Reimagining Public Safety sees progress despite setbacks

It’s been only a few months since Tompkins Weekly’s last dive into the ongoing Reimagining Public Safety process (see tinyurl.com/yb522dsh), but plenty of developments have happened since.

Local leaders have made significant progress on efforts like unarmed response, data disclosure, the community healing plan and the Community Justice Center. Still, as has been the case throughout this multi-year process, many challenges remain that have slowed progress in some areas. So, we spoke with community leaders to talk about the most recent developments.

County — Unarmed response

Just last week, the Tompkins County Sheriff’s Department held a public forum to field questions and comments regarding its unarmed response pilot program under the Reimagining plan (view the full recording at tinyurl.com/26kq344v).

The program focuses around creating a system where matters that don’t require an armed officer response can be handled by in-house, unarmed sheriff’s clerks. The department recently brought on two clerks to fill that role — Tara Richardson and Sam Pulliam. For a full break-down of calls that would or wouldn’t warrant an officer response, visit tinyurl.com/27dlwv7f.

“This is a win-win situation whereby we can lessen the load on our deputies while also handing some calls differently,” County Sheriff Derek Osborne said in an email. “It’s a plan that those who are for or against reimagination can both appreciate. It provides an alternative unarmed response, while at the same time freeing up valuable time for our deputies to focus on more important things.”

As Osborne explained, it has taken “a great deal of work and many meetings with the Department of Emergency Response to develop a method of determining whether a call should go to a Deputy or Sheriff Clerk.”

“As I have said many times, calls into dispatch often come in one way, and end up being something very different upon deputy arrival,” he said. “For this reason, rather than create a separate and distinct unit from our road patrol, we opted to embed our Sheriff Clerks into our current law enforcement response division under the direct supervision of our Road Patrol Sergeants. Our Sergeants will have the means to keep tabs on all [Sheriff’s Office] calls, including those for Deputies and those for Clerks.”

Throughout the process of implementing this program, as well as at the public forum, there’s been significant confusion from residents on the specifics of the policy, Osborne said.

“It has been frustrating to hear negative comments from some who seem to believe that we are sending unarmed civilians out into the community to handle deputy calls,” he said. “This couldn’t be further from the truth. The positions have been referred to by ‘Officers’ by some, rather than ‘Sheriff Clerks,’ which adds to the confusion. Our Sheriff Clerks will work inside the Sheriff’s Office and will not be physically responding to calls.”

County — Data disclosure

While the Sheriff’s Department has been busy handling unarmed response, the district attorney’s office has dedicated a significant amount of time and effort to fulfilling the data disclosure and transparency portion of the Reimagining plan.

District Attorney Matt Van Houten has been working with Lance Salisbury, the supervising attorney at the county’s Assigned Counsel Office, to prepare and provide all the necessary data, but it’s a long and complicated process.

“For the last year and a half, I’ve been spending time on the weekends, compiling a spreadsheet of data that is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I think the community wants,” Van Houten said. “As far as arrests, statistics, demographics of individuals who are arrested, which municipality they’re arrested in, what bylaws, by which police agency and the crime that they are being charged with — those are things that are part of the data that I’ve been compiling. But there’s so much more that we need to be able to organize and put in one spot.”

Van Houten said that his office has had to compile this data on top of its usual responsibilities since it doesn’t have a dedicated data analyst, unlike the Assigned Counsel Office.

“It just takes so much time to put together this data and organize it,” he said. “And it’s time that is really put into any of our schedules, and like I said, I’ve been doing this on the weekend among the other things that I do on the weekend on a regular basis. So, I think without the help of a data analyst, it’s just going to be a task that’s incredibly difficult to move forward on.”

Salisbury said that though it is quite the heavy task, it’ll ultimately be worth it.

“How we can use the data is to identify potential problems,” he said. “We’re all human beings, and people that work in the criminal justice system, whether they’re defense attorneys or prosecutors or judges or police officers, anybody, we all have issues with implicit bias. … The data helps us identify if we have systemic bias issues and then, if so, how can we address them. That’s, I think, the underlying purpose to me with this data, why we’re collecting it.”

