To the editor:
In his June 2 letter to The Edge, Richard Allen wrote:
“I strongly suspect that Great Barrington Police were aware that this incident was in the works. That would accord with standard operating procedure.”
Great Barrington Police Chief Paul Storti told the news media on the day of the first recent abduction in the Triplex-Barrington House parking lot that he had been given prior notice that day of the planned presence in town of federal agents here. But in fact, there is no defined procedure or policy for the Great Barrington Police to follow in situations like the recent abductions performed by mostly unidentified federal employees, except a policy not to facilitate such actions.
Our Selectboard has been derelict in its failure to exercise its own clearly defined duty to clarify such a policy, a duty explicitly delegated to it by the terms of the Article 25 Trust Policy, adopted by an overwhelming majority of voters at the May 1, 2017, Annual Town Meeting.
Mr. Allen is not alone in his apparent confusion on this matter. That confusion has been shared over the past six and a half years by our current Police Chief Paul Storti and his predecessor William Walsh, ever since the January 14, 2019, Selectboard meeting during which I and Chief Walsh asked that board to schedule a meeting to clarify the interpretation of Article 25.
Article 25 does outline in some detail the expectation of Great Barrington voters that no town employees should facilitate or assist in the detention of workers or residents of our town, or their removal from the town, by employees of the federal Department of Homeland Security. But there is no provision in Article 25 which instructs our police department not to communicate with these presumed agents or not to come promptly to the scene of a detention by heavily armed outsiders, when notified about the scene by a concerned citizen.
It was clear as long ago as its January 14, 2019, meeting that the Great Barrington Selectboard needed to hold a public hearing, or at least have a public discussion at one of its meetings, to clarify for residents and our police department its interpretation of the provisions of Article 25. In fact, one of those provisions explicitly assigns that public interpretation to the Selectboard.
At the January 14, 2019, Selectboard meeting, both Chief Walsh and I requested during Citizens’ Speak time—which is explicitly not a time for discussion of the merits of any complex policy issue—that the interpretation of Article 25 be placed on the agenda of a future Selectboard meeting. Instead, in violation of rule XII-B of the Selectboard’s own rules of order, the board’s chairman and its vice chairman tried to dispose of one aspect of that interpretation during a heated and unproductive 10-minute discussion that was out of order.
I agree with Mr. Allen’s suggestion that “people should be careful about interfering, physically” with heavily armed men wearing flack jackets vaguely labeled POLICE.
But he is completely out to lunch in opining that “…for all we know, the man being arrested could have a record that justified taking him off the streets.” If there are justifiable reasons in an apparently non-emergency situation to suddenly pull a person off a Great Barrington street or from the grounds of a local business, under our system of justice, those reasons need to be specified in a judicial warrant, and they need to be promptly subjected to the scrutiny of the evidentiary rules of a state or federal court.
If town or state police make an arrest without a warrant, as they sometimes feel impelled to do in an urgent situation (the conditions of such urgency being clearly defined by well-vetted statutes), the charges will ordinarily be promptly subjected to the scrutiny of a judge or magistrate in a court open to the public.
There is an undeniably immediate sharp increase in the statistical probability that someone will be killed or gravely injured during a public arrest (whether a legal one or an illegal one) whenever guns are brandished in the manner recorded in recent videos like the ones taken by bystanders in Great Barrington since early March.
These recent video images of men hugging assault weapons in public spaces such as the Triplex parking lot or the driveway of a local business are evidence of a disturbing threat to public safety that deserves urgent public attention by Acting Town Manager Chris Rembold, Police Chief Paul Storti, Berkshire County District Attorney Timothy Shugrue, State Sen. Paul Mark, State Rep. Leigh Davis, and the Great Barrington Selectboard under the leadership of its Chair Steve Bannon. It is unfortunate that for more than six years our local elected and appointed officials—starting with the Selectboard and our former Town Manager Jennifer Tabakin in the winter of 2019—have neglected for so long to deal proactively, in discussion with town voters, with the complex policy issues raised by the first known ICE abduction in town back then.
But as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1963, “The time is always ripe to do what is right.”
John Breasted
Great Barrington
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