Em Megas-Russell, a licensed social worker, Brattleboro resident, and business owner, collaborated on the Community Safety Review Committee report with Shea Witzberger. To read the full report from 2020, visit bit.ly/782-safety-report.
I am disheartened to be writing this op-ed.
I'd rather celebrate our town's active collaboration in cultivating dignified, innovative, and life-affirming responses to the basic human needs for safety and belonging of all our community members. Instead, I am writing from a place of heartbreak and outrage at the increased criminalization and exile of common people from common land.
The Community Safety Review (CSR) process culminated in a final report that was submitted to the Selectboard on Dec. 31, 2021 - almost three years ago. This process engaged and mobilized our community across class, race, ability, and gender to have meaningful dialogue about the underlying causes and needs associated with real and perceived unsafety in our small town.
More than 200 dialogues were facilitated and more than 25 local organizations engaged to understand the complex and intersectional root issues community members face as well as their visions for real safety and belonging within our community.
Of course, this process was not perfect - no process is.
However, this process managed to do an important thing that the town government seems to be unwilling to do: honor the dignity of those struggling and suffering most in our community while offering recommendations that address the roots of what leads to the impacts of visible poverty on our town.
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Those attending Selectboard meetings and/or speaking with disgruntled downtown merchants would be easily misled into believing that those who are most impacted by visible suffering, poverty, and houselessness are the tourists, the business owners, and the rural dwellers (of which I am one).
I do not intend to deny or minimize the frustrations, concerns, and real impacts that small business owners, residents, and visitors are experiencing.
I hear that folks genuinely feel uncomfortable and unsure; I know that shop owners are struggling economically and are concerned about break-ins and theft. These concerns are real and deserve dignity.
But the way that the town government and many community members are responding to these struggles hierarchizes these concerns and denigrates the dignity of others in our community.
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Dignity is a quality of respect that honors a person's inherent personhood and their right to exist.
When we acknowledge that people's dignity is non-negotiable, we can begin to cultivate community resources for real safety and belonging, such as:
• bathrooms, showers, storage, and drinking-water stations free and open to all
• community spaces that center gathering instead of commerce
• workers trained in providing durational emotional support and de-escalation
• access to health supplies, overdose prevention centers, and more accessible housing
But the mob response of trying to force people out of public common spaces by shaming and criminalizing their appearance and behaviors is undignified, inhumane, and harmful.
And moreover, it doesn't work.
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At the Sept. 3 Selectboard meeting, the town attempted to wrap up former Town Manager Peter Elwell's implementation plan of the CSR in a neat and tidy bow, with vague and insincere commitments to "[diversity, equity, and inclusion] values" while outright rejecting many of the recommendations that address community members' concerns about the impact of policing on safety and harm.
The town states that it has "convened a 'One Brattleboro' collaboration of public health and public safety organizations to explore practical mental health solutions locally," a collaboration that seems to have the potential to expand community-based solutions to the complex unmet needs we face.
But instead of focusing on and significantly investing in this strategy, the town is considering a Downtown Safety Action Plan that greatly expands the size, scope of practice, and budget of the police department.
The plan is focused in the short term on using expensive staff resources to tell people engaged in "undesirable," "inappropriate," and "chaotic" behavior in common public spaces to "stop it" and to inform them, "You can't do that here." (Selectboard members explicitly made these statements to articulate their campaign.) The plan calls for trespassing violators for 30 days.
The plan proposes to hire civilian staff within the police department to be trained as police, to implement more cameras, and to install a satellite police station downtown.
All of this, for what?
To surveil community members and keep telling them to "stop it," and "you can't do that here"?
When our response to struggling community members centers on policing and surveillance, it can only be punitive and criminalizing.
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The intent of this Downtown Safety Action Plan is undignified, in that it denies the right to existence, and to community, of people whom it is targeting.
It is also violent, in that it invests taxpayer dollars in a punitive response to human struggle.
It's heartbreaking to see how many in our community support this kind of approach, especially because it simply is not effective. This plan is not new; this is how the created conditions of human suffering related to injustice and impoverishment have been addressed for generations now, and it is not working.
The root causes and visible effects are only growing. We cannot exile, criminalize, or punish our way out of these crises.
Until we come together in a way that honors everyone's right to safety, belonging and dignity, we will continue to perpetuate cycles of harm and exploitation and waste a lot of tax dollars doing so.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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