Commentary: In Order to Enact Change Our Leaders Must Have a Sense of Urgency

By David M. Greenwald

Davis, CA – It made for interesting theater on Tuesday night—a well-organized and large group of activists pushing the council harder and further on police reforms, who met resistance from a group of supportive but far more cautious city officials and councilmembers.

This was another showing of force by reform-minded community members.  They came out in huge numbers—about 150 public commenters in December, then they followed it up with over 750 signatures on a letter this spring, and now 107 of the 111 public commenters spoke in favor of police reform this week.

Naysayers can shrug off these numbers.  Some have argued that they are not representative of the community as a whole or that even with one hundred-plus comments, it’s still a small percentage of the community.

They have a point, to a certain extent, as does Mayor Gloria Partida.

Mayor Partida understood some of the frustrations of the community.

“This process has been slow,” she said, in part because they engaged the commissions and are listening to the community.

She noted, while the comments this evening were one-sided, “The people who didn’t call in this evening—there are people who are concerned about money being taken away from the police department.  It is important that we are balanced in how we go forward here.”

While I think she has a point, how deep does that opposition go?  There have been several public meetings in the last year on this topic and there does not appear to be any strong opposition.

One thing I keep looking at is that, back in 2006, the POA, the association representing Davis Police Officers, strongly opposed reform in the form of a civilian review board.  In 2015, the POA pushed back against some policies of the body cameras.

They have been silent during this conversation.  You might be able to argue that citizens in Davis may not know the exact proposals here, but you can bet the POA is well aware of it.  Their silence suggests that they are probably not strongly opposed to what is on the table.

I would argue what is on the table is fairly modest.  I support Crisis Now.  I support moving Homeless Outreach out of the police department.  Creating a Public Safety Department is a modest step.

I would actually suggest, in fact, we are not going far enough.  I would like to see us discuss ways to reduce vehicle stops, which in my 15 years of covering this issue, seems to be the biggest problem in terms of generating racial inequities.  I have been advocating for the Berkeley model or what is starting to coalesce out of San Francisco.

There is a long history of activists pushing the envelope and receiving strong push back, if not outright resistance from the political establishment—even those times when the establishment was in agreement on the principles involved.

We are already a year past the death of George Floyd and activists, many of whom have seen the slow pace of change over the decades, are attempting to push the establishment further and faster than the establishment would like to move.

In some ways I agree with the council—slow, deliberate, bring all of the stakeholders together and move forward with a smart and sensible plan.

Some of the urgency is perhaps a sense that the pendulum might be starting to swing back.

The NY Times in a news analysis noted, “A strong showing by Eric Adams in the New York mayoral race and President Biden’s announcement of a new crime-fighting agenda signal a shift by Democrats toward themes of public safety.”

“Facing a surge in shootings and homicides and persistent Republican attacks on liberal criminal-justice policies, Democrats from the White House to Brooklyn Borough Hall are rallying with sudden confidence around a politically potent cause: funding the police,” the Times writes.

President Biden put out a “national strategy that includes cracking down on illegal gun sales and encouraging cities to use hundreds of billions of dollars in pandemic relief money for law-enforcement purposes.”

Eric Adams, a former police officer who is also Black, “rode an anti-crime message to a commanding lead in the initial round of the Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday.”

But overall I am not sure I buy into that.  The crime increase is somewhat limited and it has happened across jurisdictions that are blue and red.  And even in New York, while Adams was ahead, so too was reform-minded DA candidate Alvin Bragg, who was one of four progressives in the race who would outflank the establishment candidate.

Locally as is the case nationally, we have a complicated crime picture.

Chief Darren Pytel told me, “Property crime and assaults (mostly domestic violence) are up (not huge numbers) but (there are) decreases in most other violent crime.”

But the past year has been highly unusual.

“Arrests/citations were way down—officers were pretty hands off during the height of Covid,” Pytel said.  “Now that things are opening up and resuming to some sort of normalcy we will see what impact that has on crime.”

That seems like a fair synopsis.

But the shifting ground seems to me all the more reason for the activists, seeing the need for change, to continue to push hard.

Delay is a tactic of the establishment to take the steam out of social movements.

“Time itself is neutral,” Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in his seminal work, Why We Can’t Wait in 1963.  “It can be used either destructively or constructively.”

King was pushing for action in the face of massive resistance in the south and the slow play by cautious northern politicians.

“More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will,” he said.

““The conservatives who say, ‘Let us not move so fast,’ and the extremists who say, ‘Let us go out and whip the world,’ would tell you that they are as far apart as the poles,” he warned.  “They accomplish nothing; for they do not reach the people who have a crying need to be free.”

But perhaps more presciently he would state, “Lamentably, it is a historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.”

