The Saratoga Springs City Council will take its first look this evening at the report generated by the Saratoga Springs Police Reform Task Force. As with other police departments statewide, the city was required to analyze elements of their police force under a directive that Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed last year during the height of the nationwide, Black Lives Matter protests. A report approved by the city is due to the governor’s desk by April 1. The city council will take up the report during its March 16 meeting.
Broken into three sections--Culture and Training; Policy; and Transparency and Accountability--the 98 page report contains 42 recommendations that the city might consider.
"They had really great public participation” in the process of creating the report, said Shaun Wiggins, who chairs the Saratoga Springs Community Outreach Committee but was not on the task force. The outreach committee was formed last year in an effort to improve race relations in the city.
"I feel they should all be adopted,” Wiggins said of the 42 recommendations. He said he realizes that budget constraints, especially in Saratoga Springs right now, means the city should position itself, prepare a plan now that will move more than a few of the recommendations through as more money become available.
Police Chief Shane Crooks said that he too was happy overall with the outcome.
"There's a lot of people who put in a lot of hard work,” said the chief who was a member of the task force. “The process overall brought things to our attention.”
Crooks said, "I've actually already incorporated some of the stuff into our daily practices."
He was particularly interested in the issues of transparency, he said and that the police department has moved all its policies online, and the personnel complaint form is now online.
They are little things “that are easy changes," he said.
Some of the other recommendations include a ban on chokeholds and limits on the use of force to times when it is absolutely necessary.
The report asks to create a comprehensive Community Centered Justice Initiative, with an “emphasis on understanding that each person has a different set of experiences in society based on their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, religious practices, and other variables,” the report says.
The police need to “Acknowledge, Apologize, Reconcile, Review,” the report says, which asks the department to, “Acknowledge and address past conflicts within Saratoga Springs to build trust and respect between the community and SSPD.”
Implement more training using Lexipol and ICAT training which highlight real-world situations and methods for deescalation.
For his part, Crooks says that some of what the task force is asking has already been done, or the department does it--such as collecting certain types of data--but it needs to be easier to find or put in a more understandable format, he said.
Both Crooks and Wiggins acknowledged that forming a civilian review board--one of the recommendations--may be difficult to work through the city government.
Crooks says that state law and some of the clauses in the police union contract may make this difficult.
Wiggins thinks it is just a matter of will.
"It does happen elsewhere in the country," Wiggins said, so it can't be impossible. He admitted, “The devil is in the details.”
Robin Dalton, the city's commissioner of safety, did not return requests for comment.