Council accepts police reform report; no action yet

KINGSTON, N.Y. » City lawmakers have met the state’s April 1 deadline by ratifying the report created by a task force charged with examining policing issues in Kingston.

During an online meeting Tuesday, the Common Council unanimously adopted a resolution ratifying the report from Kingston’s Reenvision Public Safety Task Force. Lawmakers noted the ratification merely accepts the report but does not endorse or implement any of the recommendations within it.

“I just want to note that we’re at the beginning here,” said council Majority Leader Reynolds Scott-Childress, DWard 3, “and I look forward to working with everybody in the community, across the entire spectrum of folks with different ideas, different approaches to policing.

“We all need to be in this together,” Scott-Childress said. “We need to listen to each other, and we need to find a way forward together.”

Alderman Tony Davis, D-Ward 6, said the council still needs to discuss which recommendations in the report can be adopted. He also said a lot of time and research went into creating the report, and he thanked the task force members for their work.

Davis, who served as the council’s liaison to the task force, also thanked the Kingston Police Department for what he said its officers already are doing right.

In creating their final report (online at bit.ly/kgnreform), the members of Kingston’s Re-envision Public Safety Task Force each chose a topic to research from four key areas: use of force and accountability; police recruitment, training and morale; community policing; and alternatives to police intervention, according to Mayor Steve Noble’s office.

In his executive summary of the report, Peaceful Guardians Project Executive Director Lester Strong said many of the task force members relied on national data trends in making their recommendations. Out of the 12 task force recommendations, he said, seven seek more accurate and targeted research data. Strong said local data should be analyzed to justify and facilitate the implementation of any initiatives.

“I want the community and the public to know that we’re taking this very seriously,” said Alderwoman Rita Worthington, D-Ward 4. “We’re really looking at these recommendations. Although they’re just being ratified, that doesn’t mean that we’re not going to continue looking at them to see what can be implemented and what cannot be implemented.”

Worthington, who chairs the council’s special police committee, also said she met

with Kingston Police Chief Egidio Tinti and members of the state police prior to Tuesday’s meeting. She said that while there is a lot of work to do to bridge the gap between the community and law enforcement, the police agencies are interested in doing that work.

Alderman Patrick O’Reilly, a nonenrolled voter who represents Ward 7, said the city’s police officers already are above the curve when it comes to raining and attending meetings.

Among the specific recommendations in the task force’s report are working with the city police department to implement annual implicit bias training and creating prescriptive protocols for engagement between law enforcement and citizens to address unconscious bias. There also is a recommendation to create a team of mental health and addiction treatment professionals to respond to emergencies involving a mental health episode or addiction-related incident, as well as recommendations involving changes to the city’s Board of Police Commissioners.

Additionally, there is a recommendation to amend the agreement between the Kingston school district and city police department to specifically state that children will not be subject to criminal prosecution for offenses that represent developmentally appropriate adolescent behavior, even if those behaviors are technically crimes.

Also, the report says, school resource officers should be plain-clothed and not bring firearms to school.

If such an agreement cannot be reached and implemented in practice, the report says, then resource officers should not be used in Kingston schools.