Melinda Pellerin-Duck was getting ready for a Christmas party when she got some unwelcome news via a message left on her cell phone by a reporter: She was out of a job.
If Pellerin-Duck was a bit unnerved by the way she got the news, she wasn't surprised by it. Just a few months earlier, she had left her job as a Springfield school teacher to accept a $60,000 position from Mayor Charlie Ryan as coordinator of the city's new Community Complaint Review Board. The board was charged with reviewing civilian complaints against the Springfield Police Department and serving as a liaison between the public and the SPD, which over the years has faced charges of excessive force and abuse, particularly against African-Americans and Hispanics.
Not long after, in a shocking upset, Ryan lost the mayor's seat to City Councilor Dom Sarno, and Pellerin-Duck suspected her days were numbered. She'd been a strong supporter of Ryan. And in a speech she gave at a campaign event last summer for City Council candidate Karen Powell, Pellerin-Duck urged the crowd, "When you're selecting your elected officials, think about those people who were responsible for getting us in this economic mess. Some of these same people are sitting on the City Council now or are running for mayor." Looking back at that not especially veiled criticism of Sarno, Pellerin-Duck said, "I assume that may be part of the reason" the new mayor dumped her from the job.
But while she can accept losing her job, Pellerin-Duck can't accept the fact that the review board has been virtually invisible under the Sarno administration. She's not alone. After more than six months of waiting, residents and some city officials are demanding answers for why the board has been inactive. And the responses they're getting from the mayor's office are far from satisfying.
Pellerin-Duck's firing was the first sign that Sarno might not be taking the review board as seriously as many hoped. After taking office, he announced that his chief of staff, Denise Jordan, would take over the coordinator's role, in addition to her other responsibilities, bumping her pay up by $20,000, to $75,000. While Sarno touted the savings of this move, Ryan warned that the job was too big to be handled on a part-time basis, and noted that other cities with similar boards have full-time coordinators. Sarno also apparently dismissed several board members appointed by Ryan, as reported last week by blogger Bill Dusty (www.springfieldintruder.com).
By February, Councilor Jose Tosado was pressing Sarno about the board's inaction; at the time, Sarno assured the Springfield Republican, "It's something we take seriously. … It's not on the back burner at all." Five months later, Tosado is again pointing out the minimal progress made by the board and asking Sarno to appoint a full-time coordinator. In response, Jordan issued a statement to the Republican in which she claimed the board has been meeting regularly since April, although apparently without any public notice. (Board member Carol Lewis-Caulton, a Ryan appointee, told the Advocate the board has met three or four times under Sarno and had a meeting scheduled this week.)
In her statement, Jordan added, "We are setting the groundwork and I have no intention of moving hastily simply to satisfy the timeline of others." But according to Pellerin-Duck, much of that groundwork had already been done under the Ryan administration. The board had developed a mission statement and begun work on training, she said, and she'd given all that information to Jordan in January. Pellerin-Duck had also started the outreach aspect of the coordinator job, meeting with community groups and preparing a brochure explaining the review process—something, she said, Jordan has failed to do.
Sarno's office did not respond to an interview request from the Advocate.
The review board's inactivity raises serious legal questions. The board was created as part of a settlement resulting from a complaint filed in 2004 by the city's Pastors' Council on behalf of Douglas Greer, a school principal who said he was roughed up by city cops who came across him when he was having a medical seizure and apparently thought he was on drugs. In an agreement overseen by the Mass. Commission Against Discrimination, Greer won $180,000 from the city, which also agreed to create the review board to replace the Police Commission, which had been disbanded a few years earlier.
Attorney Perman Glenn had served as Greer's attorney; he's also representing Louis Jiles, an 18-year-old Springfield man who was shot in the wrist by a city cop earlier this month. According to the police, Jiles drove away when police tried to stop him for running a red light; when they did catch up with him, officers mistook a beer bottle he was holding for a gun and fired. While District Attorney Bill Bennett declined to pursue charges against either the shooting officer, Stephen Hill, or Jiles, the SPD is conducting an internal review, and Glenn has asked for an investigation by the Justice Department.
In an interview last week, Glenn said a civilian review board is crucial because the city's existing review process—an internal review by the SPD—is "a sham."
Glenn suspects that politics may be behind Sarno's lack of urgency about getting the board functioning. "Mayor Sarno has these close ties to the Springfield police," said Glenn. "They supported him, so now he's supporting them. This is why it's important to have a real citizens' review board."
"The issue is that the city of Springfield is turning a blind eye to what the police are doing," Glenn added. "When you have that kind of indifference, that could amount to a civil rights violation."
Pellerin-Duck, meanwhile, is disappointed to see the lack of progress by the board. "[A functioning review board] only creates a positive relationship between the community and the police," she said. "It's win-win proposition. And to push that aside—it's outrageous."
mturner@valleyadvocate.com
