Committee Meeting: Why a Police Presence?
On March 20, 2014, a citizens advisory committee (CAC), created in conjunction with Ann Arbor’s sanitary sewer wet weather evaluation study (SSWWES), met at Slauson Middle School. Two Ann Arbor police officers were present.
File photo of Robert Czachorski of OHM Advisors, the consultant that the city hired to conduct a study of flows in the sanitary sewer system during wet weather. The photo was taken by The Chronicle at the Feb. 13, 2014 meeting of the citizens advisory committee. No police officers attended that meeting.
According to sources at the meeting, the two officers sat at the back of the room for the duration of the meeting.
Part of the backdrop to March 20 included the removal of a resident from the committee on the day before the meeting. The series of events leading up to the expulsion included several email exchanges dating from a Feb. 13 meeting of the committee, when the group reviewed “group norms” for committee work.
Occasionally, AAPD officers will attend Ann Arbor city council meetings. So it’s not unprecedented for the AAPD to have a presence at a public meeting.
Still, in The Chronicle’s five years of covering Ann Arbor government, a police presence at a citizens advisory committee meeting counts as unusual.
To get additional insight into the issue, The Chronicle sent city administrator Steve Powers some questions about the tasking of the two police officers for the March 20 CAC meeting. More background and the answers from Powers are included below. [Full Story]