The death of George Floyd represented an historical moment indeed, but true change is going to take a sense of urgency—and the council needs to be mindful that the clock is ticking and they run the risk of running out the clock for the moment of transformative change.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

Author

  • David Greenwald

    Greenwald is the founder, editor, and executive director of the Davis Vanguard. He founded the Vanguard in 2006. David Greenwald moved to Davis in 1996 to attend Graduate School at UC Davis in Political Science. He lives in South Davis with his wife Cecilia Escamilla Greenwald and three children.

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15 comments

  1. “The people who didn’t call in this evening, there are people who are concerned about money being taken away from the police department.  It is important that we are balanced in how we go forward here.”

    I think there are a lot of people who don’t speak up out of fear of being called or inferred that they are a racist, a bigot, etc. (fill in the blank).  We often see that here on the Vanguard when discussions about race issues ensue.

    1. I don’t disagree with that BUT you always seem to discount just how liberal Davis actually is. The presidential vote split was 85-15.

      1. I don’t think that just because someone didn’t vote for Trump means they also want to defund the police?

        a well organized and large group of activists pushing the council harder and further on police reforms 

        Yes, they seem to be very well organized.  I asked you yesterday about a template that was put out instructing callers what to ask for in public comment but you didn’t respond.  Do you have any knowledge of that?   Maybe I can find it with a little research, but I would think that you might have information on it.  If the opposition had such a template would you have reported on that?

        1. Part of it is, the proposal is not to defund the police.

          There are kind of three components:

          1. Crisis Now which moves mental health response
          2. Moving homeless services out of the police department
          3. Creating a department of public safety to manage and coordinate those responses

          Which of those are likely to generate controversy?

          As I said in the piece, I actually don’t think it goes far enough, but what I’m suggesting isn’t on the table right now.

        2. I asked you yesterday about a template that was put out instructing callers what to ask for in public comment but you didn’t respond

          As I pointed out yesterday, Keith O.  Best you can hope for is some sort of deflection, obfuscation, not ‘transparency’… although, in the article, he did say/write,

          a well-organized and large group of activists

          At least a ‘hint’ that there may well have been a ‘template’… certainly NOT a spontaneous expression of broad community sentiment.

          Then, of course, he writes that those activists must be a good barometer of community views, since there is no evidence (to his knowledge) of organized or spontaneous “push-back”… using a ‘negative’ to prove a position he espouses… as Spock would say, “fascinating”…

          D@mn, I don’t generally take your side, but here Keith O, I agree…

  2. They have been silent during this conversation.  You might be able to argue that citizens in Davis may not know the exact proposals here, but you can bet the POA is well aware of it.  Their silence suggests that they are probably not strongly opposed to what is on the table.

    I would imagine they are making their case privately. Mayor Partida very likely has a much better sense of where the community stands on this issue than any of us do.

    1. I mean maybe. But my wife serves on the PAc, they would certainly be hearing from the community if there was a lot of pushback. The last time I requested emails on this, there were not a lot in opposition.

      1. Why would someone bother to approach PAC, if they/there views would be ‘summarily dismissed’?  It is logical folk would bypass a Commission, whose tone seems to be, “our minds are made up… don’t bother us with facts/viewpoints”…

        Just look at the Chair of PAC, and his recent actions, statements… including the repeated use of the f-word, quoted on the VG, but not allowed to be re-quoted in response posts…

        Is there a “dark underbelly” of the VG?  Founder of VG, a spouse of a member of the PAC; a frequent poster, a member of the PAC;…

         

      2. Maybe she should give a presentation at a Chamber of Commerce or Rotary Club meeting and see what kinds of questions and comments come up,

          1. It would mainly be to get feedback, and those are a particular demographic. I could see Soroptimist, maybe Farm Circle (I think we’re up to three of them in Davis now), maybe UU church or other church groups.
            If you want to get the pulse of the community, you need to meet them where they’re at. Most people don’t pay attention to city council or commission meetings and very few of us ever give public comment at them.

  3. While I think she has a point, how deep does that opposition go?

    An issue like this could be solved by a public poll. (Such as a poll on Nextdoor.)

    The poll result need not be binding, but if there are many participants then the result is indicative. It is a low cost and transparent metric.

    1. Edgar… I know of very few in Davis who use Nextdoor… about as representative as … nothing, except regular users of Nextdoor… I would give such a poll ~ 1% credibility…

      1. I think it depends on whether the city uses it.

        For example, if more people uses the poll than people making calls, then the poll could be more representative than the calls.1% of Davis is about 700 people.

        And more importantly, it allows people to react to the on going poll result without taking other people’s time.

        (If one side organizes a caller train of 100 people, are we really asking the public to react by forming a counter caller train of more than 100 callers?)

        A poll saves time.

         

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