Now policing from afar: Christian D’Alessandro (left) receiving his promotion to commander in January 2000.

Cop Out?
Questions linger after a popular Albany police officer is taken off the streets and placed behind a desk

One week after it became public that Cmdr. Christian D’Alessandro—a member of the Albany Police Department lauded by city residents for his community police work—was reassigned to administrative duties [“They Got Him Off the Streets,” Oct. 16], inhabitants of Albany’s South End, Arbor Hill and West Hill neighborhoods want their most trusted officer back on the streets.

“No one has seen Commander D’Alessandro. It’s literally as if he has been asked not to leave the public-safety building,” said Betsy Mercogliano, a resident of the South End. “It is ludicrous, completely ludicrous, to pull from the streets someone who has been so connected [to the community].”

Mercogliano and others have praised D’Alessandro for his hands-on approach to community police work: The commander regularly walked the streets of the city’s crime-addled neighborhoods, both in and out of uniform, seeking out residents’ concerns and ideas for solving those problems.

The recent retirement of Cmdr. Steve Stella resulted in D’Alessandro’s reassignment, said Police Chief Robert Wolfgang. The commander’s new responsibilities include administering all of the city’s police patrols—responsibilities that have made him unable to work in the communities.

“I can certainly understand their frustration,” Wolfgang said. “Those that I’ve spoken with concerning this I’ve asked to be patient, and to at least approach this with an open mind and be willing to try working with other people that we feel are equally qualified and competent and interested in working toward the same goal.”

Wolfgang hopes that D’Alessandro will be able to help oversee recent lapses he said the department has experienced in the administration of sick leave, overtime pay and staffing levels.

“We don’t feel that we are abandoning our community policing initiative by any means or abandoning the community,” Wolfgang said. “We’re just doing some internal movement that will hopefully be, in the long run, better for the department as well.”

Mercogliano, who worked with the 15-year police veteran on a number of issues in her neighborhood over the past year, alerted Metroland of D’Alessandro’s reassignment at an Albany Common Council meeting on Oct. 6.

Mercogliano has written letters to members of the Common Council and Mayor Jerry Jennings, expressing her dismay over D’Alessandro’s reassignment. At least two aldermen, Dominick Calsolaro (Ward 1) and Glen Casey (Ward 11), have answered her plea. Calsolaro requested that the Common Council’s Public Safety Committee investigate D’Alessandro’s reassignment. Casey drafted a letter to the mayor, asking Jennings to determine whether D’Alessandro’s reassignment will be temporary or permanent.

“I can see that if they pulled [a community police officer] out of my area, that would be frustrating,” Casey said. “You build relationships with these people and you have the level of trust of knowing that if you ask them to get something done, they’ll take care of it. . . . Once you get something like that, you fight tooth and nail to keep it.”

On Tuesday Casey said he had not heard anything from the mayor, but he had received confirmation that his letter had been received. Mercogliano also said she hasn’t heard anything from the mayor. Jennings did not return multiple calls seeking comment for this story.

Wolfgang could not say whether D’Alessandro’s reassignment is temporary or permanent—that decision will have to be made by Commissioner of Public Safety John Nielsen, who is currently out of the country. The Albany Police Department currently employs seven commanders, and has requested funding for eight in this year’s budget.

“Right now it is a move,” Wolfgang said. “We periodically restructure, and I can’t say that at some point we would not make a change again if we find that this does not work toward the betterment of the department. But right now it is a move that we are going to try and see how it plays out.”

Although the duration of his reassignment remains up in the air, D’Alessandro’s influence on the communities he policed is permanent, said Yacob Williams, a community activist and artist in Arbor Hill.

Earlier this year, Williams and his son were involved in a nasty verbal altercation with a few police officers on Second Street. As neighbors began to gather and tensions intensified, D’Alessandro suggested that the group take its discussion off the streets and into Williams’ home.

