Police reform needs more voices
All hope for “reinvented” policing in Albany now rests with the Common Council. Following an unenthusiastic vote to accept a deficient plan submitted by the mayor’s office, the Common Council president vows to deliver a transformative reform package that will look at policing in the city of Albany “in a different way.”
On March 15, the council passed a resolution adopting the “City of Albany Policing Reform and Reinvention Collaborative” report. In so doing, the council assured the city’s compliance with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Executive Order 203. That mandate, issued in the wake of national protests over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, states, “Urgent and immediate action is needed to eliminate racial inequities in policing.”
As required, Albany’s administration formed a collaborative to develop a plan for reinvented policing. Unlike other communities, all members of the Albany Collaborative were appointed by the mayor and police chief. Excluding from the outset some organizations particularly respected by Albany’s communities of color (such as the NAACP and Center for Law and Justice), the administration inexplicably appeared mystified by its inability to engage the community later on in the process. Despite their exclusion, several trusted community voices (including CFLJ) contributed extensively to the process.
Collaborative members did everything the city asked of them. They are to be commended for the tireless effort and countless hours they volunteered to produce a thorough set of recommendations, many of which could provide a solid foundation for the transformative change envisioned in Executive Order 203. Sadly, the “plan” submitted by the administration does not include all the collaborative’s recommendations.
The city’s document includes two parts. The first part contains what the administration calls “action items” — those collaborative recommendations the administration intends to pursue. The second part contains the full reports of the five collaborative working groups, including recommendations the administration has chosen not to designate “action items.”
The “plan” fails to reinvent policing, and is an absolute affront to Albany’s communities of color. The Common Council voted for the resolution to adopt the inadequate plan because, as several council members stated, they feared losing state funding if the city missed the April 1 deadline.
The sad reality is that while the city may have faced financial penalty if it did not adopt a plan by April 1, there are no consequences for submitting a plan promising little change — as made clear by representatives of the Governor’s Office of Public Safety at a Government Law Center seminar in February. Any plan submitted with the certification form signed by the mayor will suffice to satisfy Executive Order 203.
As the Times Union reported, “The resolution the council backed on Monday took issue with the lack of public input in the process, the timeline for some of the proposed reforms and the lack of information on who is responsible for seeing the reforms into action.” From the time the council first received the document, organizations with constituencies of color registered concerns.
The NAACP said that the administration’s handling of the process “sends a message that community input is neither valued nor expected.” The Capital Area Council of Churches said the plan “does not present the City’s vision of future policing and public safety in Albany, nor how it will rebuild trust in impacted communities of color.” People also raised concerns at a South End Community Collaborative meeting.
As CFLJ has noted, through the use of equivocal language, the city actually commits to very little change at all. The city says it will “take into consideration” or “take under advisement” or “take into account” collaborative recommendations. This allows the city the option of later “considering” any truly transformative recommendation and eventually rejecting it — and taking as much as three years to do so in some cases.
Some collaborative working group chairs requested (apparently to no avail) an explanation for the exclusion of collaborative recommendations from the plan. At the March Common Council meeting, Chief City Auditor Dorcey Applyrs said she would request that key recommendations of the police department racial bias audit, conducted by an independent research group, be added to the plan.
Very few people in Albany appear to be aware that a plan even exists. Neither Mayor Kathy Sheehan nor Police Chief Eric Hawkins has made a single public presentation of the plan to the people of Albany, either in person or virtually. Common Council members questioned why the administration did not attend their March meeting to present the report and answer questions.
The administration’s “plan” adopted by the Common Council lacks vision, clearly articulated goals and objectives, and a meaningful timeline. Reassuringly, however, the council concludes its resolution with the following statement: “Be it, finally resolved, that the Common Council adopts the plan as presented from the Mayor’s Office with the understanding that this is the initial step in making formative changes to policing and recognizing that the plan is not fully comprehensive and there will be various recommendations and changes to current policy that will continue to be identified and will result in additional legislation.”
The Common Council has recently passed three local police reform laws, and Albany’s communities of color are counting on the council to continue their work to reinvent policing in our city. CFLJ stands ready to assist because, as proclaimed in the council’s resolution, Black Lives Matter.
▶ Alice Green is the executive director of the Center for Law and Justice.