to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, to control and bust unions, to intimidate and commit violence against civil rights or anti-war demonstrators, to harass and round-up undocumented immigrants, to harass and loot Black and poor communities as an easy source of municipal revenue, to enforce political correctness and racial supremacy, and to use the “paddy wagon” to control and lockup ethnic communities uneasily acculturating to America. Across the globe it is often worse. Police also fight crime. Crime in communities of color and poor White communities especially is traumatizing and debilitating. It is often in those vulnerable communities that policing is most problematic. But policing also has problems in communities like Brookline. Brookline has, 3 however, worked hard as a community for three decades to reduce those problems and has achieved remarkable success. This is a reflection of the generally socially progressive orientation of the residents of Brookline who demand good policing that emphasizes fairness and equity. II. This report looks at policing in Brookline through many lenses. First, the traditional public safety role of policing and the many ways in which traditional policing can create friction and ill-will in the people who come in contact with the police. In Brookline, this is often when people encounter the police during traffic stops, particularly when the driver of the vehicle is a person of color traveling through Brookline from other areas. Subcommittees of the Reform Committee looked at the traditional public safety function in terms of the disparities in the treatment of people of color and others that may be based on implicit or explicit racial, income, or other biases or based on non-bias causes. Recommendations of the Accountability, Civil Rights, Militarization, and Mass Events, and the Personnel Subcommittees have recommendations that directly or indirectly are intended to mitigate biases and other causes of disparate treatment. We are also mindful of the need for prudence in the use of Town resources and of recent proposals in Town Meeting to make major cuts to the BPD budget. We have not been able to identify any major cuts that would be prudent with respect to the needs of public safety and the goals of the Town to increase diversity in the BPD. Proposed cuts would have to come from the largest component of the BPD budget: personnel. This would have a devastating impact on racial and gender diversity that the BPD has been struggling to increase in recent years, overcoming the many obstacles placed in their way by Civil Service rules and preferences. These obstacles are discussed in the Personnel and Governance Subcommittee report. Such cuts will reduce the availability of officers on patrol 24 hours of every day, which will reduce the ability to provide many services that don’t arise only during business hours such as mental health or substance use crises. These 24/7 services are discussed in the Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders Subcommittee report. In addition, as explained in the Personnel and Governance Subcommittee report, we also have a serious retention problem that may require significant increases to the BPD budget to address. In general, although comparisons are not exact, Brookline’s pay scale is seen as lagging behind other departments such as Cambridge, Boston, the State Police, and others. Not only do we lose officers we’ve trained and who have become knowledgeable about Brookline and its ethos, but many of them are more diverse, in ethnicity and gender.