BRATTLEBORO — Everything about this town’s new Community Safety Review Committee is big, from its summerlong incubation to its $40,000 budget and growing list of the people it wants to interview — ranging from police to other crisis responders, related care workers and the nearly 12,000 residents they’re supposed to help.
The only thing small: The just over two-month period before a Dec. 31 deadline to file a final report.
“We have a pretty short timeframe to get through this whole process,” committee co-facilitator Emily Megas-Russell said at a recent meeting. “We only have six to eight weeks left to be able to actually do the public forums, the listening sessions, the one-on-ones and the anonymous testimony.”
That’s just one of several challenges the committee faces as it prepares to reach out to townspeople in the coming month.
The local selectboard, responding to calls sparked by Black Lives Matter protests, is paying two facilitators and a nine-member citizens committee to review the use of municipal government resources “to ensure equitable and optimal community health, wellness and safety.”
Megas-Russell, a Brattleboro social worker, and co-facilitator Shea Witzberger, a Dummerston educator, are a self-described team of “white people committed to anti-racism” who have met with the committee the past four weeks to determine its ground rules.
The first: Although the study was sparked by demonstrations to defund police, it won’t limit its scope to law enforcement but instead include local health and human services, government, schools and other supporting organizations.
“This is a systems review,” Megas-Russell said. “What we’re really interested in understanding is how effective the system is and what the gaps and needs are.”
“Our hope is to engage all kinds of people to see what their perspective is,” Witzberger added. “My hope is that many people who have an investment in this issue can find ways to be a participant in this process.”
The committee is drafting both a specific map of the local system and a series of general questions seeking local thoughts and feelings about the concepts of safety, danger and harm.
“I don’t want us to get too glued into an extremely scientific kind of control-variable mindset,” Witzberger said. “We are not going to tell someone what safety means for them. This inquiry leaves space for people to name that.”
The committee plans to hold two public hearings in November that, once scheduled, will be announced on the town’s website and through social media.
Local people are expected to offer a variety of opinions, as residents spent the entire summer debating how to create the committee in a way that’s fair to both people calling for police defunding and others who want protection in a town where opioid-overdose deaths top state tallies and racial justice events have drawn verbally abusive opponents charged with hate-motivated disorderly conduct.
The committee — which includes representatives of color, from the LGBTQ community, of lower income and with addiction or psychiatric challenges — has spent much time developing “centering” and “caring” meeting practices. Even so, participants acknowledge not everyone uses the same progressive vocabulary.
“We can guide and educate people, but let’s also not shut them down,” committee member Kelsey Rice said. “Sometimes people want to discuss these topics and they may not have the words. I hope that we can still allow space for participation because if they’re seeking to understand and trying to contribute — and sometimes disagreeing with us — we’re more likely to reach them if we can find common ground.”
Diversity of opinion can be seen within the committee. Member Lana Dever, for example, identifies as a “prison abolitionist.” Colleague Rice, calling herself a “survivor of violence,” had different thoughts.
“I’m not quite ready to say that I believe that there’s never a time for incarceration,” Rice said. “I would love to reach that point in the world, but I think there’s a lifetime of work to get there.”
The committee will develop a set of recommendations by Dec. 31 for consideration by the selectboard as it drafts a municipal budget for the next fiscal year.
“The schedule is a little bit ambitious,” Witzberger said. “This came out of an acknowledgement of the moment that we’re in as a country and some specific desires to make change locally. We’re hopefully aiming for making this not just a process where the only outcome is a report, but where people are actually engaging in some community-building. Otherwise, there’s no way to build a bridge from here to there.”
