I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
The Criminal Justice System
Quality-of-life enforcement had a particularly strong impact on local courts and the rest of the criminal justice system, which saw its caseloads grow and change in character.
Where previously Albany police handled minor violations informally if at all, around 1995 they began bringing in cases of public lewdness, open containers, and disorderly conduct in droves.
The sheer growth in the volume of cases shows up in records of the local police court, where filings shot up markedly after community policing’s debut in late 1994 — a period when serious crime was actually declining in the city.
(Annual filings rose from 7,500 in 1993 and 7,200 in 1994 to 9,500 in 1995, 9,000 in 1996, and 9,800 in 1997, according to records from the New York State Unified Court System.)
Some department members attribute part of the increase to the county’s new 911 system, which was launched barely a month before community policing, but most believe that changing police priorities played a role as well. 46
“I attribute it to our increased calls for service and more proactive, . . . more enthusiastic response from our officers for enforcing the law and making a stand,” one APD manager explains of the justice system’s growing workload.
The criminal justice system initially resisted some of the new cases patrol officers brought in — from the point of intake all the way to the judges.
For example, one department member maintains that employees at the local jail complained when police first began bringing low-level violations in for processing, saying that police were “wasting their time” with petty offenses.
Some judges at the local police court also reportedly chastised officers who brought minor offenders directly into their courtroom for arraignments.
But when top management in the APD heard about these problems, they were apparently able to convince the judges and other justice workers that police needed their cooperation by explaining the APD’s new direction: The same department members who report early problems in the justice system maintain that for the most part, these problems have subsided.
In any case, one suspects that the problem could have been worse, for Jennings had the opportunity to hand-pick the primary police court judge only a month after community policing got started, and he openly expressed his intention to choose an individual who could “deliver a strong message to the city relative to crime.” 47
Philosophical agreement with the new APD program did not, of course, necessarily solve the capacity problem created by heightened police enforcement.
To be sure, jail space has not been an issue in Albany, where county jails are so flush with cells that they have been able to rent out space to other agencies like the Federal Government.
But local courts have reportedly strained under the growing workload police brought them — to the point that in the first two years of community policing, courts disposed of a much smaller proportion of the filings brought before them than they had in previous years.
(Specifically, while police court disposed of 64% of its cases in 1993 and 73% in 1994, it disposed of barely half in the next two years of increased workload — 52% in 1995 and 51% in 1996.)
In response to the city’s growing caseload, state government stepped in to fund an additional judge for Albany’s city court beginning January 1, 1997.
As a result, the court’s backlog apparently subsided: In 1997, the ratio of dispositions to new filings returned to 69%, even though court personnel report that the workload strain still feels severe.
As part of its promise to fund the additional judge (who now works in temporary quarters), the state asked city government to foot the bill for a new courtroom, and construction for the addition is currently underway in an already-cramped police headquarters, which is where the police court is located.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
City Government
Much of the push for quality-of-life enforcement lay outside the criminal justice system altogether, encompassing as it did conditions like dirty streetscapes, illegal parking, and dilapidated buildings.
To deal with these problems, police needed help not from the local judiciary but from other municipal agencies.
The APD began to address this need by teaching its own officers about the resources other agencies could offer.
One department veteran insists that Albany officers had been savvy about these matters in the past, but that the massive downsizing of the Whalen years had undermined the informal mentoring whereby older officers passed such knowledge on to their younger colleagues:
We use the catch phrase in police work, “Notify the proper authority” that such and such needs fixing.
Okay, what’s that proper authority?
I mean, I know from my experience that if a sewer cover is off, I’m going to be calling the water department because they’re in charge of sewer covers.
If it’s a tree that’s broken and hanging down in a precarious situation, then I know I need to call the parks department.
But a lot of our younger officers didn’t know that, and I believe that that was partly to blame because of that eight-year hiring gap.
We have formalized training and then there is informalized training.
