If you’d been thinking about joining Arcata’s Public Safety Committee, I’ve got some bad news for you. 

The Arcata City Council will consider dissolving the committee at its meeting this Wednesday. There’s only one person on the committee, the Arcata Police Department’s Lt. Luke Scown, who is the committee’s city liaison. It hasn’t met since April 26, 2023. Every meeting since — one every month — has been announced with a little cancellation notice posted to the city’s website. Despite the city’s efforts to attract potential members, no one’s joined. 

The group was created in 2016 to talk about public safety issues and give recommendations to the city council. A sample from the July 2019 meeting: the five members present talked about community courts, posting case workers around higher-crime areas, expanding a neighborhood watch program, and considered inviting then-HSU president Tom Jackson to speak at one of their meetings in the coming months. An Arcata resident called their Safe Arcata plan “a useless 3 pages that has bored him” and said the committee’s focus is “unclear to him.” 

A staff report on the ordinance to nix the committee says that it’s not necessary to keep it because the problems it was designed to cover are addressed regularly through other means, such as city council meetings, study sessions, and continuing coordination between APD, city staff, and elected officials. 

“This approach reflects current practice, in which public safety matters are informed by public input received at Council meetings, engagement between staff and community members, and coordination across City departments,” reads the staff report. “It reinforces the Council’s role in setting policy direction in public meetings and the City Manager’s role in implementing that direction through departmental leadership.”

Lt. Scown told the Outpost that APD Chief Chris Ortega will go into greater detail during Wednesday’s meeting. 

“There’s lots of avenues for people to bring concerns and opinions and thoughts about policing in their community to the government,” Scown said. “There’s all different kinds of channels that are open and available and always have been. We are, probably more so than ever, heavily involved in community groups and do a lot of reaching out and interaction with a lot of different groups throughout the community.”