A very vague police plan
Police Reform and Reinvention plan Mayor de Blasio revealed over the past two weeks ran more than 200 pages in length, included 64 separate proposals and was the product of more than 100 meetings between police officials and community groups. A lot of work that may come to naught.
The de Blasio package, required by all local jurisdictions by April 1 under legislation Gov. Cuomo signed last summer after the George Floyd protests, contains many big ideas but too little detail on how they’ll actually be implemented.
One major problem is the same one that’s bedeviled many of de Blasio’s previous efforts to modify the NYPD. It’s the fact that the NYPD is a massive bureaucracy in existence since 1845, which will continue to exist long after the mayor and City Council members are term-limited out of office. Decades-old, entrenched government doesn’t always change just because the temporary occupant of City Hall says it should.
One of the reform plan’s major goals is that “a culture of transparency and accountability must be cultivated and nurtured” within the NYPD. That goal has often been difficult to achieve, in practice — a problem laid out in devastating clarity in a Department of Investigation report issued in December on the NYPD’s handling of the Floyd protests, which found that an internal culture of secretiveness within the department, and an attitude of resistance to outside oversight that extended to the agency’s highest ranks, was a major obstacle to increasing transparency.
The reform plan suggests the path to a more open NYPD culture, improving relationships between police and community and ending racial bias in policing includes changing the agency’s demographics. The focus is not just the rank and file, which is already diverse, but the department’s policy-making leadership, who are overwhelmingly, disproportionately white. Yet the reform plan sets out no real concrete diversity goals. Instead, the NYPD made a weak commitment to “[overhaul] the discretionary promotions process,” and conduct more racial bias training for police leadership, though studies have shown such trainings have little impact on officers’ behavior.
Another ambitious but mushy proposal aims to end the “poverty to prison” pipeline and decriminalize poverty. That’s a worthy endeavor, but it’s one far beyond the scope of the NYPD alone. We hope the mayor, or his successor, eventually takes aim at other well-meaning government institutions that unfortunately sometimes cause more harm than good — like the Administration for Children’s Services, which too often breaks up families by treating poverty-induced neglect, as abuse.
Other proposals presented demonstrate the limits of City Hall’s power to enact changes. Some would require amendments in state law, like a measure that would dock or forfeit officers’ pensions for egregious misconduct, or allow officers to be suspended without pay for periods longer than 30 days while they’re subject to a disciplinary investigation.
Though the plan leaves much to be desired, the Council should pass it by the April 1 deadline. It won’t radically transform policing, but it will satisfy the state mandate.