A process for civilian oversight of Somerville police restarted Thursday in a presentation to the City Council, a half-dozen years after demands by councilors after the killings that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.
Though a Civilian Oversight Task Force worked for two years to release recommendations last year for a board, a presentation by city Public Safety for All project manager Jon Hillman laid out the next steps as being a Sept. 24 update from city staff; a possible Sept. 29 policy development discussion with the council’s Legislative Matters Committee; and, in October, a public hearing.
“A lot of work was done with the community,” councilor Naima Sait said. “Let’s make sure we include all those recommendations and all the work that was done.”
Councilor JT Scott, who has chosen to step down from the council on Dec. 31, was more blunt, saying “a great place to start” would be the research done years ago that was handed off by the council but “functionally scuttled” by a former mayoral administration.
Unions and the civil service system
The councilors seemed firm on what they and the public wanted from an oversight board. Eighty-one percent of the public in a survey said they supported civilian oversight, according to Hillman’s presentation.
For oversight and policy writing to be meaningful, a board needs subpoena power, access to information and camera footage and to be able to implement discipline, councilors said. “Significant power and responsibility and authority,” councilor Emily Hardt summed up.
This vision for board powers, though, came after councilors were called into an hourlong closed-door meeting with mayor Jake Wilson and city lawyers and police labor negotiators. “I have a list in my pocket here of things that we brought up in executive session that were more appropriate for open session,” council president Lance Davis said.
Underlining how much civilian oversight is about getting police to agree to answering to someone else’s authority, councilor JT Scott explained what the closed-door meeting was about:“All of this impacts a contract with employees that have a union, and we are not the ones who negotiate those contracts.” He said that makes it important for the mayor to understand council priorities – though Wilson was, until this year, a city councilor.
“The civil service system is the – I don’t want to say the end-all, be-all, but it is the body of law has the final say. It is the the ultimate rule of law in terms of of rules that impact disciplinary measures,” Davis said, seeming to set expectations on the civilian oversight power councilors called for.
“Maybe it’ll work for us”
A lot of research was done years ago by Scott and Davis into how oversight boards function nationwide: poorly.
“We had countless hours of conversations with folks from as far away as Oakland and as close as Cambridge,” Davis said. “The consensus seemed to be that none of them really worked well … they weren’t empowered, and in some cases, they weren’t properly funded, and without those two broad things, you’re probably going to end up with what municipalities have had for decades – what many consider failed, ineffective bodies.”
Scott even employed a joke from the sitcom “Arrested Development” to make the point, subbing in police oversight for open marriages: “Did this actually ever work for anybody else? No, no, it never worked for anybody else. But maybe it’ll work for us.”
His position hadn’t changed over the years, Scott said, but he’s since watched the neighboring city of Cambridge be “very proud” of getting body-worn cameras on their police officers that “isn’t helping a soul right now. It’s not getting released. It’s not putting the public at ease.” After recent violence, “the public has no confidence that the incident is being investigated well, at least from what I hear.”
Convincing arguments
The council voted 7-4 in a special meeting in July to approve body-worn cameras for Somerville police. It was a three-and-a-half-hour session in part because of debate resulting from the lack of a police oversight body for the cameras; Wilson swayed votes by affirming a strong commitment to getting civilian oversight finally in place after being part of a plan from the group Just Us Somerville to address systemic racism and shaken confidence after the death of George Floyd in 2020.
“The public should have a body that it can trust,” Scott said. “We are a government of the people, and there should be no single branch, no single department or entity within that government that stands separate and above supervision or review.”
Councilor Ben Wheeler emphasized to police that “accountability is not antipolice.”
Oversight is a basis for trust on everything from city finances to a department such as Urban Forestry, Wheeler said, and “not because we’re opposed to them. It is because we are supporting them, and part of how the public is able to to really trust and support the work that our city staff do is because they know that our oversight is real.”
“Accountability is pro-police, and I want us as a city to work towards deep and true trust between community and police,” Wheeler said. “A body like this with real power is crucial to that.”
A collection of documents and other digital artifacts related to policing and police reform in Somerville since 2020 has been gathered here.
