No one can walk unannounced into a public school in Northampton. Nor can someone appear in a courtroom in the city without passing first through a security screening.
These measures are commonplace today to protect people doing the public’s business.
With that backdrop, Mayor David Narkewicz is pursuing a wise and measured plan to enhance the safety of employees in City Hall and other nearby buildings at a negligible cost to taxpayers.
The city will spend about $800 to place unseen “panic buttons” in places where employees can summon help in the event of a problem with a visitor.
The plan seems in keeping with the tenor of public life in western Massachusetts. And yet it serves no one to believe tragedy would never strike here.
Across the country, cities are adding security systems that will make their entryways resemble airport check-in areas. Phoenix; Buffalo, New York; Cincinnati; and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, are just four U.S. communities installing metal detectors at considerable expense to make it hard, if not impossible, to bring weapons into municipal offices and pose a threat to public safety.
The city of San Francisco stepped up its City Hall security after a protest in May against police department leadership resulted in dozens of arrests and $20,000 in damage. That California city already employed metal detectors to screen visitors. Now, large packages that had been examined by hand will be sent through an X-ray device, just as they are at airports, before being allowed into the building.
And here in Massachusetts, Cambridge is moving to improve security in its civic buildings, according to the Cambridge Day website. That community’s plan does not include metal detectors, but will provide, at a cost of more than $2 million, the ability to control access to buildings through remote locking systems.
According to news accounts of these developments, cities are acting because their employees were worried – and wanted them to improve security. Recent mass shootings in Orlando, Florida, and San Bernardino, California, are cited as factors as cities upgrade security.
In that context, what Narkewicz plans is modest indeed.
The mayor says he’s heard from employees made nervous by encounters with angry visitors to City Hall. He or others have had to call police. It doesn’t happen often, the mayor said. But it does happen.
As the Gazette reported recently, the towns of Amherst and Hadley may also be considering security enhancements at their town halls.
People who work in these public spaces deserve to feel they can do their jobs without undue risk.
Across the country, municipal leaders speak of performing a balancing act when it comes to stepped-up security measures. They do not want to create fortresses that discourage public participation in government. But they need to respond to what their workers are telling them. Northampton’s plan should help City Hall staffers feel that when they need help, it will come quickly.
The new emergency buttons will be placed in offices that handle the heaviest volume of inquiries from the public. Work to install them will be folded into a project to rewire the City Hall phone system.
The “panic buttons” will be out of the sight of visitors, but not at all out of mind for employees. And that’s the point.