Social Justice Committee Meeting with Town Council Ends in Postponement 

Report on the Meeting of the Amherst Town Council, November 3, 2025. Part 1

This was a hybrid meeting held in Town Hall. It was recorded. 

Present
Lynn Griesemer (President, District 2), Andy Steinberg, Mandi Jo Hanneke, and Ellisha Walker (at large), Cathy Schoen and Freke Ette (District 1), Pat DeAngelis (District 2), George Ryan and Hala Lord (District 3), Pam Rooney and Jennifer Taub (District 4), and Ana Devlin Gauthier and Bob Hegner (District 5)

Staff: Paul Bockelman (Town Manager) and Athena O’Keeffe (Clerk of Town Council)
Members of the CSSJC: Debora Ferreira (co-chair), Allegra Clark (co-chair), Erica Piedade, Lissette Paredes

The long-requested and long-awaited meeting of the Community Safety and Social Justice Committee (CSSJC) with the Town Council to air the committee members’ frustration ended prematurely. The Council had agreed, in a 12–1 vote three years ago (November 2022) to meet certain social justice priorities but had since shown little inclination to take actions to do so. The CSSJC’s presentation was put nearly at the end of the Town Council agenda, so it did not begin until three and a half hours had gone by. Then, when Hala Lord made a motion in support of the social justice-related priorities the Council had agreed to, Andy Steinberg exercised his right under the town’s charter to end the discussion and postpone a vote. Steinberg  cited the late hour (11:45 p.m.), saying it was too late to have a thorough discussion of the motion. The vote was postponed until 4:15 on Friday November 7 on Zoom.

Four members of the CSSJC opened the meeting with the council with a PowerPoint presentation about the recommendations that the Town Council had accepted in October 2021 and reaffirmed in November 2022 to address concerns of the BIPOC community detailed in the 2021 report of the Community Safety Working Group (CSWG) and the seven priorities regarding racial justice adopted at the Town Council meeting of November 14 2022 after the confrontation between nine young people, largely BIPOC, and two police officers on July 5, 2022.

The CSSJC representatives asserted that both the DEI department and the CRESS responder program have been understaffed and unable to meet expectations since November 2022. CRESS has lost two responders, so has limited hours, and is still unable to take calls from dispatch. Also, there has been no movement on the creation of a youth empowerment center and police issues, including the recommendation to establish a  Resident Oversight Board (ROB) and to  review the town’s police policies. As CSSJC Co-chair Debora Ferreira put it, “Our charge as a town committee is to advise the Town Manager, Town Council, and town government on issues of equity, safety, and inclusion. Instead, we have been set to the side. The Town Council doesn’t talk with us, the Town Manager doesn’t meet with us, and it took us months of emailing the Town Council to even get an audience.”

Since 2022, several reports have confirmed that the needs of minorities in town are not being met and unequal treatment still exists. These include the African Heritage Reparations Assembly report (2023), “A Tale of Two Towns“ by Rabbi Debra Kolodny (2024), the Liberatory Visionary report by Dr. Barbara Love (2025), the Tury Research Institute report (2025), and the League of Women Voters of Amherst (LWVA) racial justice report last month. 

Especially frustrating to committee members has been the lack of progress in making reforms to the Amherst Police Department (APD). The CSWG recommended that APD respond only to jailable traffic violations and that all Amherst police officers bed required to take continuous anti-racism training. Ferreira said that the Resident Oversight Board models proposed by the town’s consultants to deal with complaints about the police are inadequate because they do not give the ROB investigative powers. She also pointed outthat despite conducting  a Liberatory Visioning Project, the DEI department is too understaffed to carry out its recommendations.

This following is a table from the October 1 League of Women Voters–Amherst report on the status of the CSWG recommendations.

Ferreira said that members of the BIPOC community rely on the CSSJC to represent them in expressing their needs to the town. The committee meets regularly with the Black Business Association of Amherst Area (BBAAA), which protested the disproportionate distribution of ARPA money that excluded BBAAA businesses. It also advocates for support for immigrants, improved translation services, a successor reparations committee, and acceptance of the revised Human Rights Committee bylaws, but it is hard to get their voices heard by town government.

The discussion with town councilors focused largely on why police dispatch is still not directing calls to CRESS after four years since its creation. Town Manager Paul Bockelman’s explanation was that CRESS Implementation Officer Kat Newman had been working on protocols for dispatch when her grant-funded position ended in July. Since then, CRESS Director Camille Theriaque has been developing Standard Operating Procedures for responders and dispatch. Bockelman said that CRESS will be able to receive calls from dispatch by the first of the year and that he meets with CRESS and dispatch staff every two weeks. Theriaque reported that the CRESS office now has a radio police scanner, and since th summer, responders have started to go to appropriate situations, sometimes even arriving before the police.

Mandi Jo Hanneke asked if CRESS could change its hours, currently 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, to evenings and weekends when there is more need. She also felt that CRESS does more social service work than the community safety work envisioned for them. Theriaque replied that many needs occur during the day, and there is not enough staff to cover both day and evening hours. CRESS responders often go to the Amherst Survival Center four days a week, she said, helping with potentially volatile situations in a place where many of the patrons are wary of police. She stated that “CRESS is growing by leaps and bounds as [CRESS responders] form relationships with people.”

Bockelman noted that the field of community responders is evolving as communities have learned that intervening early in a situation can prevent emergency calls. Council President Lynn Griesemer agreed, saying that CRESS “is filling a need we didn’t realize we had,” providing confidence that there is somewhere to go for help besides the police and EMS. CSSJC Co-chair Allegra Clark emphasized that intervening early includes having a Youth Empowerment Center that gives young people a safe space to go and avoids conflict with police that occurs when young people hang around in town. Ferreira noted the difference between the Community Safety Officers (CSO) who work with the police and CRESS. She said a CSO is often called in after the police have evaluated the situation, so the person involved is already intimidated. 

When asked about the status of the $500,000 in ARPA money earmarked for a Youth Empowerment Center, Bockelman said that the money had been put into free cash because no suitable location for a center had been found  before the funds had to be allocated. Although some of it has been used for youth programming, he said, most of it is still available to be used in the future. However, he then cautioned that the town has many capital needs, including a need for a senior center, and he doesn’t see the creation of a Youth Empowerment Center as being “imminent.”

Freke Ette asked how CRESS would respond to the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in town. Theriaque said that, as a town department, CRESS cannot interfere with ICE actions, but they could be there to support the family. 

Jennifer Taub asked how the council could work with the CSSJC in the future to implement its recommendations and “to get things moving and not just thank the committee for their work.” 

While admitting that much more needed to be done, Bockelman touted what the town has accomplished in the past three years, which he asserted was as much as any community in the state. He said the town has put in a lot of effort and budgetary support into combatting discrimination. 

CSSJC member Erica Piedade warned that the town is in jeopardy of going backwards with the current freezing of two CRESS positions and the recently added responsibility of DEI department employees to serve as staff liaisons on a number of  town committees. 

Lord then made her motion “that the priorities set and voted on November 14, 2022 continue to be implemented and enthusiastically supported, and we support the Town Manager in getting the CRESS department to be up on dispatch by the end of December, 2025.” 

But Steinberg was concerned about what he saw as fiscal implications of the motion, and used his right to postpone discussion to the next meeting. However, the next scheduled meeting is the Four Towns meeting on the regional school budget (Saturday, November 8). Griesemer suggested several alternative days this week for a special meeting to complete this meeting’s agenda, and the council finally settled on having a special virtual meeting on Friday, November 7 at 4:15 p.m. It was not clear how many members of the CSSJC can attend that meeting.