Council and mayor OK police legislation
Mayor Steve Noble on Wednesday signed police accountability legislation approved by the Common Council the night before. The new law, in part, changes the way members of the Kingston Board of Police Commissioners are appointed and brings transparency to the process by which complaints against police officers are filed and investigated.
The council adopted the legislation during a virtual meeting Tuesday evening. Prior to the vote, members amended the legislation to ensure a subsection dealing with conflicts of interest adheres to the city’s Ethics Code.
“I do want to give much credit to our community and to the public who stayed on us and held us accountable for getting these guidelines passed,” said Alderwoman Rita Worthington, DWard 4. She also thanked the council for being in favor of the legislation and said the measure is “not the entire step, but it is a step in the right direction.”
Worthington said the council and its special policing committee, which she chairs, will continue to work to make the city government as transparent as possible and to foster the relationship between the police and the community.
Noble said in a prepared state
ment Wednesday that the community has “come together to create what I think will be meaningful change.”
“This legislation is a step forward toward transparency and trust, and I look forward to working with the police commission to implement these commonsense changes,” Noble said.
The law establishes new guidelines and practices for police accountability in the city. The guidelines include asking the mayor and members of the Board of Police Commissioners to, in part, make their bylaws more easily accessible to the public and to change the way in which commissioners are appointed. Those changes would encourage diversity among the members of the board and encourage the mayor to seek advice and input from the Common Council about new appointees, according to the legislation.
The power to appoint members to the Board of Police Commissioners remains with the mayor.
The new law also encourages commissioners and any staff they may hire to “participate in a broad range of training annually,” including on the topics of implicit bias and anti-racism; classism, poverty and homelessness; and methods for conducting independent and objective civilian complaint investigations.
Additionally, the law addresses how complaints against police officers can be filed and the process the board will follow to investigate each one. It also calls for the board to publish data on its website each month about how many complaints it received and the disposition of each case.
While the council has not been taking live public comment during its virtual meetings, approximately 60 people wrote to city officials urging that the council adopt the police accountability legislation. One of the writers was Callie Jayne, executive director of the grassroots organization Rise Up Kingston, which brought a proposal for police accountability legislation to the council for consideration more than two years ago.
“When I moved to Kingston four years ago, I was unaware of the patterns of police brutality and misconduct that led to trauma in our communities,” Jayne wrote in an email to the council Tuesday morning. “Person after person came forward to talk about violence, sexual harassment, rape, coercion and more. Children who don’t feel safe because of police officers who work at the school, and a school district that claims they can’t address an issue without the city validating there is an issue.”
Jayne said most of the people were too scared to file a complaint because the system had failed them, which led to Rise Up Kingston being formed. Jayne said community members put in hard work to develop a platform, write legislation and build the community to support their needs.
Jayne urged the council to adopt the police accountability legislation, noting that city lawmakers had the opportunity to be leaders in the state and “start righting the wrongs from centuries of racist policing policies” that have torn communities apart.
Council Majority Leader Reynolds Scott-Childress, D-Ward 3, said it seems a lot of people don’t know Kingston police officers undergo much more training than those in most other police departments, including in areas like implicit bias. He added, though, that the council’s special policing committee plans to address other issues to improve further the way Kingston polices its community and make sure it is safe for everyone.