“When the police are on the streets they get a lot of hollering from residents on the porches and looking out the windows and stuff like that, which can escalate the situation,” Williams said. Calling them off the streets “may not have been police protocol, but it did help resolve the issue.”

“People like Chris have planted seeds in the hearts of the people in this community, and I am one of those examples,” Williams said. “Even though they put him behind the desk, they can’t pull up the roots he’s planted in community. You can’t kill the movement by taking one guy off the streets.”

—Travis Durfee

Get a Life
Take Back Your Time Day takes leisure to a new level this Friday

Feeling tired? Working too much? Do you want your life back? You are not alone.

Tomorrow (Friday) is officially the point of the year where most Americans have worked as much as Europeans will all year. American workers on average put in about nine more weeks of work per year than their Western European brethren. That’s 350 more hours on the clock.

So this Friday, Oct. 24, is the first official Take Back Your Time Day, an initiative of the national Simplicity Forum. The goal of the day is to call attention to how the average American worker is overworked, tightly scheduled, and stressed.

Our comrades-in-arms at the Times Union have also called attention to that recently—by omitting leisure from what had been their Life & Leisure section. Now each day’s Life section will be hyphenated with a different concern: Money, Health, Food, Family, Scene, Style, and the all-encompassing Today. It is precisely this sort of compartmentalization of the average person’s time that Take Back Your Time Day seeks to stave off.

Organizers are encouraging people to take time out of their busy lives to think about ways it might be possible to alleviate some of those pressures. “Americans are working way more than folks in other industrial countries, and it’s having some negative impact on health, family, and the environment, and we need to search for solutions,” said John de Graaf, one of the day’s national coordinators and a freelancer in Seattle, Wash.

“We’re scheduled to the max even outside of our work lives,” he said. “Particularly I think this is true for middle- and upper-class families. They have kids with schedules that look like CEOs. . . . There’s a lot of burnout that’s resulting from this.”

Forty percent of Americans work more than 50 hours each week, according to both US News & World Report and a National Sleep Foundation survey. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American workers average a mere 8.1 days of vacation after one year on the job, the least among industrialized nations. Leading busy lives takes a mental and physical toll on individuals and can damage the well-being of families.

“One quarter of American workers have no paid vacation,” said de Graaf. “The rest of the world looks at that and shakes their head. How can the richest country in the world not give any paid vacation?”

This August, on the syndicated public radio program Marketplace, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich proposed a federal law requiring four weeks paid vacation per year for each American worker. He argued that America already has certain free-market limitations, such as minimum wage, so he sees no reason why minimum paid vacation time should not be added to that list.

“The competitiveness of American workers depends mostly on our productivity,” Reich said on the program. “And American workers are among the most productive in the world. So are European workers, and they get four weeks vacation. A guarantee of four weeks paid vacation here may make American workers even happier, and hence even more productive.”

But Take Back Your Time Day organizers aren’t prescribing particular solutions per se; they just hope to increase the level of awareness and dialogue on the national level.

From Seattle to Duluth and Mount Airy, N.C., a number of municipalities have declared Oct. 24 Take Back Your Time Day, as has the state of Michigan. In Rochester, Jessey Bernstein, a psychology intern at the University of Rochester’s Counseling Center, decided to hold an hourlong workshop at the university.

“People are overscheduled and overworked, especially on campus . . . so I want to give them a moment to think about how busy they are,” Bernstein said. “In North America there’s a strong value for productivity, for working. You don’t get a lot of kudos for taking time off or taking a break.”

Some encouraged individual activities for Take Back Your Time Day: sleeping late, or canceling something on your schedule, or keeping the TV off, or talking about ways to take back time with your coworkers and boss (just hope they don’t find your efforts counterproductive), and generally embracing leisure as part of your routine.

De Graaf said he tries to make sure he’s getting enough leisure time in, but, he admits, “for the past few months that’s been rather impossible, and that I’m a case study in everything I criticize, just because of the time I’ve spent on this movement.” Even so, on Friday he hopes to get out of work early and hang out with his son.

