Our Rationale for Community Policing

This City of Albany, NY and its police force need a change. Our next Police Chief must be an individual who throughout his/her career has demonstrated the belief that the life of each citizen is as valuable as any other, regardless of race or economic status.

Furthermore, we feel that the Police Department committed a disservice to Albany’s inner city communities by pulling community police officers—beat cops—out of their neighborhoods, and devaluing cooperative partnerships that had been established by effective community police officers. Without the same officers consistently patrolling delegated neighborhoods, getting out of their cars, and forming relationships with community members, citizens are less safe and suffer from an anxiety and fear for being vulnerable to violent crime. We reject the hierarchy and impersonal relationships that result from a policing strategy based largely upon statistics and reactive policing. We hereby demand that the next Police Chief utilize the proactive model of community policing as a means for creating a safer environment for Albany’s economically oppressed communities. If the next Police Chief is truly committed to decreasing violent crime in Albany, it is critical that he implement the following policies that will collectively achieve remarkable gains in revitalizing trust and partnership between communities and their police officers:

1) Beat cops be assigned throughout all residential neighborhoods, especially in Albany’s most impoverished communities with the highest rates of shootings and violent crime. These neighborhood officers should be stationed in one area for several years, identifiable with their names and locality clearly labeled on their uniform, and expected to do the great majority of their daily policing out of their cars and on the street. Shadowing effective community police officers would be an essential component to training rookie police officers.
2) To legitimately promote partnership between beat cops and community members, it will be essential to retrain these officers in community policing. We advocate for forums to take place between community members and their police officers that promote dialogue and mutual respect. These could utilize the Study Circles Resource Center’s Protecting Communities, Serving the Public curriculum or implement something similar. This would be the start of establishing more permanent public input forums within neighborhoods, by in part supporting the implementation of Assemblywoman Destito’s Bill that would establish Community Justice Councils .
3) An Albany Police Department (APD) pay structure compensating police officers for excellence in community policing and peace-keeping as their primary responsibility and policing model.
4) An APD plan with policies, procedures and performance targets to aggressively recruit youth in Albany’s inner city communities to become police officers in the City of Albany.

Not only must our crime be policed more effectively, in thinking long term the next Police Chief must implement and support policies that prevent crime. This would include:

1) Actively supporting Operation SNUG/Ceasefire, a community driven initiative working to decrease violence. This program has been implemented in violence-plagued urban communities across the country.
2) Further strengthening Albany’s new Reentry Task Force, as well as supporting the creation of a Reentry Task Force for Juvenile Offenders.
3) Reopening the book on supporting Community Crime Prevention policies that would work holistically to revitalize low income neighborhoods and therefore prevent crime, much as the moribund Neighborhood Preservation Crime Prevention Act of 1983 intended .