Excuse me, governor! Terry O'Neill says the key to community policing is already on the books. PHOTO: Chris Shields

It Says So Right Here

A forgotten law from 1983 could bring community policing back to New York state

Like a number of issue-specific activists, Terry O’Neill, a criminal-justice consultant who advises the Albany County district attorney’s office, wanted to hear a little bit more about his issue in Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s State of the State address. He would have liked to have heard about the governor’s take on public safety. But unlike other activists who want to push the governor and the Legislature to pass a piece of legislation tailored to their pet issue, O’Neill simply wants Spitzer to utilize a law that has been on the books since the early ’80s—a law that Albany County District Attorney David Soares calls “one of the most brilliant pieces of legislation ever drafted, empowering neighborhoods and empowering people.”

O’Neill, who has made a name for himself in the criminal-justice community, has doggedly been trying to get the attention of the Spitzer administration by using his contacts, which include mayors, members of Spitzer’s transition team and even former governors.

The law O’Neill wants Spitzer to recognize is the Neighborhood Preservation Crime Prevention Act, which was signed by former Gov. Mario Cuomo in 1983. The law would have seen the creation of neighborhood-specific, nonprofit corporations funded by the state. The corporations would have been charged with increasing each community’s involvement in local crime-fighting issues and instituting cooperation between neighborhoods and their law-enforcement institutions. But according to O’Neill, the state had turned its attention away from community involvement and toward increasing the state’s prison capacity.

O’Neill, who comes from a family with a long history of policing, notes that programs like Operation Impact, which deploys officers into high-crime areas for a limited amount of time, do not foster stability and need to be complemented by community-based programs.

“There is a drastic need for that sort of legislation in all upstate communities, not just here in the city of Albany,” said Soares. “It fits in perfectly with my community-prosecution philosophy that says people in neighborhoods are the only people that can change their community. And we’ve got to give them the resources to do it.”

“It’s one of those good laws on the books nobody has taken ownership of, for whatever reason,” said state Assemblyman and historian John McEneny (D-Albany). McEneny points out that the state has periodically gone through financial crises, and as a result, things that were supposed to be temporarily without funding have been lost in the shuffle.

“Sometimes the temporary delays turn into permanent ones,” he said. “The thing about Day One is, Spitzer is someone else. He is coming in refreshed. One of the great strengths of our democracy is that every four years we get a chance to try new things. We get to try things that have failed, things that were the right thing at the wrong time.”

According to McEneny, the need for community policing has not always existed. “Years ago, the cops lived in the neighborhoods. When a kid was acting up or people were suspicious of goings-on or creepy-looking strangers walked by, the cop only lived a block or so away.”

McEneny said that as city police officers became better paid, they began an exodus into the suburbs. “We now have a generation of police officers that never lived in a city. They were educated in suburban schools. We have police officers with an urban mindset and a suburban ZIP code. That is one of the reasons why you have to suddenly say, ‘You have to get the community involved.’ The police were the community, they actually lived there.”

Should the Spitzer administration notice the law and act to fund it and update it for use, O’Neill made it clear, it would not be a quick fix for the state’s crime-ridden areas. He pointed to his experience on a task force that was asked to provide policing for a Mohawk reservation.

“We had state troopers in large numbers occupy the reservation, because they didn’t have their own police force and didn’t like outsiders telling them what to do,” he said. “So, we spent two years developing a consensus on what kind of public-entity service the Mohawks could have that satisfied their needs, and then we could take the state troopers out of there.” At the end, O’Neill said, his task force named someone from the community as police chief, who then put together his own police department.

In contrast, O’Neill pointed to the recent change in the structure of Albany’s police department. “I don’t see that going on here in Albany. [Police Chief James] Tuffey was trying to sell the community on this plan. It was pretty vague up until now. He did have a number of community meetings, but if you get 100 people together where only a fraction of them get to ask one question, most questions turn out to be complaints or speeches with no meaningful dialogue. The process should have been handled differently.”

O’Neill stressed that the biggest challenge is making sure the community is involved in defining what community policing means to them.

“There is no definition that says, ‘This is what community policing is,’ ” he said. “Some of the projects I’ve been involved in have had some kind of major restructuring in the police’s relationship with the community. But there has to be a consensus for what community policing means to our community. You can’t put the cart before the horse.”

—David King

dking@metroland.net

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