New Citizen life being born in Wellfleet?

Something new, an unprecedented form of citizenship, may be taking shape in Wellfleet, the Little Town That Could. It’s not clear even to those who are part of its emergence (including this writer) what this new thing is, or might be. At this point it could go in any of several directions, become this or that.

It could also fizzle.

One thing seems clear: this whatever-it-is had its conception in the recent police troubles in town. After a controversial arrest of a couple of locals in early May, stories had begun to circulate of overly zealous policing. One citizen went to a selectmen’s meeting to make these “troubling incidents” known to our elected representatives. At the next meeting of the Board, others showed up, one with a petition demanding removal of the officer considered most problematic.

In response to this citizen activity the Town Administrator asked the Wellfleet Forum, an established form of citizen activity, if it would sponsor a public meeting on what seemed a related and possibly helpful concept, “community policing.”

A few days before the Forum meeting, at a private home, about a dozen people met to share and hear stories of troubles with police and to prepare for the public meeting.

At some point emerged the concept of “presence”–the presence of people witnessing and telling stories of what happened that were not being told in the official police reports.

At the Forum meeting, police were given the opportunity to explain what they do to facilitate positive interactions with citizens. Though the meeting was explicitly framed to avoid specifics of individual cases (legal reasons were cited), specifics were in fact mentioned by those attending and the feeling of the meeting was that the police chief probably came away with a pretty good sense that he had a problem on his hands at least in the form of a bunch of riled-up citizens who thought he had a problem.

A week after the Forum meeting it became known that the officer named in the petition had resigned and that the Town Administrator had formed a new committee to address the interaction of police and citizens consisting of the TA himself, a selectman, a lawyer, the police chief, and one of the most involved citizens.

A day after that the citizens who had met privately before the Forum met again, a larger group this time and in a public place, the library. The purpose of the meeting was to take up the question of what, if anything, to do next. There was the feeling that even though some of the immediate police problems had been addressed (the resignation and the new TA-instigated committee), this group did not want to disband. To some at least, the police problems had made it clear that something new, some new form of citizenship activity, was needed.

That’s where it stands now. A next meeting is scheduled at which whoever shows up will consider what this so far vaguely defined group of concerned citizens might become.

“Community policing” has become part of our vocabulary, but as it is usually defined, it is something for police to do, a change in perspective on their part with regard to the community they serve. The question for the citizen group is: what is our version of that? What do we want to do?

In formulating a mission statement, it might be helpful to think about about what we want to become in relation to existing forms of citizen activity. Why, in other words, do we feel the need for something else when we already have, for instance, a board of selectmen elected by citizens? We already have a Wellfleet Forum, the purpose of which is discussion of topics of interest to citizens. We have a TA, part of whose job is to respond to citizen concerns. Now we have the new committee put together by the TA to address police concerns. We have Town Meeting, of course. So why something new?

The obvious answer is that despite the existence of all those citizen entities the recent troubles with the police seemed to require something new of us. In a way, all the existing citizen organizations dropped the ball, and only picked it up in response to ad hoc citizen pressure.

Given established forms of citizen activity, what shall we become? A form of citizen review board to field complaints about the police? Are there other aspects of town life which might benefit from a new organization? What aspects? Will we be more or less loosely organized? a sort of citizen lobby? That new term “crowdsourcing” comes to mind.

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