Taking a Closer Look at Systemic Reform in Tompkins County
ITHACA, N.Y. — Following an executive order from Governor Andrew Cuomo, Tompkins County and the City of Ithaca have called upon community members, civil servants and local officials to envision an equitable model of public safety that places antiracism and lived experience at the forefront of reform.
This process, dubbed the “Reimagining Public Safety Collaborative,” so far has involved a series of public forums and Town Halls where community members provided input and posed questions about the role of policing in the County. The Center For Policing Equity (CPE), which is a national research center working with police departments and communities to use data-driven interventions that pave pathways to reform, has been collecting data from working groups and focus groups on the heels of the public forums to devise a plan that will usher in a new model of public safety.
The Collaborative, as stated on the project’s website, looks to develop a draft of its reinvention plan by Jan. 31. The County and City will then seek and consider additional public comment throughout February and March. As previously reported by the Voice, there is a hard deadline for change—as the County will finalize and adopt a plan for police reform by April 1, 2021. The state-mandated plan will apply to several police departments across Tompkins County, including the Ithaca Police Department (IPD) and the Tompkins County Sheriff’s Office.
Throughout the Reimagining process, there have been an array of opportunities for community members to share personal experiences with law enforcement and offer alternatives to policing including surveys, the “Community Voices Public Forums,” one-on-one interviews with Collaborative facilitators and moderated discussions.
Here’s everything you need to know from the last four months of feedback.
“Defund the Police”
Following the murder of George Floyd in late May, racial justice protests rocked the City and nation at large for months. The historic uprising marked a boiling point in the centuries-long fight against systemic racism, as well as the contemporary resistance to racist state violence—a phenomenon involving the continued brutalization and murder of Black and Brown people at the hands of police across the United States.
Hundreds of antiracist protestors notably flooded the Bernie Milton Pavillion in early June to share personal experiences with anti-Black racism, particularly at the hands of law enforcement. Sustained protests since then have led community members to reflect upon the structural violence in the Ithaca community that has given rise to inequity. Every Sunday at 2:00 p.m., protesters have gathered to sound the alarm on systemic racism and rally against the institution of policing—in other words, they’ve called upon local government to “Defund the Police.”
“Defund the Police” became the rallying cry of antiracist Black demonstrators and multiracial allies who took to the streets of their communities with one strong message: “Black Lives Matter.” Community leaders and organizers have demanded that local governments cut their law enforcement budgets significantly and reallocate public funds to community programs, services and infrastructure.
This clarion call has echoed not only through the weekly protests but also has been a prevalent theme throughout the public forums series.
“For most of this year, the people of Ithaca have been demanding that [the] police department budget be cut significantly and that those funds be used for community-based programs,” resident David Foote said on Nov. 13. “We need to hold police accountable and institute changes that effectively protect our people.”
Of those in attendance at the Community Voices Public Forums in November and December were members of the Tompkins Antiracist Coalition, an alliance of racial and economic justice advocates from Ithaca. The Coalition released a letter to officials with their demands for change, which they hope will result from the Reimagining process.
“Here at home, the need to divest from policing and invest in human need can no longer be denied,” the letter stated. “Rather than a bloated police budget, our community needs support, investment, and healing. This is not the time for mild reforms.”
Some defunding has begun locally, but on a much smaller scale than some may want. On Nov. 4, the City of Ithaca Common Council passed the final 2021 budget. The spending plan thinned department budgets across the board, including that of the IPD, which has been on a downward trend in terms of percent of the city budget over the last few years.
Six vacant IPD positions were cut in 2020 and $200,000 was reallocated to the South Side Community Center to support its programming—a 50 percent increase in funding.
The reallocation of funds is the other side of the defunding coin. Many, including Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick, have argued that reappropriating spending toward community aid will help decrease negative interactions with police at their source.
“We’ll need more funds than we can find in the police department or Sheriff’s department budget to fund the priorities: mental health, housing, substance abuse, job creation, etc.” Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick said at a Dec. 18 Town Hall.
He continued, adding that increased funding for programs that decrease law enforcement violence should come from higher up as well—taking some of the burden off of the small city’s shoulders.
“The federal government—and the state government too—could and should be doing much more.”
