PD Editorial: Petaluma is improving its policing

Petaluma, like many communities, is reassessing how police do their jobs. That requires a dispassionate, independent assessment, and now the city has one in hand.

Last year, the city hired an outside firm, IntegrAssure, to take a hard look at law enforcement practices and results. Other communities in the North Bay and nationwide have done similar reviews in response to increased awareness of challenges with law enforcement in the wake of the George Floyd killing and the Black Lives Matter movement. Santa Rosa contracted with an external police auditor that delivered a report last summer. Sonoma County has its Independent Office of Law Enforcement Review and Outreach, which has issued annual reports for six years.

The report on Petaluma’s police overall was good. There were no critical failures, and the department worked with auditors to implement recommendations on issues ranging from officers’ use of profanity to bringing pursuit policies in line with national best practices.

The audit highlighted the department’s willingness to change, noting, “The experience over the past nine months clearly shows that a process of continuous improvement which addresses issues in policing the City of Petaluma in near-real time as those issues are observed through our review process, will serve the City extremely well.”

Other recommendations and improvements are still in the works. Not least is the creation of a public safety advisory group to work in parallel with the audits to improve relationships between the community and police. Petaluma community members will lead that program, which is scheduled to launch later this year after a new police chief is hired.

The auditor also recommended changes to body-worn camera policies that the department accepted, but some community members argued that they still come up short. Turning on the cameras remains optional despite the fact that they can provide a critical accounting of police interactions with the public. The City Council should intervene to make sure that accountability on camera is the norm, not discretionary.

Council members and the public should take heed of some troubling numbers when it comes to the race and ethnicity of people against whom police use force. Last year, white people had disproportionately fewer encounters relative to the racial composition of the community, half of such encounters compared with more than two-thirds of the population. Black and Hispanic or Latino residents, on the other hand, were overrepresented.

The root causes of those disparities remain unclear. Racism certainly could be part of it. Yet the numbers are not so out of whack as to warrant immediate panic. It’s something to monitor and to work on. Additional monitoring and training seem to be obvious next steps.

Petaluma’s contract with the auditor runs for three years with an option to renew for two more. That means that this is only the first such report. Next year’s report will show if the changes already made and the changes to come have made things better. There’s no time to waste in advancing the causes of justice and culturally informed policing.

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