I believe dissatisfaction and the current debate over law enforcement on Bainbridge Island has roots in a place deeper than recent incidents. I believe the debate arises from a desire to have a kind of law enforcement that actually promotes our common felicity as a neighborhood rather than acting primarily as a corrective to it.
The Bainbridge Island community has for some years had a dysfunctional relationship to its police department and there has apparently been little leadership or oversight by the City Council or City Manager, nor has there been a definition by the Council of what law enforcement should look like here. It has not always been so.
There's no good reason in a neighborhood like this that we shouldn't know our police chief and officers by first name and hold them in high regard. But for the most part, we know the police as the people who hide around corners late at night in dark places in hopes of catching someone going too fast or sliding through a signed stop in a light traffic location. The officers in those cases very often are reported by responsible adults to have been brusque, cold, unfriendly and lacking discretion or lacking authority to exercise discretion in the decision whether to issue a citation or a simple oral admonishment. In the case of parking enforcement, citizens who have the audacity to do business with local retailers and fail to watch the clock receive a citation commanding one of the highest overtime penalties in the nation. Our police officers should be known as neighbors and participants in local service organizations, PTOs, churches, and other groups that help make this a good place to live, and some of them are.
There are good people in our police department, including Chief Fehlman, but we know them too little and see them as other than members of our community. Some of our officers and reserve officers do live off the island. We widely suspect that some arrive here with biases that we know exist among us within this county, and, to our discredit, we bear our own toward them.
At a basic level, citizens routinely show their disrespect of police by flashing their headlights at oncoming traffic to alert it to the presence of an officer with radar ahead. (To be fair, it should be said that opportunistic speed enforcement is fostered by our inconsistent patchwork of speed limits, a result of Council action on matters best left to traffic engineering.)
The presence here of illicit drug trade and use is widely known. This problem is exceedingly counterproductive to individuals and to relationships that reach to corners of the community far beyond the drug user or dealer. Nevertheless, the public seldom hears of a drug bust or a party brought to an end by police intervention, this in part because the police don’t sense the trust and support of the citizenry for their legitimate work.
In seven years as a Winslow retailer, I have seen very little citizen street contact with police on foot in any part of our town. For the sake of respect of their profession and skills, officers have got to get out of their cars and be seen to be friendly and approachable. They need less often to be weighed down with a load of formidable gear on their belts. Nor should they be wearing dark glasses most days of the year. If it can be done in central Los Angeles, it surely can happen here.
It’s a matter of some wonder on the part of citizens that our police department owns something like 25 cruisers when it appears that on any given shift there are no more than 3 or 4 officers on duty. Within the last year or two recently purchased police vehicles began to sport the slogan “One mission, one team.” This slogan tends to communicate a message from the police department that “it’s all about us, the police,” and it confirms popular belief that the police department itself has assumed a “them and us” attitude, a belief consistently borne out in conversation among residents. Why does the slogan not reflect something inclusive about the community itself, such as “To protect and serve?” My conversations with former City Council members have led me to believe that this slogan is not one that was approved by the Council. This can only mean that the police department itself made that selection and marked its vehicles accordingly. It would seem that the Council would have keen interest, responsibility and authority to approve slogans placed on city-owned vehicles.
Given the dysfunction between our citizenry and our police department, the Council should give the conduct of the department far more scrutiny and direction. A citizens' advisory board, much like that in many cities, including some large ones, may be a powerful tool in refining our law enforcement practices, holding the department accountable to the citizens, creating a conduit of understanding in both directions and drawing citizens and police into a better relationship.
As someone said at the first meeting of Citizens for Collaborative Policing, unless we, through our Council, make clear what kind of law enforcement we want, we'll get the kind that we're given.
John Hays
Bainbridge Island