—Ashley Hahn

Election-Law Kerfuffle in Troy

Marcia Pascarella is a 70-year- old woman who keeps a baseball bat at her front door. She has chased off gang members, cursed out drug dealers, broken up fights, and endured death threats. She’s also been known for being a thorn in the side of nearly every elected official in Troy. Now she’s got a new barb to throw at the powers that be.

Pascarella got tired of being a bystander in Troy, and decided to run for an at-large seat on the Troy City Council on an Independent line. But now she’s not on the ballot because of confusion over certain legal requirements for candidates, and what is ultimately the selective enforcement of election law.

Pascarella filed her 880 petitions on time. When she handed her petitions to the Rensselaer County Board of Elections, she asked a clerk if there was anything else she needed to do. She was told “no.” That was on Aug. 15. She received no direct correspondence from the BOE until Sept. 4. Marcelline Haskell, a campaign volunteer for Pascarella, was notified in late August by the board that objections were filed regarding Pascarella’s petitions.

In a bizarre twist, Haskell’s son-in-law, Scott Schmiedeshoff, was the person who filed the objections. Well, actually, the objections were filed by a Scott Schmiedeshof—no second ‘f’—who does not exist as a registered Troy voter, which the law requires an objector to be.

Objections are supposed to be made within three days after a candidate files his/her petitions, but Schmiedeshoff’s came in more than a week late, and were rejected. Republican Elections Commissioner Larry A. Bugbee said the board “didn’t really look at the objection too much, because it wasn’t filed on time.”

Bugbee helped Schmiedeshoff fill out his specific objections paperwork in the elections office, something he said he would have done for anyone. It was actually Bugbee who misspelled Schmiedeshoff’s last name. Pascarella accused Bugbee of providing Schmiedeshoff with more help than just filling out the form, which he denied.

Pascarella was told on Sept. 4 that she was not on the ballot because she never filed a Certificate of Acceptance. These certificates let a candidate choose whether he or she wishes to be included on any number of ballot lines, and are required by state election law for candidates not running on party lines or who are not judicial candidates.

Bugbee said, “Any time a candidate’s running, we give them one of these pamphlets” detailing what is required of candidates running for office in Rensselaer County. “It’s spelled right out here completely.”

Pascarella said she was never told she needed to file an acceptance, and says she never even saw a pamphlet until it was too late. She says she should have been told when she filed her petitions that there was more required of her. “If those leaflets were on the counter. . . [the board of elections worker] should have handed me one.”

But the Rensselaer County Board of Elections appears to have been ignorant of the state’s election law as well. Under New York law, after nominating petitions are filed, the board of elections is supposed to mail notice of candidacy to candidates for them to accept or decline, as committees sometimes file petitions for candidates without their consent. Republican commissioner Bugbee said the board chose not to mail notices because “it’s a very time-consuming process.”

“I wasn’t aware that it was a legal requirement,” said Bugbee. “We pointed it out to him in the book,” confirmed Pascarella. Bugbee said in the past the board has chosen not to send letters, though as a result of the problems it’s created, the board will send them in the future.

To the state board of elections, Pascarella was just as responsible for finding out what was required of her as a candidate as Bugbee was required to send the letters to candidates. But, because the county board of elections “didn’t send a letter, doesn’t mean that ignorance of the law gets you off the hook,” said Lee Daghlian of the state board of elections. “The presumption is that candidates for office know what the laws and rules are. “There’s plenty of access to election law and booklets about how to run for office and the official calendars.”

According to Daghlian, the only action a candidate can take to overrule a county board’s decision is by going before a State Supreme Court judge, which Pascarella said she did not have the resources to do.

“It’s too late for me this year,” she said. “It’s totally wrong that a citizen cannot run for office when she thinks that she can do better than the money grabbers that are up there now.”

And if Troy’s governmental officials thought she was prickly to them before, Pascarella said they haven’t seen anything yet. “They don’t know what they’ve unleashed now.”

—Ashley Hahn

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