What: Allentown Council Meeting
Date: May 19th and June 2nd, 2021 at 7:00pm
Official Agenda and Recording 5/19
Official Agenda and Recording 6/2
On May 19th and June 2nd Allentown City Council held two very brief and mostly routine meetings (33 min. & 1 hr. 3 min. respectively). Council President Julio Guridy kept up a brisk pace, closing and voting on resolutions and bills almost as soon as he asked for comments and, on June 2nd, dispensing with the roll call by referencing the attendance at the full council contract approval meeting that had taken place just beforehand.
The May 19th meeting fell on the day after the primary election. The three Democratic mayoral candidates defeated by top campaign spender Matthew Tuerk, current Mayor Ray O’Connell and council members Guridy and Ce-Ce Gerlach, were of course present in the council chambers. Right from the opening Invocation, in which Guridy asked Council to “reflect on those who were running”, it was clear that the election was uppermost in the minds of the Council members. Council member Candida Affa noted that “We’re all tired today”. A series of routine bills and resolutions were quickly passed by unanimous votes. The sole exception was R65, a resolution sponsored by council members Ce-Ce Gerlach and Josh Siegel supporting pending state legislation (HB626) to bring police body camera videos under the state’s Right To Know laws. R65 was tabled due to the fact that the Public Safety Committee had voted earlier in the evening to defer action, pending receipt of comment from the Lehigh County District Attorney. The lengthiest statements of the meeting came at the end, under the ‘Good And Welfare’ agenda item, and concerned Tuesday’s election plus the difficulties of running for and serving on City Council in general. All who spoke--Mayor O’Connell and Council Members Guridy, Zucal and Hendricks--congratulated the winning Democratic council candidates, Cynthia Mota, Daryl Hendricks, Natalie Santos and Ed Zucal. Zucal spoke about the stressfulness of running for office and delivered a sort of pep talk addressed to losing candidates, saying that one is bound to lose the first time one runs and urging that they “stay the course’ and “don’t give up”. In what were by far the evening’s longest remarks, outgoing Council President Guridy reiterated Zucal’s comments about the stresses of running for office, talked at length about attending conferences without taking reimbursement, even though “it’s allowed”, spoke of how little Allentown Council members were paid compared to those in Bethlehem, Easton and other cities and said that before he left council he would probably submit a resolution to increase council salaries. Overall, this part of the meeting provided an interesting glimpse of the local political class’s view of itself. With a sense of solidarity based primarily in their shared experience of running for and holding office, they view themselves as selfless public servants. Their self-proclaimed motivations are to do it “for everyone”, “because we want to help” and “because we love the city”. Translating such abstractions into concrete actions is the actual work of politics but apparently this was not the night for that.
A concrete action taken by Council at the June 2nd meeting was the passage of a resolution (R77) approving the hiring of yet another police officer. Yet again the vote was 5-2, with Josh Siegel and Ce-Ce Gerlach voting no, and yet again the new hire was from outside of Allentown, in this case Dakota Martin of Bensalem in Lower Bucks County. Repeating the line taken by Assistant Police Chief Bill Lake at the May 5th Council Meeting, Council Member and ex-police captain Daryl Hendricks commended the staff of the police department for hiring an already certified officer (Martin) “as this saves us a lot of money and time.” “He’s able to go on the street after a very short duration, after learning our laws in Allentown, and he’s immediately available to go into patrol. So, good job.” An aspect of such out-of-town police hiring not mentioned by either Lake or Hendricks is that it means that the introduction of the new officer to Allentown and its citizens will be primarily mediated by their fellow police and that will continue to be the case if they continue to reside outside the city. Surely such circumstances tend to contribute to the us-vs.-them attitudes and codes of silence that pervade police departments nationwide. Such dynamics, and of course the accompanying police violence, led the Black Panther Party, over 50 years ago, to liken the police to an army of occupation. Last year, in the wake of protests over the police killing of George Floyd, Philadelphia City Council passed an ordinance reinstating the residency requirement for new police recruits. The issue came to prominence again after the police killing of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, MN and the revelation that none of the town’s 50 police were residents of the community. While some academics question whether residency requirements affect the quality of policing, perhaps the question should not be whether that or any other band aid reforms exert positive effects on an essentially unreformable institution. Should we instead be asking whether reimagined institutions for public safety that replace the police be run by and for Allentown’s residents? And would a police residency requirement help bring us closer to that goal and/or have other beneficial effects? Arguably such a requirement would at least keep police salary money circulating in the community and might, by slowing the police department’s recruitment roll, help shrink the power that needs to be fought in order to create new institutions that truly ensure the safety of all Allentown’s citizens.