Ithaca Police Chief Dennis Nayor agreed with Mayor Myrick, saying that additional federal and state funding could pay dividends in the way of police reform efforts that invest in the community.
“The federal government can start kicking in some funding to start allowing this to happen,” Nayor said at the same Town Hall. “I think if we start looking very holistically at this at what the federal government spends money on—and sometimes in extreme amounts—the focus really has to be toward localizing funding for issues regarding mental health, homelessness, addiction—I think they’re all so intertwined.”
Additional support to not defund the police came from Tammy Baker, a community outreach worker with the Family & Children’s Services of Ithaca. She outlined how IPD in its current form has made her job more difficult.
“As a street outreach worker I can’t enforce rules, ordinance or law,” Baker said on Nov. 4. “Law enforcement are the only ones that can enforce the rules—the fewer officers available, less enforcement is possible. To have a safe vibrant community, we need to have police officers who aren’t burned out, feel supported and can show up for the community.”
Communal Security and Vitalization
Local officials and community members alike agreed that the success of the Collaborative’s reinvention plan rests on the development of alternatives to crisis situations that police conventionally respond to.
As Chief Nayor acknowledged, reimagining public safety begins with recognizing the intersection of mental health, substance abuse and housing insecurity (homelessness). These issues comprise part of what are known as social determinants of health, which especially influence health outcomes for vulnerable communities.
Myrick publicly acknowledged the City’s housing deficit and identified the need for more affordable housing. He notably voted against raising Ithaca’s tax rate by 8 percent, which ultimately passed with a 10-1 Common Council vote. 2020 saw a growth in home values in the city, and with that the overall tax levy—or revenue brought in by property taxes—has increased by nearly $2 million.
Myrick said that Ithaca doesn’t have enough housing “period.”
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“We (can) do the rest of things we’ve been talking about (sic) like increasing our funding and support for social services and shifting towards a housing-first model and (building) more affordable housing,” he said. “Then LEAD will be all the more successful in helping connect people who are unhoused with housing they need and can afford.”
Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, or LEAD, is designed to overhaul the way law enforcement responds to crime by focusing on harm reduction and strengthening police-community relations. It seeks to redirect offenders who commit crimes out of need—like those related to addiction, poverty and mental health issues—by giving them an alternative. Thus, providing a net of security for low-level offenders who, time and time again, have been incarcerated rather than enfranchised.
“It actually gives the police an opportunity to be compassionate to those that are struggling,” GIAC Deputy Director Travis Brooks said. “It takes them out of a never-ending judicial system that doesn’t solve their basic issues.”
LEAD is not a court-adjudicated program, which means that enrollees aren’t forced into a police-controlled space and avoid tarnishing their record with an arrest. Unlike Mobile Crisis Team caseworkers, LEAD counselors do not respond to mental health emergencies. Instead, IPD officers will be the ones who initially determine which offenders are eligible to enroll in the program. Chief Nayor and Sheriff Osborne have similarly stated that while they believe in alternatives for mental health response, there may still be situations where police intervention is necessary—and Brooks agrees, to an extent.
“What people don’t want anymore is for the police to show up to a situation, aggravate that situation because they’re not mental health experts, and then that person (gets) hurt when it never had to be that way,” Brooks said, adding that—in the future—IPD could defund a number of positions and put those funds toward hiring more counselors.
At least over the next three years, the program won’t come at any cost to taxpayers. This is because LEAD and its partner, the Respectful, Equitable Access to Compassionate Healthcare (REACH) project, received a $900,000 federal grant to recruit counselors who will work with enrollees.
Although LEAD will play a role in mitigating Ithaca’s opioid crisis, community members suggested additional ways in which the City could support its struggling residents; Suggestions ranged from adding halfway houses for those in recovery to establishing more safe-use centers like the Syringe Exchange Program (SEP).
Natayla Cowlich, a community outreach worker with the Family & Children’s Service of Ithaca, illustrated the reality faced by many of those who are struggling with opioid addiction.
“We have an opioid crisis in Ithaca,” Cowlich said. “We need a safe place for people to be able to inject drugs so that they’re not overdosing and dying outside.”
