WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — One year ago today, it is a fair guess that most Williamstown residents had never heard of Police Sgt. Scott McGowan, or, if they had, they'd forgotten the name.

 

All that changed on Aug. 12, when McGowan's attorney released to the public a federal lawsuit he had filed against the police chief, town manager and the town as a whole.

 

The specific issue in the lawsuit was whether McGowan was the victim of retaliation against a whistleblower when he was passed over for promotion to lieutenant.

 

What captured the attention of the community were the disturbing tales of misconduct on which McGowan claims to have blown the whistle over the course of about 10 years.

 

Eventually, in December, the lawsuit was dropped after the then chief of police announced he was leaving the town's service.

 

What never disappeared were the allegations raised in the lawsuit — including a WPD officer harassing a female resident in her home and lying about it to the state police, the chief participating in inappropriate sexual behavior at the station, an officer for years keeping a photo of Adolph Hitler in his locker and a dispatcher using the "n-word" in the presence of a Black Williams College student visiting the station.

 

Eventually, the lawsuit's fallout led to the departure of the town manager, in addition to the police chief,  and a town-funded investigation into the allegations that continues to this day. Those allegations continue to be principal talking points in any town discussion about police accountability and structural racism.

 

As the anniversary of the lawsuit arrives on Thursday, iBerkshires.com asked three people at the center of those discussions — the interim police chief, the chair of the Select Board throughout most of the last year and a civic leader who has served on the town's Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Equity Committee and who, professionally, is Williams College's assistant vice president for campus engagement and vice president for institutional diversity, equity and inclusion — to share their thoughts about the lawsuit's impact and the current state of the town.

 

Select Board member Jane Patton, who served as chair from June 2020 through June of this year, shares her insights.

 

Question: One year after the lawsuit came out, has the town changed, and has the change been for better or worse?

 

Patton: I think, as with most things, it's some of both, which is probably not a great answer.

 

Q: How better?

 

Patton: I think it has made people more aware of not only things that pertain directly to the lawsuit but just more aware in general. You don't know what weight people carry with them in terms of their experiences and how that forms and shapes and impacts them. It's awfully easy to assume that if you love Williamstown, everybody loves Williamstown.

 

What it brought out for me is that Williamstown is different to each individual in how they experience it. You can probably cluster people who have 'this experience' of Williamstown and another group that has a different experience and another that has one that is 180 degrees different. [The discussion of the last year] helps the town be aware it's not all the same things to every single person.

 

Q: How worse?

 

Patton: I think that one is super nuanced and related to the [COVID-19] pandemic. The whole thing is like a perfect storm. To have any one of these things happen individually is significant. To have them happen simultaneously is extraordinary. I can't help but think that if all the meetings we had were in person, some form of healing may have begun sooner.

 

The first in-person meeting [the Select Board] had, we were in Town Hall, and that was fine, but it was cramped and crowded and it was hard to see people's faces. At [Williamstown Elementary School on July 26], you could see body language. When I said my ribs hurt [from a fall at work just before the meeting], a resident gave the heart sign.

 

I could see people nodding their heads in agreement and shaking their heads in disagreement. All those forms of non-verbal feedback, having that three-dimensional experience, especially after the nightmare meetings on Zoom, was lovely.

 

Now, of course, who knows what's going on in terms of what we have to go back to because of what's happening with COVID.

 

Q: You think the forum of virtual meetings impacted the kind of discourse we saw?

 

Patton: It's easy to sit behind a screen in the comfort of your own home and lash out.

 

Q: Almost like watching a sporting event?

 

Patton. Yeah. I think there were all kinds of things said that were meant to be hurtful. I don't mind people asking me to have uncomfortable conversations. But I don't enjoy people who enjoy being hurtful. And I felt like there was an amount of that.

 

I don't want this to be all about me, but the nights when I would go straight from [the Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Equity Committee] at 5 to the Select Board at 7 and finish at 10:30 or 10:45, I was just emotionally exhausted. I spent a lot of time criticizing myself for how I could have handled all of that better.

 

Q: Does the virtual meeting, where each member of the board has a camera on them all the time and sort of spotlighted all the time require you to try to keep a poker face throughout in a way that you might not in a room full of people? The Select Board was criticized for not showing empathy and appearing to be too passive in the face of pretty emotional comments from community members at its meetings.

 

Patton: That's, again, where you can't see people's body language. For me, when I'm upset and trying to maintain composure, I wring my hands, and you can't see that on Zoom.

