Last year, the Laramie City Council approved the creation of a Police Advisory Board to improve the relationship between the community and the local police force. The board has five civilian members appointed by the City Council and a city council liaison.
According to City Council Liason Sharon Cumbie, the board was created in response to national controversy around use of police force, such as the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and, more locally, Robert Ramirez in Laramie.
“The killing of Robbie Ramirez felt very unresolved to everybody in the community. And they felt like they had not had closure,” said Cumbie. “So the city formed a work group that met twice a month for six months.”
The board’s goal is to engage the community in open conversations about policing. A key priority is to provide transparency in law enforcement procedures and ensure that community members have a place to voice their thoughts.
“The public believes that the police are trying to hide things and that they don't want the public to know what’s going on, but that couldn't be further from the truth,” said Ted Cramer, the board’s chair. “The board has a wonderful, open relationship with the local police.”
That good relationship partly came from the decision to give each member of the board similar ongoing training that police officers get.
“The training that we give them [police advisory board members] is really a synopsis of the longer training that we receive in a 14-week law enforcement academy or criminal justice courses through the University [of Wyoming], and also our on-the-job training,” said Police Chief Brian Browne, who attends every meeting.
The training helped build both formal and informal relationships between the board and the police, and between the members themselves, creating a high degree of trust and good-spirited collaboration even before its first official meeting.
According to Brown, the board works better because Laramie is a small town where relationships are personal and close-knit.
“The benefit of being in a smaller community is that everyone knows someone who's associated with our police department or our Police Advisory Board,” he said.
That atmosphere can be typical of how democracy works at the more local level in the United States. Jane Mansbridge is the author of the book “Beyond Adversary Democracy.” In it she argues that at the local level, people have a shared common interest, which means politics is less adversarial and more about shared interests and friendship. Mansbridge writes that politics at the local level lends to be consensus and cooperation-based. It’s a lot harder to engage in mean or nasty politics when it’s your neighbor you are talking to face-to-face.
One of the board’s focus has been on how the police are trained. A common critique of policing over the last 10 years has been that the emphasis is on training officers for lethal force instills a mindset that the world is extremely dangerous, despite the fact that the vast majority of situations police officers encounter don’t involve any kind of force. This has led to mistakes because officers are being conditioned to constantly expect danger, even though most of their experiences don’t involve such high-stakes threats.
City Council Liaison Sharon Cumbie said that the board and local police have been working on training that is “less militaristic and more about providing safety. They're more conscientious about safety, about de-escalation. They think about what's effective, but less lethal and less harmful.”
According to Cumbie, one of the difficulties the board has been dealing with has been low involvement from the public. She says that she gets feedback through letters both positive and negative but that letters aren’t that common.
To help with this issue of low public engagement, members of the board have recently begun to write op-eds for Laramie newspapers. The hope is these missives will better connect with the community and raise awareness about the board’s role and activities
“[This is] a great way to increase transparency between the board, the police department and the public,” said Board Chair Cramer. “Various members write an op-ed with some sort of topic such as training or history or something like that, putting into words what the board believes and what they would really like the public to understand and to know.”
The board is also expanding where it holds its official meetings to include more easily accessible venues. So far, it has only met at the police station, but going forward it is planning to hold meetings at the University of Wyoming and the Laramie branch of the Laramie County Community College.