In what could be taken as either a red flag of rebranding or a prospect of hope, Mayor Myrick said that systemic change is on the horizon.
“We have to weave a web of golden solutions together,” he said. “It’s going to be 1000 small initiatives, programs—some of them undertaken by the City, some of them by County, some of them by the community, some of them by nonprofits—that help shore up all the cracks and many holes and gaps in our system.”
Demilitarize
Demilitarization has been top of mind for many community members, with many calling to abolish the IPD’s SWAT program.
Militarism of police is when local departments draw upon the tenets of an actual military force, and is often a dual-pronged approach that involves the adoption of specialized equipment and tactics. Anti-militarists assert that law enforcement agencies with a militaristic disposition erode public trust in police, which can impede positive relationships between the police and the communities they serve.
At the Dec. 18 Town Hall, Mayor Myrick shared his contentions about the controversial 1033 program, which funnels excess military equipment to local law enforcement agencies.
“I know a lot of folks are very aware that, nationally, militarization of police following the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense has distributed a lot of military weaponry to police departments across the country; We’ve been careful not to accept those,” he said. “We should review all of our equipment and figure out what we can do without.”
Ithacan Ruth Yarrow, who previously wrote a letter to the Voice questioning the purpose of the SWAT truck, or “Truck-99” as it is formally designated. Yarrow said that removing or repurposing the vehicle would help to build public trust in the IPD.
“I am convinced that the SWAT truck is not a help but a frightening, tank-like tension-raising piece of equipment that has no place in our community,” she wrote.
Some community members claimed that Truck-99 has been parked at the West Village Apartment Complex for no reason in particular, as it was reported to be there during the lulls of last year’s racial justice protests. The IPD denied the presence of Truck-99 in the West Village community outside of emergency responses. IPD Deputy Chief John Joly asserted that the vehicle has never been deployed in response to protests, nor has it been used as a tool for crowd control. He said that the department has been working to destigmatize Truck-99 through community outreach.
“We have made many attempts to introduce and familiarize the public with this vehicle, going all the way back to its in-service date in 2009,” Deputy Chief Joly wrote in an email. “Truck-99 is the most requested emergency vehicle for community events, both in the City and within Tompkins County.”
According to the IPD, the Mobile Command Vehicle—which Truck-99 is also called—transports tactical officers and serves a strong utility purpose. This is because the vehicle is often used as a mobile office for Crime Scene Management at the scenes of homicides, shootings and motor vehicle crashes where significant injury has occurred.
“It’s not an armored vehicle (and) it’s not protective in nature,” he said. “It’s just an extreme-quality utility vehicle that serves as a command vehicle for communications and negotiations (…) it serves a basic function.”
Although Truck-99 is said to fill this role, community members criticized the IPD for deploying their SWAT team to mental health emergencies.
“I think it’s a pretty reasonable thing to think that if someone’s going through a mental health crisis, they wouldn’t need a traumatizing incident of people in military fatigues (…) coming to pick you up off the street and into an unmarked vehicle,” one resident said on Nov. 6.
In his initial reimagining public safety announcement, Mayor Myrick said that the City would form a task force dedicated to reinventing public safety. In his announcement, he acknowledged the contentions of the community regarding militarization in Ithaca.
“The people of Ithaca have been crystal clear, they don’t feel like the current SWAT is an extension of the community or its values,” Myrick said. “We need to resolve this difference and create an agreed-upon set of guidelines for how and why our tactical response capabilities are used.”
Dismantle the Blue Wall of Silence
The question of who polices the police was one asked by many community members throughout the data-gathering stages of the Reimagining process.
Residents were critical of how law enforcement agencies handle police misconduct, and demanded more transparency from the Community Police Board regarding the status of active investigations. Some also spoke to broader issues in policing that have made it easier for officers to avoid the consequences of their actions, specifically denoting the existence of a Blue Wall of Silence—the code of silence among police officers who conceal evidence of corruption and retaliate against colleagues who speak out against misconduct.
County and City residents expressed outrage at the proliferation of this code of silence as well as incidences of racist state violence, especially denoting the presence of other officers who had opportunities to intervene.
