Panel to interview police hires
Schenectady chief credits activist with idea for vetting process
In a bid to weed out bad apples, the city police department has over the past few years toughened its hiring standards to include a psychological evaluation and polygraph test, as well as police officials contacting former college professors to learn more about a potential hire.
The already rigorous vetting process will now also include police recruits and new hires appearing before a five-member panel of people who live and work in the Electric City.
Police Chief Eric Clifford credited William Rivas, a community activist, with coming up with the community advisory panel that Clifford touted as the first of its kind pilot program in the country.
Initially, Clifford tapped three people to serve on the
community panel but expanded it at Rivas’ suggestion to include an former felon and another person who — through their job — knows what is happening on the city ’s streets.
“I think by adding this panel to our hiring process, it’s giving us one more piece of information to use in our assessment... and my hope is that it will allow us to choose candidates for appointment here that the community will embrace more knowing there’s representation in the hiring process from the community,” Clifford said.
“We wanted to get ordinary citizens that may or may not have had interaction with the police as a part of this panel.”
The chief said he wants the panel, currently two women and three men who are all Black, to be expanded to include people of Guyanese and Caribbean descent (specifically Trinidad and Tobago), as well as include a members of the Indian and Hispanic community so the command staff can observe everything from that candidate’s body language, to their interaction with someone who may not look like them.
A white man looking to transfer from a different police department was the first person to recently meet with the panel in a spacious room that allowed for social distancing as police brass looked on virtually from a different room.
The chief said the wideranging discussion, based on questions formulated by the panel reviewed beforehand by Clifford, included the man’s upbringing in Schenectady and the Black Lives Matter movement.
“There was a little bit of a concern that this was being put together to be nothing more than a show and I was assured that it was not and that their input did matter,” said Clifford, adding that he gave the panelists the options to make recommendations good and bad to him about the candidate in writing. “That’s really what this panel is all about, getting the input of the community before we hire candidates, to see how they ’re going to react and work in the community.”
The candidate, who later acknowledged to Clifford “that it was better than I thought it would be, but I still felt like I was in the hot seat,” passed muster and was ultimately offered the job. Clifford said that was intentional so the man could get a feel for what people of color feel when they walk into a room of predominantly white people.
The chief said he’s hoping to double or triple the size of the panel to have a pool of community members to draw from when the department resumes hiring.
Rivas said Wednesday that inspiration for the idea came from the work in the field that he and other community activists are engaged in to make a difference in the inner city.
Rivas said he felt they were able to have an open and productive conversation with the police officer candidate.
He said panelists are interested in how a person will engage with the community, their experience with police growing up, and the community ’s expectations.
“If you’re going to be coming into my community to work with my people and to do a job, then we need to let you know these are our expectations of how our people need to be treated,” he said.
Rivas said the candidate had some questions for the panel members. “They get to know the different organizations, they get to know the different agencies and the people in the community,” Rivas added.
Rivas said in anticipation the officer might have prepared responses to their questions, the group politely made it clear up front for the officer to keep it real, “which is why what we were able to do is really break down the barriers and just have a genuine conversation.”
Rivas said he shared his experiences of growing up in Schenectady and being involved in a gang and chased by police.
“We expressed the fact that we don’t like seeing police brutality, we don’t like seeing people of color shot and killed — we explained these things and by doing that we got to a point where everybody put the nonsense away,” Rivas added.
“This is us setting a tone, saying we’re not asking for a seat at nobody else’s table, we’re going to create out own table, we’re going to tell you ‘this is what we’re expecting from you,’ so now what’s going to happen is that if officers know before they take the oath and get hired in Schenectady, that they have to go through William Rivas and all these other panel members, they ’re going to really think twice before even applying.”
Assistant Police Chief Michael Seber said Wednesday during the gathering that the department provided some guidance to the panelists because of potential liability issues that make certain questions off-limits.
Clifford said the panel will undergo some formal training.
Robert Worden with the Finn Institute of Public Safety in Albany said one area police brass could look to standardize is when it comes to the grading system or scores panelists give to the interviewees.