Salisbury spoke well of Van Houten and said that while they “might butt heads sometimes,” they try to work “collegially,” and Van Houten has really stepped up.

“He’s been good to work with,” Salisbury said. “That’s not the situation in every county in New York, frankly.”

County — Community Justice Center and community healing plan

The last big area of progress on the county side has been with the further development of the Community Justice Center, headed by Monalita Smiley. As Smiley described, the center has made significant progress surrounding the community healing plan.

“I think that was probably the most successful over the past couple of months — really getting community leaders and just members of the marginalized and BIPOC community engaged in the process,” she said. “Some … identified being willing to be trained and become a facilitator for this type of community forum so that, once we’re finished working on this particular aspect of it, we’ll have people in our community that will be able to hold those containers and sessions to continue in the future.”

Smiley explained that much of the healing plan so far has consisted of Zoom meetings with local leaders and BIPOC and marginalized communities, and so far, the conversations have been positive and a good learning experience for everyone involved.

“The response has been amazing,” she said. “People are really feeling welcome. They’re feeling heard. They’re feeling appreciative of the space being created for them so that they can come in. I’ve seen people open up and be able to share sometimes some very personal things that they had been through or that they’re dealing with. So, it’s pretty amazing because people are generally closed off when you first start a process like this.”

The Community Justice Center will continue to implement more recommendations from the Reimagining plan over the coming months, Smiley said.

City — Unarmed response and the commissioner of community safety

Turning the focus to the city of Ithaca’s efforts, the Ithaca City Common Council’s recent meetings have largely centered around the city’s unarmed response efforts as well as the possible appointment of a commissioner of community safety (view a recording of June 6’s meeting at tinyurl.com/27x2oha2).

The Reimagining Public Safety Working Group’s final report calls for restructuring the city’s law enforcement system into a Department of Community Safety, which would be overseen by a commissioner of community safety and include a Division of Police and a Division of Community Solutions. The latter division would be focused largely on unarmed response.

Creating a commissioner of community safety position at the city level requires a referendum, but June 6’s Committee as a Whole meeting made it clear that referendum is likely still a ways out.

“The timeline is super tight, and we would have had to get perfect language in place before our July meeting in order to get on this November’s ballot,” said City Alderperson Ducson Nguyen, who introduced legislation to create the position. “So, we had what’s called a Committee as a Whole, which means all council meets together as a committee, the week after that council meeting and pretty much acknowledged that, … with the timing constraints and other legal constraints, that wasn’t going to happen, the referendum. But almost all of us committed to continuing to work on this.”

Further complicating this process is the fact that the city is also moving forward in the creation of a city manager position. In 2021, the Common Council voted to create the new city manager position, and a referendum will be on this November’s ballot. Lewis explained in an email that the referendum is “required because it represents a change in the mayor’s role once there is a city manager.” She said the manager “will work most closely with all city staff,” which would include those in public safety.

Some city officials expressed concern about how adding a commissioner of community safety — or even a deputy commissioner of community safety — would then impact other systems like the Ithaca Police Department.

“I myself have severe, some really structural concerns about the local law that we are considering upon which the commissioner would be presented,” Alderperson Cynthia Brock said at the June 6 meeting. “And that would need to go through, I think, significant revision before we could even understand what the commissioner role would be. So, I do think it’s really premature at this time to consider a referendum on a commissioner with a local law [when] we don’t really have a complete draft.”

Acting Police Chief John Joly spoke at the Common Council’s meeting and said he doesn’t believe the new hires would greatly impact his department.

“We don’t operate in a vacuum at [Ithaca Police] — there’s definitely a lot of coordination that goes on,” he said. “And I think having a city manager, and maybe an assistant city manager or deputy city manager, whatever, would seemingly just kind of solidify and maybe have more clear designation and lines of authority, potentially, but seemingly, would kind of solidify what we’re doing now without disrupting things.”

On the unarmed response front, Common Council will be creating an ad hoc committee to oversee the process, as Brock told Tompkins Weekly.

“We will be creating an ad hoc committee, which will be overseeing the review of the creation of an unarmed response or co-response team that will address nonviolent activities and calls that come into the police department,” she said.