The informalized training would be working with an older, more experienced officer so that when you went on a call and found a building that needed boarding up or needed attention, you would learn by listening to the older officer say, “Well, we need to call the fire department to do an inspection to get DGS in here to do this.”
[That] was kind of lost in that eight-year hiring gap, because suddenly we started hiring at a pretty quick rate [after the hiring freeze ended].
And we had a lot of young officers . . . that had never had that ability to work with someone with five years and eight years and ten years and twelve years on the job.
We might have [entire] squads made up of [officers] with three years or less.
Well, where’s the experience?
If they have never come upon a vacant building, how do they learn how to handle a vacant building?
In response to this perceived weakness, the department tried to pay particular attention to interagency relationships in its community policing training sessions.
To prepare the partner agencies themselves, the APD began its community policing effort by meeting with all city department heads, explaining what police intended to do differently, and asking for their cooperation.
In many cases they found a willing audience, for the public service in Albany has always been a tight-knit community.
For example, Code Enforcement Director Mike Whelan, who worked in the Department of Public Works for many years and moved to the newly-created Department of General Services in 1996, was a long-time acquaintance of both Jennings and Tuffey (who attended high school with Whelan’s older brother).
“There are a core of people here,” one APD manager says of the city.
“Although we have some big city problems, it’s really kind of a small town in a lot of ways.”
Reinforcing this sense of a shared history and community was Jennings’s leadership as Mayor — particularly, once again, through his emphasis on the quality of life theme.
One milestone came in 1995, when Jennings consolidated the departments of Public Works, Traffic Engineering, Parks and Recreation, and Engineering into a single Department of General Services (DGS).
Though partly motivated by budgetary pressures, the move did not ultimately have much financial impact on the city, 48 and perhaps a more important effect was to “streamline the quality of life focus by bringing all of these [jobs] under one roof,” as Whelan puts it.
This was particularly true in Whelan’s own area, as the city combined the responsibilities to enforce city codes for things like lighting, curb cuts, trash, and graffiti.
Whelan and police alike report a strong relationship between the two agencies, and Whelan has become something of a catch-all “go-to” for police who notice physical disorder like trash, graffiti, or broken streetlights.
According to Whelan, police demands are not at all problematic for his agency, which simply sees the officers as another set of eyes on the street to help it identify neighborhood problems: Since the agency does not do its own periodic inspections, it relies on complaints to spot relevant code violations, and it is just as happy to receive these complaints from police officers as from private citizens.
In any case, since Whelan’s new position was defined precisely in terms of bringing coordination and zeal to quality-of-life enforcement in the city, it is not surprising that he and his staff responded willingly to police referrals.
Even more dramatic than the creation of DGS was Jennings’s decision to shift building and housing code enforcement over to the Fire Department, an effort that formally got underway in January of 1995.
Until that time, Albany buildings had been inspected by the small Building Department, which had never had enough staff to make periodic inspections a reality.
The result, as many saw it, was that city buildings were becoming deteriorated, and Jennings made stronger code enforcement one of the linchpins — along with community policing — of his quality-of-life message in his Mayoral campaign.
“Let’s face it,” one city official exclaims.
“Albany is an old town."
"You can drive around and look at the plaques on the building — eighteen hundreds, late eighteen hundreds."
"Most of these buildings are well over a hundred years old.”
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
City Government
Much of the push for quality-of-life enforcement lay outside the criminal justice system altogether, encompassing as it did conditions like dirty streetscapes, illegal parking, and dilapidated buildings.
To deal with these problems, police needed help not from the local judiciary but from other municipal agencies.
The APD began to address this need by teaching its own officers about the resources other agencies could offer.
One department veteran insists that Albany officers had been savvy about these matters in the past, but that the massive downsizing of the Whalen years had undermined the informal mentoring whereby older officers passed such knowledge on to their younger colleagues:
We use the catch phrase in police work, “Notify the proper authority” that such and such needs fixing.
Okay, what’s that proper authority?
I mean, I know from my experience that if a sewer cover is off, I’m going to be calling the water department because they’re in charge of sewer covers.
