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Date: 4/6/2021
NORTHAMPTON – During a joint meeting between the Northampton City Council and Policing Review Commission on March 30, the commission presented its final report before the council.
Cynthia Suopis, one of the commission’s co-chairs, said the safety of the entire Northampton community was at the forefront of the decision making process throughout the commission’s existence.
“I can tell you our research led us to a common ground and consensus on our commission that everyone in Northampton wants to feel safe. We are confident you heard from individuals in our 7 hours of testimony that many people in our community do not feel safe,” she said.
The 53-page report included a number of recommendations and in its exectutive summary, the commission stated it “took as a primary lens the idea that the right people should respond to calls to optimize results.”
One of the most significant recommindations in the report was the establishment of a Department of Community Care, which co-chair Dan Cannity said would help connect services throughout the city.
“The biggest change is a new Department of Community Care that exists independent of the Police Department. It includes peer responders housed within the city and with talking with people from the city it became clear that we are missing a point person that connects the services provided by the city, individual organizations, and nonprofits in the city,” he said.
The department itself would function to respond to wellness checks, substance use calls and more.
“It would respond to wellness checks, substance use calls, and calls for service around houseless individuals, and it is going to focus on non-coercive and non-violent models of intervention and prevention, which is extraordinarily important,” Cannity said.
To have a larger impact in change as soon as possible, Cannity explained that many of the commission’s suggestions for change will go to the Mayor’s Office before City Council.
“For us, the legislative options were still there, but those changes do not always produce a large impact immediately. Because we were focused on the maximum impact with the least amount of effort, a lot of it ended up being decisions that are more executive heavy,” he said.
When asked about what the commission could have done differently, member Nnamdi Pole said it may have benefited them to hear more from the Police Department and victims of crimes helped by police.
“This is just my view, but I think this was a process that might have benefitted from inviting more input from the Police Department in the beginning. I think we kind of went too far in the other direction and were unnecessarily hostile to influence from the Northampton Police Department,” he said. “I feel personally bad we did not go after people that identified themselves as victims of a serious crime that were helped by the police.”
While the commission did not issue a decision on what to do for victims of domestic violence, commission member Elizabeth Barajas-Roman said city leadership needs to take the forefront on the issue.
“I think we got to the point that more data will not necessarily more illuminate this problem. What it really needs is leadership. It requires leadership of the city and elected officials to make a choice to give survivors control over their situations. It is absolutely one of the most important things the city needs to consider in terms of crime,” she said.
Commission member Josey Rosales said it was necessary to adopt every recommendation from the final report.
“These recommendations come from a strong place of consensus and many hours of hard work. This is a starting point, and these recommendations need to be adopted in their entirety or there are really strong implications that there may be gaps in services for community members,” he said.
In an interview after the meeting, Northampton Police Chief Jody Kasper said she was in favor of more mental health services in the city.
“After looking at the report, I think there is a lot of good common ground between the findings and the work of the department. I have enthusiastically supported more mental health services,” she said.
Overall, Kasper said community policing is heading in a direction that better serves the needs of the community in some aspects and changes to mental health calls could be a larger part of the solution.
“The direction in general where policing is going in some ways is very good and responsive to the needs of communities and kind of a recognition of where there are some gaps in the system,” she said. “For instance, replacing officers or having clinicians go with officers to mental health calls would make our department better; it would enhance the services we provide and would be a better service to our community.”
Kasper added that she agreed with one of Pole’s concerns during the meeting that removing some community outreach efforts could negatively impact the department’s makeup.
“I thought that was astute of him to point out and that is certainly one of my concerns. I do not know if people understand that many officers apply here because of the way that we work with the community. We ask candidates why they want to work here and a lot of them cite our community outreach efforts, and they are the kind of people that want to do that work,” she said.
If policing becomes more one-dimensional, Kasper said candidates may not be as interested in community outreach.
“If the work changes and it becomes the kind of work that is one dimensional law enforcement only, we will attract different candidates who may be less interested in community outreach work, building relationships, problem solving, and all the things that come with community policing,” she said.