Democracy In Albany

By
Terry O'Neill
The Constantine Institute
102 Willett Street
Albany, New York  12210
www.constantine-institute.org

In the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, Stephen T. Flynn, Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, observed that "the events of September 11 have been used to elevate the role of professional warriors, spies, and cops at the expense of enlisting citizens to assist in securing the nation." The result is "a climate of fear and a sense of powerlessness . . . undermining American ideals and fueling political demagoguery."  

In such a climate, do people in trouble or people who have witnessed crimes go to public safety authorities?  They do not.  And that is a very big problem today.

Almost twenty years ago, as I was deepening my study of constitutional and legal issues shaping law enforcement administration, I was introduced to the compelling concepts of community-oriented and problem solving policing.  These called for a dispassionate analysis of the environmental, demographic and cultural roots of specific local crime problems and engagement, meaning real human contact, between public safety agencies and the community they serve to reduce the incidence and fear of crime.  There was a dynamic and growing movement nationwide to imbue public safety services at every level of government with this philosophy.

Then came 9/11.  That movement came to a screeching halt.  We suddenly found ourselves in a never-ending state of emergency in which our police agencies have surrounded our communities with yellow crime scene tape as they adopt increasingly aggressive, technology-driven tactics.  The community is shoved aside.  As Albany Police Chief James Tuffey declared at a Common Council meeting last year: "We're the professionals.  Leave it to us."  While that statement doesn't rise to the level of demagoguery, it is very much the rhetoric of those "professional warriors, spies, and cops' who have so influenced public security policy of late.

This retrograde direction is very apparent in Albany.  A little over a year ago, the Albany Police Department was "reorganized."  Neighborhood police stations were shuttered, foot patrol officers reassigned and communication with the community was appropriated to only  the highest levels of the department's bureaucracy.  Deployment of police manpower and resources has come to be driven by crime statistics.  Among the most visible of the assets deployed under this regime is the "Roach Coach", a tricked out RV funded by Governor Pataki's (sic) Operation IMPACT, that rumbles from one statistically defined infestation to another in the city's historically distressed neighborhoods.  Already the young people of the city's distressed neighborhoods view it as the most obvious manifestation of the police department as occupying force.

It is sadly ironic, though emblematic of how policing is devolving in Albany, that in a city that has seen the number of abandoned buildings grow over the past decade, when the Mayor decided to abandon one in particular, he chose a brand new neighborhood police station in the heart of one of the city's most distressed neighborhoods.  The intimidating Public Safety Building to which residents are now directed is reminiscent of Baghdad's Green Zone.  And having a police chief who is invariably described as "accessible" is no substitute for a decentralized organizational culture that encourages communication, bonding and cooperation between the rank-and-file and residents of communities they serve.

As I indicate, this unfortunate devolution has taken hold nationally since 9/11.  In New York, the top criminal justice official under both Governors Spitzer and Paterson, Division of Criminal Justice Services Commissioner Denise O'Donnell, has been happily complicit with all of this, given her seamless segue with regard to Governor Pataki's Operation: IMPACT.  This is the state's premier local assistance program for public safety agencies.  It represents the rejection of community-oriented policing writ large.  Aside from police and prosecutors, no one representing the community is at the table where decisions are  made on how to spend these monies.  The result is that we get more subsidized police overtime, more technology and more prosecutors.  We get no community crime prevention programs, community renewal initiatives and no prison inmate re-entry planning.  All powerful crime control strategies and tactics, but just not on the table where decisions are made with respect to the state`s only significant public safety grant program.

I used to work for DCJS.  I know it well.  It is nothing but a glorified file cabinet and it has no business shaping tactical responses to crime on city streets. If the municipalities of the state want leadership in further driving down crime in our communities, I'd point them in the direction of the office of the Superintendent of State Police.  Harry Corbitt, the man just installed in that office by appointment of Governor Paterson and with the advice and consent of the New York State Senate, comes to that organization fresh from the experience of working in an inner city school system where the gangs, crime and violence of years to come may be breeding -- or may be stopped cold.  Listen to him.

It's time to recognize that in being rid of Eliot Spitzer, who fancied himself a hard-nosed, decidedly non-community-oriented  prosecutor, we gained a governor who has spent his career representing a constituency that has a long history of unhappiness with aggressive police tactics and liberal resort to incarceration as the premier means of crime control, who does not see the suffering of people in minority neighborhoods in terms of crime statistics and who has seen scant attention to the renewal of high crime neighborhoods whose distressed state is probably the most criminogenic condition in every city.  That's who the boss is now and his is the point of view that should guide the state's most important public safety local assistance program.