‘Nothing’ doing on NYPD reform
Seven months after Gov. Cuomo mandated local governments reform their police departments, the NYPD has dominated those efforts and in the process has limited community input, advocates charged Monday.
Cuomo issued an executive order in June requiring reforms as protests of the killing of George Floyd roiled the Big Apple.
As an incentive to have reform plans submitted by the order’s April deadline, Cuomo threatened to halt state police funding to cities that don’t submit plans on time — a proviso he doubled down on Monday in his State of the State address.
“Seven months later, New York City has made no progress toward a police reform plan informed by community input,” Legal Aid Society attorney Corey Stoughton said in written testimony submitted at a City Council hearing Monday. “Community stakeholders were convened and then disbanded. Efforts by community organizers and stakeholders to build trust and revive the process have been ignored. Drafting of the plan appears to have been turned over entirely to police leaders.”
The city’s Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative is being led ostensibly by First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan.
Cuomo’s reform order requires input from the communities most affected by policing, but Stoughton described the city’s efforts to include community voices as mostly for show.
She said that in-person invitations to NYPD “listening sessions” were limited to police allies and that many people who wanted to attend were “relegated to online participation” with their questions carefully filtered.
“An operations plan was meant to have been issued by September of last year, stakeholders were to have been convened in the early autumn, collaborative drafting was to have taken place in November and December, and a public comment period was contemplated to launch this month,” she testified. “None of this has happened. For months, the mayor’s office did nothing.”
Thomas Giovanni, a deputy executive assistant at the city’s Law Department, suggested that the process of hammering out reform proposals has changed since its inception in the summer and now includes more community input.
“I think you will see a difference between early engagement and the recent engagement,” he said. “We continue to adjust our engagement based upon what we’re hearing.”
Councilwoman Adrienne Adams, who heads the Council’s Public Safety Committee, wasn’t buying it though, and questioned why the NYPD was put in the position of spearheading an effort to reform itself.
“Respectfully, it was NYPD that actually announced this, rolled this out,” she said. “Why has the NYPD hosted all the meetings so far?”
Giovanni responded that it would be “inappropriate” to “interpose” another entity between the police and the people concerned with how they’re doing their job.
“They do need to be in the room. They do need to be hearing the information directly from community members,” he said. “They do not need to be in total control of this process, and they are not.”