We need a task force to reimagine policing in Brookline, and everywhere.

Let’s rethink our entire relationship with police.

Many of you have read my post in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. It focuses particularly on racial inequities in policing, with special attention to policing in Brookline. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to give it a slow read with an open mind before reading the rest of this message.

At the heart of the post is a truth that we seem to have lost — that a community holds the power to determine its own approach to community safety, which includes determining if and how police should be part of that approach.

Clearly, there are members of our community and those in our neighboring communities for which Brookline’s current model is simply not working. That those community members are most often Black is no coincidence and, as I say in the post, there’s a centuries-long reason for this rooted in causes that are external to policing as well as those that are intrinsic to policing.

Beyond those of us that have been profiled, brutalized, and traumatized by inequitable policing in Brookline and beyond, I’ve heard loud and clear from many white residents that changes to our policing are both necessary and urgent — literally a matter of life and death. I’m glad to live in a community where so many people are ready to step up and actively challenge conventional systems which, by design or neglect, have taken Black lives and set out nearly insurmountable challenges for those who remain.

I outlined some near-term solutions in my post, some of which need to be addressed in the police contract negotiations, which are long overdue, and in which the Select Board and community need to take a more active role. Other critical solutions can be initiated through Select Board, Town Meeting, or School Committee votes, and we should start planning for those immediately.

At the same time, there’s a need for a longer-term process that brings all voices to the table and that prioritizes the safety of those who are at most at risk — especially Black people. To meet this challenge, I’m proposing the creation of a Task Force to Reimagine Policing in Brookline.

This task force would be under the direction of the Select Board, with a charge to:

• Review our current police policies through an equity and justice lens
• Solicit public feedback on those policies through robust community engagement
• Explore alternative models to community safety and policing being employed in municipalities around the world, and conceptualize new models that have yet to be imagined
• Hold numerous public forums focused on reimagining our relationship with policing
• Make recommendations for meaningful changes that can be enacted by the Select Board, Town Meeting, School Committee, or other relevant bodies
• Make recommendations for legislation that should be supported at the state and federal levels
• Other charges as determined by community input

This task force will need to be diverse, transparent, and (necessarily) critical of our current model. We’ll decide as a community how we’ll move forward, but it’s important that this task force provides a distinctly alternative vision of community safety that we can wrestle with and compare to our current approach, which so many of us agree is not working.

I’ve shared this recommendation with the Select Board and requested that we docket a discussion on this as soon as possible — it’s that critical and that urgent.

In the meantime, I welcome feedback on this proposal and look forward to hearing your thoughts on how we can move Brookline forward, together.

Raul Fernandez
Brookline Select Board Member