This commentary is by Alex Fischer of Brattleboro, a town meeting representative and former member of the town’s Citizen Police Communications Committee.
I was hoping to write a fairly short, simple and straightforward commentary wholeheartedly supporting the Community Safety Review Committee’s report and recommendations that were shared at a Brattleboro Selectboard meeting in early January.
I had never been so proud to be part of this town, part of the marginalized communities organizing for safety and well-being.
And then the horror and reality of the unending violence of white supremacy reared its head in the form of violent attacks on the U.S. Capitol building, the people inside and the democratic election processes.
What we are grappling with as a town around community safety and the violent acts by organized white supremacists on Jan. 6 are not separate. The attacks were born from years and decades and centuries of white supremacists’ inability to share power and see the humanity in others; our current carceral systems are the product of years and decades and centuries of the desire to hoard power, own people and create illusions of safety for some at the expense of others.
The attacks Jan. 6 by armed white supremacists were met with some police resistance, and active support by others, while months earlier Black and Brown bodies trying to hold peaceful vigils were met with tear gas, pepper spray and mass arrests. In Brattleboro, we have been shown evidence of racial profiling in our town that favors white bodies at the expense, most specifically, of Black bodies.
I want to so desperately separate the atrocities at the Capitol from the harm caused here in Brattleboro. As a white person, I am afforded the opportunity to try to compartmentalize and separate the two. But if I am honest with myself, the way to prevent future violent white supremacist attacks is to begin uprooting racism and creating new visions of safety here in my own community. For those reasons, I find it so important to link the violence Jan. 6 as an act of white supremacy supported by our current policing systems to what we are trying to achieve here in Brattleboro.
And there is so much hope to be had here on the local level. What we have been given in the committee’s report is nothing less than a gift.
As part of the coalition that worked to create a robust request-for-proposals for this process, I was blown away with what was accomplished in such a short period of time. What a gift that Shea Witzberger, Emily Megas-Russell, members of the committee and members of our community have given us.
It speaks to the years and decades of community organizing and relationship-building in this area that supported a quick and comprehensive mobilization of, and communication with, so many marginalized communities, service providers and community members at large. This report and the work that went into it is inspiring, a true gift and blueprint for how to move our communities and our town forward in denouncing the living legacy of white supremacist violence and moving toward the horizon of safety and well-being for all of us, an image Shea so clearly conjured.
I thought I would write a letter about my experience as a member of the Citizen Police Communication Committee and my support for it to be disbanded. I thought I would write about my experience as a facilitator and trainer and my support for freezing the Brattleboro Police Department’s training budget, as one-time trainings fall short of creating change when deeper healing and reckoning are needed. I thought I would write about my support for committee member Lana Dever’s words that we shouldn’t have had to create this committee, write this report or present these findings because we should know these truths already; we should be listening.
But what I find myself wanting to write about, after white supremacists violently attacked the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., killing four people, is the first recommendation of the Community Safety Review Committee’s report: the need to acknowledge and reckon with the harm caused.
In my understanding, that is referring specifically to the harm caused by the realities of white supremacy and state violence. The brilliance and necessity in addressing the systemic paradigm shift that must occur for any meaningful change to happen cannot be underestimated.
We as individuals, as a community and as the town of Brattleboro must do things that have not yet been done before, both internally to change our own understanding and externally to change the impacts of our policing systems. We must be creative, bold and experimental. For those of us who hold the privileges of whiteness, of wealth and class privilege, of Cis-bodies (aka non-trans bodies), etc., we must be willing to be wrong, to listen and to act differently than we have been. Past attempts to reform our broken system of safety did not fail because of individuals. This is not about any one of us; this is about systems. This is about all of us.
For me, the most inspiring part of the work done by the committee and what has come forth in the report is the ability to create more safety for more people without lessening safety for anyone. It is a nondebatable fact that many in our communities do not feel safe. It is also a nondebatable fact that many in our communities do indeed feel safe. What the recommendations put forth is a path forward to create safety for everyone, at the expense of no one.
When we come together at the next selectboard meeting, I hope we can start from a place that cuts past myths of white supremacy that lie to us by teaching us that carceral systems create safety. I hope we can start the conversation with an acknowledgment of harm caused — intentionally or not — by maintaining our current systems of policing and carceral systems. I hope we can start the conversation acknowledging that our current system of policing comes directly from slave-catching. I hope we can acknowledge there is so much we don’t know and haven’t tried. I hope we can acknowledge that there is a desire and demand for something altogether different.
Above all, I hope we can listen to those who have known since the beginning of policing, since the beginning of mass incarceration and Jim Crow and sharecropping and slavery, that the systems we have created are not meant to keep everyone safe.
For those of us who have benefited from our current systems of policing and incarceration, there can be a fear that a new system will enact the harm caused to others back onto us. I want to encourage folks to imagine beyond harm. If you believe that harm and violence are an intrinsic part of safety, then you will only be asking who will be harmed if we change things. If you are able to imagine the creation of safety without harm, then I hope you will ask yourself: What is holding us back?
