Police/Community Reform in a Time of Turmoil and Social Change
Terry O'Neill
February 14, 2021
Terry O’Neill is an attorney specializing in police-related matters. He spoke about his experiences in the context of currently prominent issues and a longtime overall problem of systemic racism.
Relations between policing and, particularly, minority communities have indeed been fraught; brought to the fore by the recent George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings and others. O’Neill also discussed the death of Daniel Prude in Rochester. These cases gave new energy to the “Black Lives Matter” movement and efforts to “Defund the Police” (a politically maladroit slogan which O’Neill explained really means shifting funding from police to other kinds of interventions).
He pointed to COMPSTAT, a program originating with New York City’s police in the 1990s, aiming for data-guided policing. The idea being to devote police resources to areas statistically shown to need them most. But Black communities felt this meant singling them out for unwelcome police aggressiveness. O’Neill said this was aggravated by “stop-and-frisk” policies that caused a lot of ugly interactions between police and minority citizens, with actually very few resulting arrests or finding drugs or guns. And when “stop-and-frisk” was ended, crime did not rise, but continued falling.
O’Neill said the biggest problem for police forces is to build trust and respect in the communities they serve. This has been the focus of “community policing” efforts. However, there is a tendency among police forces to feel that the way they’ve always done things is the right way, so they are resistant to change. Reform often being forced upon them by outside forces, such as the courts. Meantime, communities often feel they don’t get the policing they need, while what they do get disserves them, causing tension and alienation.
Accountability is a key issue. O’Neill said people demanding reform often don’t really know what they should be asking for. He noted that since 2000, Albany has had a citizens’ review panel – but it has never consummated disciplinary action against a police officer. The panel simply lacks teeth. Right now efforts are underway in Albany to do something about this.
But pushing back against accountability are powerful police unions. They wield political clout because elected officials are afraid of them, lest they be branded “soft on crime.” Such unions have been very successful at negotiating contracts that make it almost impossible to discipline officers for misconduct.
Looking toward a way forward, O’Neill also discussed his experience relating to Northern Ireland, with a long history of severe police abuses. There, an ombudsman was introduced to facilitate oversight; and also a policy of hirings to better reflect community makeup (in that case, hiring as many Catholics as Protestants.)