Our Haines community will benefit more from a citizen stakeholder review of the police department than from an ill-timed, expensive, out-of-town consulting firm’s review:
1) Citizens will devise guidelines for ensuring cooperative law enforcement, including establishing criteria for hiring police personnel. Recent years’ high turnover of personnel has favored an alienating atmosphere between citizens and officials.
2) Citizens will stabilize law enforcement operations by stating expectations, thereby creating a dynamic continuum for addressing individual rights within a community. This will fare best with continuous, proactive communication between law enforcement and members of the Haines community. Community safety will develop in direct proportion to protection of individual rights.
3) Citizens will recognize collective safety (manifested via law enforcement officers) is the sum of personal liberties protected from abuse. Initiating aggression or hostile action by either ordinary citizens or police cannot be tolerated, if our collective safety is to be secure.
Perhaps the Public Safety Commission will lead our community in a direction without the tragic events forcing other communities toward reform?
Bill McCord