The Push for Maplewood’s Police Review Board
How SOMA Action helped create one of suburban New Jersey’s only police oversight groups
by Rose Maura Lorre
The killing of George Floyd at the knee of a Minneapolis cop evoked a deep-seated reckoning on racist policing in America, with countless municipalities around the country demanding structural change -- or even outright metamorphosis -- in law enforcement. The groundswell of support for such transformation may be recent, but actually making it happen often means years of tireless dedication in even the most progressive communities -- as Maplewood’s Community Board on Policing shows. It also shows why that effort is so worth it.
In the early hours of July 5, 2016, a group of nearly 200, mostly Black teenagers made a rowdy exit from Maplewood’s July 4 fireworks. Crowd control by local police devolved into racial profiling and violence; videotape released in 2017 revealed that officers punched, kicked and pepper-spayed victims while herding many of the crowd’s young Maplewood residents over the border into the majority-Black neighboring town of Irvington. The incident led to the dismissal of Maplewood’s police chief and, after almost three years, the creation of the township’s first-ever Community Board on Policing -- one of the only suburban community police review boards in the state. But that incident alone wasn’t enough to propel the board into existence. The most essential step in the early stages? Persistence.
“We went to pretty much every Township Committee meeting for about a year to make sure it stayed on the agenda,” recalls SOMA Action trustee Kelly Quirk, citing several hurdles. “There were questions initially about whether some of the goals for a police review board could get put into the town’s public safety committee, but we felt very strongly that that should not be the case [and that the board should be its own entity]. And as progressive as we are, local government staff and elected officials still have a friendship with the police department.”
SOMA Action partnered with two other local groups, SOMA Justice and Community Coalition on Race, to research police boards’ best practices and envision what Maplewood’s could achieve. Community Board on Police Vice Chair Kasia Piekarz says two objectives were deemed most critical: “One, a clear mandate to review and advise on policy, training and use of data. Two, a focus on community involvement and education.” Piekarz adds, “The laws in New Jersey at the time made it difficult to enact a robust civil board with regards to Internal Affairs involvement. The biggest challenge was to write a charter with enough teeth to guide the work while not subjecting the Township to litigation.”
Court cases involving other New Jersey municipalities, some of which are still pending, prevented a push for access to police personnel records and subpoena power -- despite the fact that Quirk calls the latter “the gold standard of what everyone wants” However, the list of things that can be accomplished by Maplewood’s eight-member board (which includes a non-voting board attorney) is lengthy. “First and foremost, community members can come and bring their concerns about police interaction,” she explains. “The board has access to the video footage in every use of force without needing to sue, in order to review whether the department is complying with the rules. The board can look at data, identify trends related to bias, report out through the community and then serve in coming up with better practices and best practices, identifying training needs and, if necessary, finding funding to get those needs met.” Quirk describes the end result as “literally as close to the line as we can come without getting enjoined in a lawsuit that would prevent the board from getting formed at all… What we’re left with is, we now have better data for the public and we can identify some real trouble spots.”
Both Piekarz and Quirk point to the same proof that the board can and already has brought about significant progress. “Our campaign to raise awareness around racially motivated suspicious-person calls has started critical conversations on implicit bias and its negative impact on people of color in our community,” Piekarz states. As Quirk points out, that effort -- which is only possible because there’s now a community board granted access to police data -- isn’t about “policing the police,” but about confronting white Maplewoodians’ own racial biases. “How many suspicious person calls do police respond to that result in arrest? The answer is: Zero result in arrests,” she says. “That’s a huge community issue… If we really want to improve our relationship with the police, then we need police to not be the person engaging with persons of color for ridiculous reasons. One of the things that came out of that board that’s really clear is, basically, don’t call the police for non-emergency issues.”
With racial injustice now at the forefront of so many Americans’ minds, it’s reassuring that Maplewood already has a community-led authority in place to tackle such issues head-on -- but also a reminder that the board can only be as effective as the community involvement behind it. Says Quirk, “For all of us to sit back and just say, ‘OK, here’s the board, they do their work and I don’t have to pay attention anymore’ -- no, we still have to push the township to act.” Fortunately, Pierkaz reports that “public engagement has soared, leading us to decide to add two more seats to the board. She adds, “Everything we’re doing is meant to improve and reframe our relationship with the town’s BIPOC community. The Board’s existence is predicated on this goal.”