Over a year after the first Black Lives Matter protest in Brunswick, town officials took the next step Monday night in addressing further diversity training, complaint transparency and mental health services within the police department.

The council unanimously accepted a seven-recommendation report produced by the Police Review Committee, a group that was formed in October 2020 following the summer protests that were sparked in part by the death of George Floyd.

Floyd was a 46-year-old Black man who was murdered by a white police officer in Minnesota. A video showed Floyd pleading with the officer whose knee was on his neck, and the killing sparked protests and calls for reform regarding police brutality throughout the world.

The first recommendation asks that the Brunswick Police Department go through an assessment process to measure its collective understanding of cultural differences and issues of diversity. Based on the results of that assessment, if areas of need were identified, the department would engage in further training or activities.

“What we really wanted to get at with suggesting that we do a diversity inventory is to identify what blind spots may be out there,” said Police Review Committee Chairperson Jason Gould at Monday’s meeting, adding, “I think that we recognize everyone has some level of unconscious bias.”

The committee met 12 times between December 2020 and May 2021. Last year, The Times Record reported that the committee was originally looking to submit the report by the end of April. According to Gould, the delay was in part due to the COVID pandemic, but also the result of group members wanting to engage in more thorough discussion without a hard deadline.

Recommendations also included that the department undergo training and gather data for mental health calls as well as develop a team and hire an appropriate position to meet those needs.

The final recommendation asked that the town maintain a public list of all complaints about individual officers, in compliance with all employee disclosure laws.

“The spirit behind the recommendation is to foster trust and transparency, and I would say I don’t think there is any issue on the Brunswick Police Department that needs to be drilled into today,” said Gould. “But I think that when you look at policing on the national scale, we would be remiss to not acknowledge the fact that there have been officers in the United States who have been repeat offenders of significant transgressions of trust that have been swept under the rug.”

In an interview Tuesday, Town Councilor Dan Ankeles said that Monday’s council approval was largely procedural, but also the necessary next step in implementing the recommendations. Ankeles was also a Police Review Committee member.

Going forward, Ankeles said, the recommendations that will require funding, such as new therapist, social worker or clinician position, must first be looked at in the context of the town’s budget.

“It means that anything that requires further action, we as a council want it back on the agenda in an appropriate amount of time,” said Ankeles, adding that recommendations that do not require funding are now council endorsed for the police department to pursue.

According to Brunswick Chief of Police Scott Stewart, many of the topics addressed in the recommendations are already being examined within the department.

Some examples of this, Stewart said Tuesday, include initial efforts on data collection for mental health calls, officers already attending crisis intervention training and a mandatory diversity training session with local experts that took place last year.

“By putting these down, it kind of solidifies them so it kind of just keeps us on track to make sure some of these goals are accomplished,” Stewart said at Monday’s meeting. Stewart was also a member of the committee, and said the department will be looking at possible grants to fund the recommended positions.

Stewart added that he is confident that the department is where it needs to in terms of staff training, but is always open to suggestions and improvement. According to Stewart, in both 2020 and 2021 there was one formal complaint each year filed against officers in Brunswick. Both times, Stewart said, an internal investigation found video footage to prove the complaints unfounded.

According to a 2019 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, police use of force is one of the leading causes of death for young men of color.

The journal states it is expected that about 1 in every 1,000 Black men are killed by police over a lifetime. For comparison, the average lifetime odds of being killed by police are about 1 in 2,000 for all men and about 1 in 33,000 for all women, the journal states.

Copy the Story Link

« Previous

Brunswick Councilor launches bid for Maine House

Next »

Mid Coast Hospital Auxiliary marks 20th anniversary with cookbook