What We Need: The City of Ashland to be a more active partner, do what it can with its employees and platform, and take the steps that only a municipality can take to support this larger work in the community. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, I met with community leaders to identify how the City of Ashland could support our local Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) community, and what needed to be on the long-term agenda to make Ashland the authentically welcoming community I believe we want to be.

Social Equity and Racial Justice Resolution

One of the most meaningful things I’ve done on the Council is drafting the Social Equity and Racial Justice Resolution with former Councilor Dennis Slattery. Unlike typical resolutions, this one had action items and Council members stepped forward to move them forward with staff. In spite of the pandemic, we have made good progress on many of those items, including naming Juneteenth a day of municipal celebration, strengthening the City’s role in celebrations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, updating our hiring and promotion policies to remove implicit bias, and supporting public art that speaks to our community’s commitments. We have also worked with others in Jackson County to improve crisis response for people suffering from mental health issues.

Social Equity and Racial Justice Commission and Financial Investment

Early in 2021, the Council created the Social Equity and Racial Justice Commission to help the City move this work forward. In the lead up to the second year of our two-year budget, we were able to make an initial financial investment in the effort to develop training, incident response, and community acknowledgement programs that help residents and business owners address the long-term, systemic root causes of inequality and racial injustice and celebrate progress.

Addressing Bias

While Ashland holds the value of being a socially equitable, racially just community, we have not yet reached our goals. In a socially equitable society, all people can move freely about a culture free of bias or favoritism. In a racially just society, everyone feels a similar degree of safety and individuals would not be considered more dangerous or likely to break the law than others based on their skin color. Social equity and racial justice are closely linked and must be addressed in tandem.

It’s important in this work to acknowledge that much of the bias that needs to be addressed lives in our subconscious. Those who study the brain are finding that our subconscious brain is a powerhouse, and it holds the reins of our behavior much more than we like to think it does.

We each have an autopilot of sorts inside our head that helps us navigate the world, and that autopilot is programmed by everything we see, hear, feel, touch, and smell from the time we are infants. There is no way to grow up in a country that has not fully faced its “isms” (racism, sexism, etc.) without carrying some amount of bias.

It is also true that bias is not limited to race and gender. Bias can be found related to sexual orientation, age, disability, mental illness, homelessness, etc. We need to do the work of unwrapping this bias and addressing it head-on as individuals and as a community if we are to create an equitable society where everyone feels safe and expects equal treatment.

The City of Ashland has done good work to address social equity and racial justice, and more needs to be done.

The Ashland Police Department regularly trains its officers on implicit bias and procedural justice and was one of the first police departments in Oregon to step forward to start collecting data for the Statistical Transparency of Policing Act passed by the Oregon State Legislature. By doing this, Ashland Police Department begin collecting information about the people being stopped by our officers long before the law required it to.

In the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, former Mayor John Stromberg signed the City of Ashland on to President Obama’s Eight Can’t Wait campaign. As part of that pledge, the Ashland Police Department completed a community survey designed to engage the public and inform ongoing efforts. At the same time, Chief O’Meara completed a review and revision of our policies. The survey results are here.

I have a blog post here that includes more information about that work.

The senseless murder of Aidan Ellison in our community reminds us of the urgent need to continue this work.