A modest proposal, in the civic spirit of the Town of Shelburne
I want to begin by saying, without irony, that Town Clerk Joe Judd is right.
At last week's Selectboard meeting, Mr. Judd proposed a five-member Town Seal Committee to spend the next seven or eight months gathering community input, consulting the Secretary of the Commonwealth's office, and bringing a recommendation to Annual Town Meeting — all to correct a single inaccuracy in the town's official record. The current seal, he explained, gives Shelburne's incorporation date as 1768. The correct date is 1775. Shelburne was organized as a district in 1768 and did not become a town until the Continental Congress bestowed township on thirty-six Massachusetts districts in 1775.
Mr. Judd's stated purpose was not, he was careful to say, necessarily to change the seal. His purpose was that the record be correct. "My sole reason behind this," he told the board, "is that our date of incorporation in the town of Shelburne was actually in 1775."
The Selectboard voted unanimously in favor.
I could not agree more with the principle. When the town's official record contains a documented inaccuracy, the town owes it to itself to convene a transparent, publicly accountable body, take community input, consult the state, and set the record right. A seven-month process and a five-member committee are not excessive. Accuracy in the public record is worth that diligence. It is worth more.
Which brings me to my modest proposal.
If a committee is the correct instrument for correcting the record on a date — a matter that affects no living person, alters no one's safety, and has sat harmlessly on a rubber stamp for two hundred and fifty years — then the Town of Shelburne has established a principle it cannot now abandon: that documented inaccuracies in the official record deserve structured, transparent, publicly accountable review.
I would like to submit, for the committee's consideration, a body of documented inaccuracy of somewhat higher stakes.
The town's official record currently reflects that a formal public records request, filed with the Shelburne Police Department and acknowledged by the Records Access Officer, went effectively unanswered for the better part of a year. It reflects a sergeant's own written policy that he would no longer make contact with the subject of complaints because doing so "hadn't worked in the past" — a documented decision to process complaints one-sidedly. It reflects reports signed and forwarded to a show-cause hearing that ended in a No Probable Cause ruling by the clerk magistrate, filed by officers who never investigated and never met the accused. It reflects, in a separate matter, a federal finding — arrived at by federal investigators, not local ones. It reflects a departmental merit increase awarded thirteen days after a court declined to grant an officer qualified immunity.
I do not offer these as legal conclusions. Every finding referenced above is the finding of a sitting judge, a state office, or the department's own paperwork. I offer them as exactly what Mr. Judd offered the Selectboard: a documented inaccuracy — or rather, a documented pattern of non-action — in the town's official record, of the sort a conscientious municipality convenes a committee to examine.
So I ask, in complete good faith and in the civic spirit Mr. Judd himself modeled last week:
Where is that committee?
If Shelburne can find seven months, five volunteers, and the Secretary of the Commonwealth's telephone number for the incorporation date on a seal, it can find the same for the conduct of the armed men it employs. If community input is the right mechanism for the town's stamp, it is the right mechanism for the town's police. If the standard is that the official record must be correct — and Mr. Judd has now established, by unanimous vote, that it is — then the standard does not get to apply only to the safe, the symbolic, and the two-hundred-and-fifty-years-dead.
The seal committee is a fine idea. It is such a fine idea that it should not be wasted on the seal.
I'll bring my own documentation. I have a good deal of it — reports, dockets, rulings, correspondence, all of it sourced, much of it already public. I'll consult the state; I have been consulting the state for some time. I would welcome five neighbors and a transparent process. I would welcome, frankly, anyone in town government willing to apply to a citizen's safety the diligence they were willing, last week and unanimously, to apply to a date.
You said you'd love to be part of that group, Mr. Judd. So would I.
How about it?
The petition for an independent investigation of the Shelburne Police Department is available here:
change.org/p/petition-independent-investigation-of-the-shelburne-police-department-ma
Every claim in it is sourced to a report number, docket, court order, or named witness. None of it is a legal conclusion. All referenced findings are those of sitting judges and state offices. — J.F.S.