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Letter to the Editor: New Paradigm of Community Safety

Dear Editor:
City technology issues prevented me from giving a public comment at the Public Safety Task Force meeting March 29. I was asked to send my planned remarks and promised they would be emailed to the entire task force.

In summary, our lame duck police chief and his cheerleader(s) need to stop deflecting and stalling the work of the task force, so that Chelsea can have a different vision of community safety than, “those people out there are the enemy.”

This was my script:

My name is Diane Jonas Locker. I have lived on Hickory Drive inside the city limits of Chelsea for a little over 32 years.

First, I want to thank all of you who are making time to serve on this task force, especially those of you who are here in the hope of creating positive change despite your own personal negative encounters. And I want to commend every police officer who has the courage and heart to be part of changing old mind sets in order to create a new paradigm of community safety.

Your last meeting’s agenda item, “vision of community policing,” got buried by tangential discussions of metrics and accreditation and whether this task force can possibly have the time to work through all of the nitty gritty specified in your “purpose” statement.

I, as a community member who thinks you do have an important job to do, want you to remember that creating a statement of “priorities”, and arriving at a recommendation to council about what community involvement in holding our police department accountable needs to look like, is about clarifying Chelsea’s vision of community safety — something I am confident you are equipped to do, using tools such as the Prioritization Exercise shared at your last meeting, and your own wisdom, judgment, and good hearts.

I want to share with you an experience I had well before the Chelsea Black Lives Matter protest police department actions that led to the creation of this task force. My experience shook my confidence in our police department. And it made me question what vision our community sets forth for our police department.

A few years ago, after six months volunteering daily as a morning and afternoon crossing guard, together with North Creek Elementary para-pros, on McKinley at the intersection nearest school, I wrote to the mayor and the police chief to suggest some kind of communication campaign about traffic safety, and offered to help with that.

The mayor asked if she could read my letter to council and I assented. The morning after that council meeting, the police chief arrived at Elm Street and, before even waiting to see how I fulfilled my duties as a crossing guard, proceeded to lecture me on the mechanics of being a crossing guard, with emphasis on the necessity of capturing make, model and license plate information of drivers who were “breaking the rules.”

But the part that shocked me the most wasn’t the condescension toward me about my understanding of the job of the crossing guard, or the emphasis on “catching” the rule breakers (rather than my attention to the safety of the children), what shocked me most was being told that it was important to understand that, quote “those people out there are the enemy.” Quite frankly, I went and told the school principal that I was ready to quit, that morning, if those were the parameters of the job.

I refuse to consider the parents and grandparents and older siblings driving children to school in our community as the enemy. If we begin by considering our own parents and grandparents and children as the enemy, and train those in positions of maintaining community safety to consider anyone going by as the enemy, will we ever have a truly safe community?

I told the Bobcat interviewers about my experience, and decided to share it now for two reasons. First, when Bobcat asked me whether I had shared my story with anyone “official” back when it occurred, the answer was no, and the reason was because there was (and still is) no place that I know of to share it confidentially and no one, to my knowledge, who cared. Second, my story relates to the question of what vision we are asking our police department to practice and uphold in maintaining community safety for us.

I ask this task force to please find a way to make it clear that the fundamental vision of community safety in Chelsea is that we are neighbors and friends who care about each other, and that our community safety employees are helpers first and foremost.

This is Chelsea’s opportunity to be an exemplar of the best kind of community safety, starting with a vision this task force can create and the recommendation you will make to City Council for continued community participation in the vision and policies of our police department. That doesn’t require metrics. That requires heart.

Diane Jonas Locker
Chelsea

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