Seeing Is Believing - Editorial
We are glad to hear that so many people took advantage of the opportunity to tour the Mashpee Police Station last Saturday, to see the condition of the building themselves ahead of Monday’s Town Meeting vote to appropriate more than $37 million to construct a new one.
Word on the street (read: Facebook) is that last Saturday’s warm rain created the perfect conditions to give the station’s visitors the full, uninhibited picture—“stench” included, as one poster called it.
Discussion of the station’s conditions was a hot topic in the town’s Facebook group. Residents expressed that seeing things for themselves really hammered in how dire the conditions are at the station. One person wrote that they walked into the open house intending to vote no on the upcoming warrant article for a new building, but what they saw “changed everything.”
The department’s decision to open the station up to the community for tours was a good one. We sent our own reporter there a couple of months ago, and she reported many of the same issues that residents attested to seeing themselves on Saturday. We are glad they had the chance to do so because seeing things with your own eyes (and, in this case, smelling the mildew stench with your own nose) is far more powerful than the photos and articles we published.
The issues are numerous: rampant mold and mildew growth, rodent infestations, air quality that is so poor it is making the officers sick, jail cells that fail inspections for not meeting state standards, sewer leaks and burst pipes, just to name a few top of mind. The station’s interview room is not even outfitted with surveillance cameras, which poses a safety issue because interviews going on inside the room cannot be monitored for security by officers outside the room. And what cameras do exist, such as in the cell blocks, are known to cut out at times, rendering them largely unreliable for consistent surveillance.
We applaud those who took the initiative to attend the open house, see the conditions for themselves and make up their own minds. Having an informed citizenry is a crucial part of a healthy democracy, and we are glad to know that so many residents took the opportunity to take in as much information as possible about the issue ahead of Monday’s vote.