After watching the devastating news of the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, we thought that even though Needham hasn’t faced such an incident, it was necessary to take some action to try to avoid a similar tragedy. Not to be offensive, but everyone has been posting Instagram chains and re-posting videos of protests rather than trying to instill change in our town. Raising awareness is important, but we have an obligation to ensure this never happens by imroving the nation's police culture and putting in place policies to avoid such a tragedy. We thought some material change would truly honor the life of George Floyd. 

Even if a situation like this might seem unlikely in our town, there are dozens of police interactions each day. Some of those, over the years, will be impacted by snap judgments, prejudice, or just plain unneeded aggressiveness regardless of race, gender, sexuality, social class, or any other characteristics.  

There are many steps which we could put in place to both change the mindset of police officers during moments of escalation, and change civilian perception of police culture so both police and civilians have a similar vision and shared goal of peace, safety, and civility.

Linked here is our planned message to the chief of the Needham Police force: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c_zdnu4peSdzG_xF1DOpqCDnDByhdlrTEXuOYIKdBlE/edit?usp=sharing

I urge you- if you would like, to edit this and send it to your police chief if you are signing this from a town outside of Needham.

These are just basic ideas to start a conversation around what we can do in our town. We recommend many policies for the Needham Police department, including increased deescalation training, new body cams rules ensuring penalties for not recording or tampering, training officers how to restrain without a risk of bodily injury,  and ensuring police officers have at least one non-lethal weapon (ie. Pepper spray, taser).

Thank you.