Jason Golub (2021)
Using this presentation slide in part, Jason Golub explained to the Saratoga Springs City Council how to avoid pitfalls when creating a Civilian Review Board.
The possibility that Saratoga Springs will form a police oversight Civilian Review Board, a board that would be written into city code, took a large step forward at Tuesday night’s city council meeting when three board members said they would support such a board “if done right.”
Saying that “we know everything we need to know” and that her opinion on the CRB has evolved, Commissioner of Public Safety Robin Dalton said, “I think these [CRBs] provide another layer of trust and accountability.”
Commissioner of Finance Michele Madigan and Commissioner of Accounts John Franck agreed in principle on the idea. That makes three of five board members in support of the CRB.
Mayor Meg Kelly was absent from last night’s meeting.
Commissioner of Public Works Anthony “Skip” Scirocco told FoothillsBusinessDaily.com, “I haven’t made a decision on it.”
He said he liked the presentation on the CRB Tuesday evening but was “not really leaning one way or the other” and would need time to consider it.
Commissioners sounded positive about CRB creation during a presentation on it, but confirmation came in interviews after the meeting.
Jason Golub offered a third presentation on the subject Tuesday evening. Golub is one of two members of the city’s Independent Advisory Committee. That committee was created in the wake of the city’s Police Reform Task Force. The task force wrote a report containing 50 recommendations, one of which was to create a CRB.
Rather than implement that recommendation immediately after the task force completed its work last spring, the city council voted to create the advisory committee to research further how a CRB might be created. Golub has focused his work there.
The other member of the advisory committee, Kimberly Galvin, has been working with the police department on “the other 49” recommendations.
[Read about Golub’s second presentation here. Read about Galvin’s work here.]
“I think this will likely be the last of these updates,” Golub told the board at the start of last night’s presentation. “I think there’s plenty of evidence that a CRB will add value to our community.”
He added that he would be happy to work with the city to build the board.
“What I don’t want to do is keep talking about it,” he said.
In his presentation he told the board that his research shows that CRBs fail for a number of reasons:
- When they lack support from people in the community including police officers and activists.
- When they lack appropriate funding.
- When they are not independent from the police departments and have too much representation of the police on them.
- When they are tilted too far toward activists in the community.
- When they are developed too quickly, without appropriate planning.
- When they “wing it” and do not follow the same procedure with each case.
Those failures “are not insurmountable,” he said.
He also said that fear of change affects any group, including police, but he asked the board to consider body cameras which police fought against years ago but now rely on. Also, a criticism of the CRBs is often that the civilians on them do not understand police work, but Golub countered that municipalities use civilians in juries and that they can understand complex issues. Board members will have to be trained, he said.
Those two comparison helped to sway board members to favor the CRB.
Dalton said she liked the body camera comparison because of how effective they are now at helping police when there are questions about what happened.
“I have total trust in our police department,” she said, but the body cameras help.
Franck said, “I think the jury was a great example.” He added that he liked the idea that civilians could be trained to understand the nuances.
The three on the council who supported the board Tuesday night also said they want to see it written into law.
“We need something stronger than a resolution,” Franck said.
A resolution from the board could easily be changed by the next board or even the same board at another meeting. A law takes much more effort and would include public hearings on any changes.
“This would be instantly political” if the board were not codified in law, Dalton said.
Ithaca, a city with a long-standing CRB, has its board written into city code. Their board does not have subpoena power and the board is advisory only, meaning the police administration or city leadership are left to take action. Golub suggested the same for Saratoga Springs.
He said the city should plan to spend $100,000 on a pilot program and take about six months to put together the first board and the processes and policies that the board will follow. Training for board members and background checks on them are part of that budget, he said.
“Who we put on the board is one of the more critical decisions we can make,” he said.
The commissioners still wondered whether the city’s charter and the police union’s contract would put up hurdles to implementation, but generally affirmed that the process can get started in the few months remaining before the next city council is inaugurated in January.
Golub wrote in a text: “I’m pleased to hear members of the city council embracing the possibility that a CRB done well will add value to our community. All stakeholders need to be at the table as part of any implementation...and I’m hopeful that will be our next steps.”