 

One of the most impactful moments for me that I really had to maintain my composure and not cry was when Arlene [Kirsch] told her story about her family and the Holocaust, and you realize there are people who lost relatives. That goes back to: You don't know what people are carrying. That was a very crystalizing moment for me. There's no way I would know this if I just spoke to her on the streets. That was probably the point, consciously or unconsciously, that I felt, 'I have to let everyone tell their stories.' Telling the story, I believe, has some restorative component to it.

 

When you're sitting there and people are saying, 'What's wrong with you?' or what have you, our job is to be completely objective — whether it's Arlene telling her story or someone telling you how much you suck at your job. I did work very hard at just trying to maintain a neutral expression because I don't have much of a poker face. My face is very expressive.

 

Q: Was it also difficult adding to that the fact that the Select Board had access to information it could not divulge because of personnel confidentiality or being actively involved in litigation?

 

Patton: The harder thing was the times people were saying things and repeating things that were not true and the balance between … Jane, non-selectperson, would be, 'Geez, that's just not true. Not only is it not true, but I went out of my way privately to explain why it's not true because I could see it was causing you pain, and you acknowledged the reasons why. And you're back the next week saying the same thing.'

 

That's where I was trying to maintain my composure. There were a number of things that were said about circumstances or about us or any of our colleagues that were fundamentally untrue that just kept being repeated.

 

Q: June and July of 2020, there was obviously a lot of conversation nationally and locally about policing in America. Did it feel to you like that conversation was directed at the local police or did the release of the lawsuit on Aug. 12 make it a local discussion in a way it hadn't been before?

 

Patton: In that [June 22, 2020] meeting, what struck me was — while there was not specificity related to the lawsuit — there were several generalities about anti-Semitism, sexual assault, racism, and they were talking about this directly in relation to Williamstown. I, for one, was caught off guard by that. It was kind of like, 'Wait, what? We need to find out what's going on.'

 

That's what drove creating DIRE and creating that space for people to be able to talk about these things in a safe place. … Probably the biggest disappointment was that DIRE had one or two meetings, and then the lawsuit dropped. And the very hopeful, at least for some, vision of what DIRE could be and could do got dramatically impacted by the lawsuit.

 

That would have been the time [for the town manager] to say, 'Hey, there's this thing hanging out there.'

 

Q: This thing that none of the five people on the Select Board knew about.

 

Patton: I still shake my head. … I know how it happened. I'm baffled why it happened the way it did.

 

Q: Did it feel at times during the aftermath of the lawsuit that residents were asking the five of you [on the Select Board] to do more than you could?

 

Patton: On a scale of one to 10? About 1,000.

 

People don't realize how a Select Board in a strong town manager system works. There are times, even as a Select Board member, when you're like, 'Oh, wait, I have no say over this.' As the Select Board chair, other than setting the agenda and reading the Arbor Day proclamation … you really have no power.

 

We probably could have asked a whole lot more questions. That's my personal takeaway: I'm going to drill down, look for more clarity, say, 'Help me understand what exactly does that mean.' I think there were times when the Select Board, because for a lot of years the town ran smoothly and the bond rating was high, thought everything was good.

 

That will be part of the town manager search. What we ask of the next town manager — we get that the town manager is the hiring authority for the next police chief, but we want more transparency. I want to know if there's an officer disciplined for something. Whoever is on the Select Board, the biggest lesson for me is you've got to ask more questions. You can't say, 'This person is super smart, so we're going to go along with what he or she says.'

 

Q: This gets a bit far afield from the lawsuit anniversary, but one of the things that has grown out of all those discussions is the suggestion that the town move away from the strong town manager model. Is that something you think needs to happen?

 

Patton: I think every now and then you should stop and take stock of where you're at and how things are working. … A great merchant said to me once in my marketing career, 'You put more on the floor of what works and less on the floor of what doesn't.' So you're constantly reviewing.

 

I know it's a huge undertaking [to change the form of government] because it would take a change to the town charter. I don't know that I'd immediately jump to that.

 

But, as a starting place, I'd say to the new town manager, 'Yes, this is a strong town manager form of government. Yes, the Police Department reports to you. But you report to the board.' And we've learned the hard way what can happen when the town manager is not completely transparent and forthright, and if you as a potential town manager cannot handle a Select Board that wants to understand what's going on and does not want a situation like August 2020 to ever happen again, if you're not interested in that, then this is not the job for you.

 

This is the second in series of three articles reflecting on how the lawsuit last year affected the community. Acting Police Chief Michael Ziemba's Q&A can be found here and former DIRE committee member Bilal Ansari's here.