Pace of police reform at issue
Black Lives Matter says changes coming too slow, apology necessary
SARATOGA SPRINGS — For the past year, the city’s Police Reform Task Force and Saratoga Black Lives Matter have been asking Commissioner of Public Safety James Montagnino to implement all 50 points in their Reform and Reinvention Plan.
But after 14 months in office, advocates for police reform have lost patience and are now demanding Montagnino move more quickly to enact recommendations. “I’m deeply disturbed,” Daesha Harris, a member of the Police Reform Task Force told the City Council last week.
Montagnino, however, says the city has moved on most of the recommendations designed to improve police culture, policies, training, transparency and accountability. He pointed to the controversial Civilian Review Board that was seated last month, as well as the commitment to transparency that he demonstrated when he publicly released the police body cam videos from a Nov. 20 shootout on Broadway.
“Over the last year and a quarter, there has been significant change,” Montagnino said on Thursday. “Not only personnel and command staff level, but also the way things are done.”
But Saratoga Black Lives Matter leader Lexis Figuereo said Montagnino and the city are falling short; for example, the Civilian Review Board has been formed, but they don’t have a manual in place to define its operation.
“Based on my analysis, there are 25 to 30 points that haven’t been started at all,” Figuereo said.
Montagnino challenged that assertion, saying many of the points are in still in progress — such as state accreditation for the department, which should be awarded by the end of the summer. He also said he plans to release a report, with data on police actions and demographics, by next week, another point in the reform plan.
Yet he also admits there are other items in the 50-point plan that he finds problematic, such as those listed in Section Three: Community-centered Reinvention.
He says it’s impossible for the city to hire social workers or mental health counselors to respond to certain 911 calls, and the city has not invested funds in a program to pull away from police involvement during a behavioral health crisis. Nor, he said, has the city developed a program to reduce arrests of those without homes or those who are mentally ill.
“We can’t do that at the local level,” Montagnino said. “That would have to come from the (Saratoga) County because the Department of Social Services would be the folks with social workers in their employ. But what we have been doing is training officers in crisis response. We have trained nine officers in crisis response.”
Other items, such as banning no-knock warrants, Montagnino said he opposes because on a rare occasion, a no-knock warrant is necessary if it is believed that the people on the other side of the door are heavily armed. Such cases might involve allegations of large-scale drug sales, something Saratoga sees little of, he said.
However, the department has banned chokeholds, a state requirement in the Eric Garner Anti-chokehold Act passed in New York in 2020.
Figuereo said he is happy the police will no longer restrain people with chokeholds, but he is distressed that Montagnino won’t swear off no-knock warrants.
“Research shows they are dangerous to all the people involved, including police,” he said.
Other items Montagnino is balking at include the creation of a Community Centered Justice Initiative, which would include creating a strategic plan and incorporating plan violations into an officer’s performance evaluation. The commissioner said that would require a renegotiating of the union contract. But he said training on restorative justice practices will happen.
Overall, a point-by-point review with the Times Union shows that the city has addressed many of the sections that cover culture and training, policies, and transparency and accountability. But the city remains lacking on community involvement action and repairing relationships with the Black community.
Montagnino said putting school resource officers in the elementary schools, a controversial move, constitutes outreach.
Also distressing for advocates of reform is how the 50 points, adopted by the previous City Council on March 31, 2021, were rewritten by then-city Attorney Vincent Deleonardis to elminate item No. 1, which was an acknowledgement and apology to the community about systemic racism built into American policing because the Police Reform Task Force wrote “acknowledging harm is the first step in the reconciliation process.”
Figuereo said that piece remains vital, particularly when the city’s police force remains under investigation by the state Attorney General’s office Civil Rights Bureau for its treatment of Black activists and the city still faces a wrongful death suit in the case of Darryl Mount, a 21-year-old biracial man who died after a 2013 police foot chase.
“That was No. 1,” Figuereo said. “The city cannot move forward in a real way until they address it. They haven’t done that at all.”