The most interesting item of the night was clearly #29: Consider a Revised purpose statement for the Council Criminal Justice Reform Committee.
The CJR Committee was formed to address Cite and Release issues. Cite and Release has been adopted. Max Baker and Alyssa Garza are the two Councilmembers on the CJR Committee.
The CJR has been pursuing other topics that would fall under Criminal Justice Reform, and city staff has gotten prickly because the topics aren’t within the purview of the mission statement.
Tonight’s issue: to revise the purpose statement so that City Staff can carry out the supporting work. That is the text. As always, there’s a lot of subtext!
So how did the discussion go? Bert Lumbreras was arguing for procedure to be followed. It’s a committee that operates at the discretion of the council. City Staff serves the council. Therefore, the council needs to bless the new direction of the committee before City Staff can do its bidding.
Max Baker comes with a new proposed purpose statement. City Council tweaks it and seems on board with it. Hughson, Derrick, and Garza kick the wordsmithing around a bit.
Then Scott says, basically, why isn’t this committee over?
Baker and Garza explain that there are a lot more simmering issues still. Here’s where the subtext arises. Their take is that they’re being stonewalled by City Staff because these are controversial issues, and made to dot their i’s and cross their t’s with far more precision and wasted time than other committees.
The charitable take on City Staff is that they’re being CYA precisely because these are hot-button issues. They do not want to be perceived as acting without direction on controversies. Whereas when issues are boring, they can take more liberties without Council direction, because they’re not going to be on the hot seat defending their choices.
The uncharitable take is that yes, they’re stone-walling because they’re unsympathetic to the cause. 20 minutes later, on the next item, they ask for council members to come directly to them with Covid ideas because it’s simpler.
Scott asks the new Police Chief Dandridge what his thoughts are. He does not stay neutral. He explicitly tips his hand against the committee, saying this will take time away from the top items on his to-do list, a lot of which have to do with the recently killed and injured police officers, and the department trauma and repair. He also took issue with the merging of national conversations with local issues.
IMO, his failure to stay neutral when delivering his answer undermines his credibility on this topic. A bit of acknowledgement of issues of police racism and brutality would have really given him a lot more credibility when he listed the competing issues. Are the other issues real? Absolutely! Does he believe in them? For sure. But for his opening bid to be so dismissive of this committee is a giant red flag. He does not seem to buy into the idea that good reform is safer for officers as well as the community.
In the end:
- they approve the new mission statement for the CJR committee. I don’t have the exact wording, but it involved Cite & Divert, working with the county, and increased police transparency where allowed by law.
- Hughson lectured the committee about taking their priority list to the police chief and seeing where there are goals in common, and working with them instead of against them.
- Hughson lectured Lumbreras about needing to inform councilmembers on which items are quick to retrieve and research, and which items are time-consuming. Councilmembers don’t know how the databases and systems are set up, and can’t necessarily predict the workload involved.
Side note: To google-proof or not? Do people have alerts set up for their name? Do I want people to read this while I’m still getting the kinks out? I don’t know!! (I decided to play it safe for now and google-proof names.)
[Updated 8/8/22: removed google-proofing]
The San Marxist 