“Rose (DeGroat) and Cadji (Ferguson) were assaulted by members of IPD and there were no consequences for any of the officers involved,” one resident said on Dec. 5. The resident (who went by Stephanie*) added that on Oct. 22 of last year, the “IPD (wrongfully) arrested Massia (White-Saunders) and a bunch of people who were (…) nonviolently protesting.”
Stephanie* continued, recalling the IPD’s deployment of pepper spray against nonviolent protestors and lack of consequences for officers who committed misconduct.
The Tompkins Antiracist Coalition referenced several instances of police misconduct in their letter.
“We cannot forget the killing of Shawn Greenwood and Keith Shumway by IPD officers in 2010 and 2011, nor the four teenagers of color held at gunpoint by an IPD sergeant in 2014, nor the brutality experienced by Rose DeGroat and Cadji Ferguson on the Commons last year, nor the police misconduct in the Nagee Green trial, nor the SWAT raids in West Village, nor the countless other accounts of daily dehumanization and punishment at the hands of police,” the letter stated.
The Voice reported in early December that the IPD placed Sgt. Kevin Slattery on paid leave after he bragged about beating then-suspect Jovon Monk. Chief Nayor suspended Slattery after the officer made comments regarding Monk’s 2014 arrest, which were unwittingly captured on his body camera in October 2020. Slattery remains on suspension with pay until the internal investigation is complete—a further suspension after the investigation concludes would be without pay.
Community members expressed frustration at the fact that it took six years for Slattery’s misconduct to be made public.
“The way our government upholds a culture of silence around police wrongdoing is too large an issue to be ignored,” one resident said on Nov. 20. “The lack of accountability for all the actions that are in the public eye as well as those that are not is very dangerous.”
Chief Nayor said he recognizes that Slattery’s comments serve to harm the police’s relationship with the public—which is already tenuous locally and nationally at the moment. He also added that these circumstances motivated him to act quickly in initiating the internal investigation and suspending Slattery.
Ithacan and local activist Genevieve Rand explained that Slattery wasn’t the only officer on the scene when he brutalized Monk. In the video, officers Michaela Conrad, youth liaison for the IPD, and Eric Doane—president of the Ithaca Police Benevolent Association (IPBA)—appear to be referenced as bystanders who said and did nothing to hold Slattery accountable. The Community Police Board along with the Attorney General of New York State and New York State Division of Human Rights are in the process of conducting their own investigations into the series of incidents.
In response to calls from community members to end Slattery’s “paid vacation,” Mayor Myrick denoted the importance of due process and asked the community for patience.
“Imagine a world in which executives base their decisions based off snippets on social media,” he said. “Everything including those internal investigations is being done not just by the book, but even more (transparently) than the book requires.”
Calling for accountability, residents suggested that the County expand the disciplinary powers of the Community Police Board and also scrutinized the Board for its lack of communication regarding the intense backlash against protestors on Oct. 22; This came after the controversial arrest of Massia White-Saunders.
Mona Sulzman, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation—which is part of the Tompkins Antiracist Coalition—attended a public forum on Dec. 4 during which she alluded to the viability of establishing a community council with representatives from each of Ithaca’s neighborhoods. Sulzman said that these representatives would review and make public “all that is revealed to the IPD,” doing so as misconduct arises. Unlike the Community Police Board, a community council would engage in participatory budgeting and work to elevate the voices of those living in the most vulnerable communities.
“When there is police misbehavior, who’s going to decide what’s to be done?” she said. “No matter what these Community Review Boards do, it always winds up with the police unions.”
Community members also condemned arbitration, which is the appeals process used by law enforcement agencies across the country in cases of police misconduct. Arbitration happens when an officer objects to the consequences of their actions after an investigation. It involves an arbitrator, typically a lawyer trained in labor law, who has the final say in what discipline an officer will be subject to. The process itself—which can take years—has been criticized for fragmenting police accountability nationwide, the D.C.-based media company U.S. News & World Report reported.
The IPBA last updated its collective bargaining agreement, or union contract, in 2011. Since then, ongoing disputes between the union and City over the agreement’s terms and conditions have crushed any potential for a new contract. It is unclear whether arbitration will remain in the IPD’s collective bargaining agreement in the future.
