Steve Thurston (2021)
Many people spoke about the Saratoga Springs Police Department during public comment, Oct. 6, 2021.
A number of people told the Saratoga Springs City Council that they are still angry about arrests made in the wake of the BLM Saratoga protest of July 14. They spoke at Tuesday night's meeting, Oct. 5. Among them was Melanie Trimble, the Chapter Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union Capital Region.
“We will continue to watch, and so will the attorney general,” Trimble warned the council.
The July 14 BLM Saratoga protests ended in five arrests that day and more than a half-dozen since then. She said the arrests after a peaceful protest, especially those coming about two months later, were unheard of, especially since many of the arrests were over “violations,” not criminal offenses. Violations are similar to traffic tickets.
The arrests, she said, were “intended to cause fear and intimidation,” and that they had a “chilling effect” on protests who disagree with the police and city leadership. She said the police in Saratoga Springs have a fundamental misunderstanding of their jobs.
“Police ought to be protecting that right [to protest], not suppressing it,” she said.
The NYCLU had said last month that the police acted like a “racist police department.”
In the past, the police department along with Commissioner of Public Safety Robin Dalton, had defended the arrests as simply applying equal treatment to all people who break the law. The July 14 protest blocked traffic on Broadway in downtown Saratoga for a number of minutes.
Although the public comment time is not a dialogue between the public and the council, commissioners do sometimes respond to what was said. None did so on this topic.
[Read about July 14 here, about the subsequent arrests here.]
The comments came at the start of the meeting. Later that evening the Public Safety agenda included the item: “An Ordinance to Create a New Chapter 37 of the City Code.”
Many items on the agenda are linked to documents on the city website, but this one was not. Details and explanation are often found in those documents. There was no explanation accompanying this.
The agenda item was meant to set a public hearing on the ordinance that would codify a “Community Police Board,” Commissioner of Public Safety Robin Dalton said when the agenda item started.
She barely introduced the idea before Mayor Meg Kelly interrupted and said that “the general public would never know what this was for.”
She said the process creating the law was not transparent enough. As Kelly spoke, she looked down and referred to a document. (A search this morning turned up nothing related to the proposed new chapter on the city’s website.) She said she had not heard enough about this potential change to the code.
“I think it’s deceiving to put it on the agenda like that,” Kelly said.
Dalton countered that a public hearing would come with all the necessary information and said it was based on the research that Jason Golub had completed. Golub had been named to the Independent Advisory Committee by Mayor Kelly and was tasked with developing an outline for a police oversight Civilian Review Board in Saratoga Springs.
At the last board meeting, he offered ideas and pitfalls involved in creating one. Kelly was out of town during that meeting, but three of the four remaining commissioners expressed their support for the idea if done well.
Kelly said she thought Golub had not completed enough research, and that the as-yet-not-public ordinance was not what the original Police Reform Task Force wanted. Golub was a co-chair of that task force and was subsequently named to the Independent Advisory Committee.
The task force stemmed from an edict from then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo that all municipalities had to analyze their police departments for racial biases and use-of-force issues. It completed its work in May.
“This is empty legislation as I see it,” Kelly said, “This ordinance is very vague.”
Dalton said that Golub had completed the necessary research, and she placed it on the public hearing schedule.
Dalton is also running for mayor, and during a candidate debate said that her belief that a CRB in some form could work in Saratoga Springs. This was a change in position for her, she said during the debate, adding that she would be introducing legislation to make it happen. [See the debate here.]
The ordinance was added to the public hearing for the Tuesday Oct. 19 City Council meeting. At least one other public hearing is set for that day. Public hearings occur before the regularly scheduled meeting at 7p.m. The hearing on this matter will occur about 6:30p.m.