Last year, I wrote about how Camden went about reforming their police. In short, they fired everyone, dissolved the police union, expanded the police force with stricter hiring criteria, and rewrote the new department’s use of force policy. The net result was lower rates of crime and lower rates of civilian complaints about police behavior.  

Ithaca, New York has begun enacting its own police reforms, and they are also notable. Ithaca’s mayor, Svante Myrick, wants to rebrand the city’s police as the Department of Community Solutions and Public Safety. The plan the mayor is proposing goes beyond aesthetics into deep, fundamental reform of the way the city structures and uses policing resources.

The impetus for
the project was Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Executive Order 203, which mandated
plans for police reforms across the state. Under the Ithaca proposal, the new police
department will be made up of both armed and unarmed officers, with each
responding to different types of calls — one for criminal activity and the
other for social and mental health concerns where force, actual or potential, can
do more harm than good. Another major reform is the repurposing of SWAT
Vehicles for emergency response to further represent the demilitarization of
the force. Beyond this, there are more conventional reforms: calls for greater
accountability, training, and transparency; racial diversification of the force;
and calls for changes in disciplinary processes. The end goal of this process
is a department of public safety that is more trusted by the community and thus
better equipped to succeed.

Many of these changes must be approved by the city council and Tompkins County, but the Ithaca plan is a positive step, demonstrating that the policymakers are working to address the public’s concerns about policing practices. Ithaca’s work, and other projects like it around the country, are laboratories of reform. Not everything that’s tried will work, but those that do work can be replicated with the twin objectives of reducing violence and improving public safety.

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