While it may seem unlikely that police unions like the IPBA won’t budge on arbitration, there are prospects for accountability outside of these union contracts. One pathway toward this is active bystander training, which has already been proven to weaken the Blue Wall of Silence in police departments across the country.
The IPD has met the #8cantwait reforms that reduce harm caused by police in the short-term, including banning chokeholds, strangleholds and shooting at moving vehicles, as well as requiring de-escalation, warning before shooting, exhausting all alternatives before shooting and more comprehensive reporting. The only missing #8cantwait reform that isn’t currently employed by the IPD is “duty to intervene,” but Chief Nayor said that this policy is in the works.
“The one we were missing was the duty to intervene, it was kind of indicated within other policies but we wanted to make sure we had one that was very specific to the parameters of that, so we just created that policy and then we were in compliance with all of them,” Chief Nayor said in an interview with the Ithaca Voice. “I had not actually heard of them delineated in the fashion they are in the #8cantwait campaign, so it really wasn’t difficult to make sure that we had them all.”
Alas, whether other law enforcement agencies across the County have implemented some form of active bystander training is not explicitly clear.
A Long Stairwell to Climb
Among the plethora of questions community members have asked throughout the Reimagination process is this: What will change?
Unfortunately for those demanding immediate reform, any change to the systems in place will have to wait until after the data-driven Reimagining process yields a reinvention plan.
Dr. Tracie L. Keesee, Senior Vice President of Justice Initiatives and Co-Founder of CPE, leads the Public Safety working group. Like many of her colleagues, she has been educating working group members on the role of public safety in the communities they serve and familiarizing them with different models of policing. She said that once all the data is collected, change will follow.
“The most important thing that we can do is make sure that there aren’t any decisions made until the data has been done,” Dr. Keesee said. “Until you hear from the people (…) you can’t really resolve Executive Order 203 (Cuomo’s order).”
Community members are wondering how the Reimagining Public Safety Collaborative will establish a baseline of safety for Black and Brown people who define “safety” very differently than their white counterparts. Travis Brooks explained that marginalized folks feel targeted because of their skin color, sexual orientation, or both. Instances where police officers demonstrate insensitivity and commit acts of excessive violence continue to deteriorate the community’s trust in local law enforcement, says Brooks. He said that until municipalities, locally and nationally, are equipped with the capacities to weed out anti-Black bias in policing, marginalized folks will continue to feel just that—marginalized.
“We have to get to that place where people who are of color that look like me are feeling just like white folks who own property in Cayuga Heights,” Brooks said. “At a starting basis, everybody should feel like a white homeowner in Cayuga Heights.”
Community members have criticized the Community Voices Public Forums for that same reason, saying the format has been inaccessible to the communities it aims to reach.
Schelley Michell-Nunn, Director of Human Resources for the City who has been co-leading the Community working group said that it was a priority among working group members to gather input from the BIPOC and vulnerable populations across Ithaca and Tompkins.
“The Community working group acknowledged that people engage differently, and so what we wanted to do (was) set up a multitude of avenues for people to access this process and provide input,” Michell-Nunn said, citing the various ways in which community members have been able to do so throughout the process.
Those leading the Collaborative worked to establish an open dialogue regarding public safety reform by hosting a Town Hall on Dec. 11. After swathes of community input, though, Collaborative leaders recognized that additional Town Halls were needed to properly address the public’s concerns, experiences and insights. So on Dec. 17 and 18, officials led a Mental Health Emergency and Crisis Response presentation and an additional Town Hall, respectively.
Dr. Keesee alluded to the importance of consulting vulnerable communities in the data-gathering stages of the Reimagining process.
“Public safety is done at the consent of the community,” she said. “And that’s why it’s important to have (…) the voices of those who’ve been affected by law enforcement (…) because they are the receivers of that service.”
Mayor Myrick asserted his confidence in local leaders and officials who are committed to dismantling anti-Black racism in Tompkins County.
“In my now 13-year commitment of public service, I have never seen such unanimity amongst elected officials, and appointed officials, that racism and anti-Black racism is a real problem in our system and one we’re committed to solving,” Myrick said.
“Reimagining (and) reinvention will be real and lasting; We won’t just come up with a plan (…) and forget about it.
This article first appeared in The Ithaca Voice.
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