Amanda Letendre is studying to be a social worker in the addiction and recovery field, helping individuals struggling with substance abuse. Throughout her studies, she’s found an unlikely adversary: law enforcement programs that claim to crack down on the use and sale of drugs.
On June 15, the Concord City Council unanimously approved a $106 million budget for fiscal year 2021, including a projected increase of $956,307 in expenses for the police department. Prior to the meeting to approve the budget, dozens of citizens, including Letendre, emailed their concerns to city councilors and Mayor Jim Bouley, urging the city to defund the police and invest in community services instead.
Following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who was killed after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, protests and demands for justice have swept across the country. “Defund the police” has emerged as one of the most powerful statements of the moment, whether it’s drawn on protest signs, chanted at marches, or written in letters to officials.
The word “defund” holds different meanings amongst supporters. Some advocate for eliminating police departments altogether: After massive protests in the wake of Floyd’s death, the city of Minneapolis passed a measure to dismantle its police department and replace it with a department of community safety and violence prevention. Others advocate for downsizing forces and diverting funding to other community services, such as mental health services, affordable housing, and education.
Letendre, a Concord resident, cites programs such as the state’s Granite Hammer anti-drug operation as examples of police intervention creating more harm than good in the lives of individuals. She says that encounters with law enforcement can make it more difficult for individuals struggling with addiction to get the help they need. “When someone actually has a disease – a real, medically proven disease – that doesn’t necessarily need a police officer. A police officer isn’t going to help that person. If anything, it negatively impacts that person,” she said.
Above all, Letendre said that programs like Granite Hammer perpetuate harmful attitudes about addiction. “Having your picture all over WMUR just promotes the stigma that follows people with substance use disorder,” she said.
Jonathan Harrison, who grew up in Rye, is worried by the continued increases in funding and the size of police departments, especially in areas that already have a low crime rate. “If we are arming police officers and are militarizing police stations and police institutions, they’re going to show up and respond with force and violence where it’s not needed,” he said.
Harrison cited the death of Floyd as a case where police should have never even been called. “The police were called over a counterfeit $20 bill. It’s such a minor thing, and for a man to lose his life over that? How do we get there?” Harrison said.
Naomi Collett Ritz, who was raised in Walpole, says that demographics aren’t an excuse for harmful behavior from officers. “Whatever the cause is just because a white officer is not used to dealing with Black people, for example, doesn’t in any way make it okay for him to be making those kinds of mistakes or that kind of profiling in his work,” she said.
Collett Ritz, who has lived and traveled abroad extensively, says her experiences in other countries have demonstrated to her that policing in the U.S. could look different than it currently does. “I’ve seen the way that policing is more of a mechanism for producing safety. That’s not how it feels at home in the States for me. It feels like policing in the U.S. is not only very violent, but they also have so much power and control,” she said. “It feels more like the police are intimidating people and imposing their control through violence and punishment and surveillance.”
Collett Ritz pointed to the small town of Randolph, Vt., where the police force was disbanded in 2018 after officers left for other departments or retired. The town is now covered by the Orange County sheriff’s department, a service that is approximately half the cost of the town running its own department.
Oliver Ward, a student from Peterborough, views New Hampshire’s smaller towns as ideal locations to begin experimenting with alternatives to traditional policing. “Why can’t a small town like ours that doesn’t have that much of an issue [with crime] be a perfect place to start and set a precedent?” he said.
Ward believes it may be more difficult for smaller towns to divert funding from police, simply because fewer resources exist for the money to be diverted to. “Part of our thinking is that a lot of those resources don’t exist because we’ve just used police as a catch all, but we’re trying to move away from that kind of narrative,” he said.
Each community faces its own particular issues, Ward said, making conversations about police funding different in every town. “It’s not an issue where we should just go to the state government and say, ‘Here’s our list of demands, fix these things,’” he said. “You have to approach each town slightly differently, which I personally believe is by design – to increase reliance on policing and make it harder to dismantle.”
Letendre feels that the state government needs to implement change from the top down, although she is disheartened by what she views as skepticism from key players. Despite Gov. Chris Sununu’s formation of his Commission on Law Enforcement Accountability, Community and Transparency to address police misconduct, the makeup of the commission and Sununu’s comments that he does not believe systemic racism is a problem in New Hampshire police departments both make Letendre want to see more from state officials.
Members of the commission include the director of the Police Standards and Training Council, the president of the Manchester NAACP, the executive director of the New Hampshire Commission for Human Rights, and the president of the New Hampshire Association of Chiefs of Police, as well as representatives from civil rights and mental health organizations. However, Letendre took issue with the committee’s makeup, arguing that the members were not representative of the individuals most affected by police misconduct.
“The people that are represented in that task force are not necessarily the people who are affected by police,” she said. “There’s definitely a lack of representation.”
Originally, the Black Lives Matter movement was not represented on the commission at all. Two days after the commission’s formation, Gov. Sununu invited Ronelle Tshiela, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter Manchester, to join the commission.
Despite the continued increase in police budgets across the state, Letendre remains hopeful that police funding will be a central topic in future conversations about racial justice in the Granite State.
“The more that people try to address the issues within the police system with legislators and senators and the governor, in particular, hopefully they’ll realize that there are more than just a handful of people that run the Black Lives Matter organizations in Manchester and Nashua that want this change within New Hampshire,” she said.