City — Ethics investigation

Happening parallel to the previously described efforts is an ongoing investigation by the Tompkins County Ethics Advisory Board into the Reimagining Public Safety initiative and former Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick regarding a list of allegations raised by Brock, including possible third-party financial influence during the Reimagining process (The Ithaca Voice broke down the list of allegations back in April at tinyurl.com/2addw4ca).

Local leaders who spoke with Tompkins Weekly regarding the investigation largely agreed that they expect and hope that it won’t greatly impede the overall Reimagining process.

“While there are investigations occurring, this has to do with some very specific aspects, for example, of third-party involvement in reimagining public safety,” said Acting Mayor Laura Lewis. “I want to be very clear that we are moving forward with a number of the initiatives that we — being the city, community members, city and council, county — together identify as key aspects of reimagining public safety. So, while these investigations are ongoing, it by no means has halted the progress that we are making.”

Nguyen said that the desire to not slow down the Reimagining process with the investigation is almost universal among city residents.

“What I’ve seen and heard, just speaking to people individually, is that they don’t want us to lose momentum, that the ethics investigations that are in process can happen in parallel implementation of parts that are noncontroversial and that we should be committed to moving forward on reimagining public safety,” he said. “We’re committed to move forward.”

Brock said she’s heard similar things, and she acknowledged the investigation could have small effects on some of the logistical details at the city level.

“I fully anticipate police reform to proceed and the reimagining public safety recommendations to move forward, but I believe it will take a different form,” she said. “The feedback I have gotten from leaders in the community, city and county staff, elected officials have all been in support of ensuring that we have the highest level of transparency and accountability in city processes. So, I have received overwhelming support in regards to the importance of the investigation.”

Salisbury, however, shared some concerns regarding the investigation.

“I’m concerned that some of these attacks seem to be, they may be personal payback issues, number one, but also they seem to be made at trying to undermine the process. And that’s my real concern,” he said. “If there are legitimate issues, let’s look at them, but I have real questions as some of this is more people trying to use this as a way to undermine the Reimagining process.”

In addition to the county’s investigation, city of Ithaca administration is pursuing its own investigation into the allegations. On June 22, the City Administration Committee approved the Attorney’s Office to bring in outside counsel to conduct the investigation, which will be separate from the county’s investigation. Common Council will consider approving the measure in July.

Looking ahead

Over the next several months, progress is expected to continue on all the fronts previously described. Based on how the process has gone so far, several sources cautioned that progress has been and may continue to be slower than originally expected.

“No doubt, it’s slower than we’d like,” Nguyen said. “But again, we’re trying to move forward so that, for example, that next year, we have someone, a civilian, who is in charge of public safety efforts at the city, be it a deputy chief of staff under a mayor or a deputy city manager under a city manager if the city manager referendum passes this November. So, we have options, and we’re definitely moving forward on them.”

Osborne added that he’s expecting that he and others will have to gather plenty of community feedback and adjust where necessary.

“Being completely new for us, and without any historical evidence or studies to draw from, I anticipate many challenges will surface that will need to be worked out as we move forward with the program,” Osborne said. “I’m going into this with an open mind, knowing that we can overcome issues as they arise. We have prepared ourselves the best we can, but sometimes you can’t work out the kinks until a plan is put into action.”

Lewis said that while setbacks and challenges are to be expected, there is widespread dedication to fulfilling the Reimagining plan from all parties involved.

“I believe all of us understood from the outset, from early discussions, that our efforts to reimagine public safety in a truly meaningful way was going to be a multi-year investment, in part, because we need community engagement around this, [and] in part, not insignificantly, because we need budgetary support in this,” she said. “It’s not going to be impacting only one budget year for the city, or I believe the county. … But I’m confident that we are moving forward at a pace that puts our community in a better position to deliver public safety to our community in a way that is meaningful, that looks at public safety through a racial equity, social equity, community-centered lens.”

To learn more about the Reimagining process and to submit feedback, visit publicsafetyreimagined.com.

Jessica Wickham is the managing editor of Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to them at editorial@VizellaMedia.com.