If it’s a tree that’s broken and hanging down in a precarious situation, then I know I need to call the parks department.
But a lot of our younger officers didn’t know that, and I believe that that was partly to blame because of that eight-year hiring gap.
We have formalized training and then there is informalized training.
The informalized training would be working with an older, more experienced officer so that when you went on a call and found a building that needed boarding up or needed attention, you would learn by listening to the older officer say, “Well, we need to call the fire department to do an inspection to get DGS in here to do this.”
[That] was kind of lost in that eight-year hiring gap, because suddenly we started hiring at a pretty quick rate [after the hiring freeze ended].
And we had a lot of young officers . . . that had never had that ability to work with someone with five years and eight years and ten years and twelve years on the job.
We might have [entire] squads made up of [officers] with three years or less.
Well, where’s the experience?
If they have never come upon a vacant building, how do they learn how to handle a vacant building?
In response to this perceived weakness, the department tried to pay particular attention to interagency relationships in its community policing training sessions.
To prepare the partner agencies themselves, the APD began its community policing effort by meeting with all city department heads, explaining what police intended to do differently, and asking for their cooperation.
In many cases they found a willing audience, for the public service in Albany has always been a tight-knit community.
For example, Code Enforcement Director Mike Whelan, who worked in the Department of Public Works for many years and moved to the newly-created Department of General Services in 1996, was a long-time acquaintance of both Jennings and Tuffey (who attended high school with Whelan’s older brother).
“There are a core of people here,” one APD manager says of the city.
“Although we have some big city problems, it’s really kind of a small town in a lot of ways.”
Reinforcing this sense of a shared history and community was Jennings’s leadership as Mayor — particularly, once again, through his emphasis on the quality of life theme.
One milestone came in 1995, when Jennings consolidated the departments of Public Works, Traffic Engineering, Parks and Recreation, and Engineering into a single Department of General Services (DGS).
Though partly motivated by budgetary pressures, the move did not ultimately have much financial impact on the city, 48 and perhaps a more important effect was to “streamline the quality of life focus by bringing all of these [jobs] under one roof,” as Whelan puts it.
This was particularly true in Whelan’s own area, as the city combined the responsibilities to enforce city codes for things like lighting, curb cuts, trash, and graffiti.
Whelan and police alike report a strong relationship between the two agencies, and Whelan has become something of a catch-all “go-to” for police who notice physical disorder like trash, graffiti, or broken streetlights.
According to Whelan, police demands are not at all problematic for his agency, which simply sees the officers as another set of eyes on the street to help it identify neighborhood problems: Since the agency does not do its own periodic inspections, it relies on complaints to spot relevant code violations, and it is just as happy to receive these complaints from police officers as from private citizens.
In any case, since Whelan’s new position was defined precisely in terms of bringing coordination and zeal to quality-of-life enforcement in the city, it is not surprising that he and his staff responded willingly to police referrals.
Even more dramatic than the creation of DGS was Jennings’s decision to shift building and housing code enforcement over to the Fire Department, an effort that formally got underway in January of 1995.
Until that time, Albany buildings had been inspected by the small Building Department, which had never had enough staff to make periodic inspections a reality.
The result, as many saw it, was that city buildings were becoming deteriorated, and Jennings made stronger code enforcement one of the linchpins — along with community policing — of his quality-of-life message in his Mayoral campaign.
“Let’s face it,” one city official exclaims.
“Albany is an old town."
"You can drive around and look at the plaques on the building — eighteen hundreds, late eighteen hundreds."
"Most of these buildings are well over a hundred years old.”
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
City Government, concluded ...
Jennings’s plan was to certify every Albany fireman as a code inspector so that the city could — in the words of one Times-Union headline — “deploy an army to fight building code violations.” 49
Albany’s Fire Chief immediately lent his support to the idea, arguing that “it’s just so beneficial to the department and the people in it to know what the hell they’re walking in to.” 50
Some firefighters turned out to be less enthusiastic, and their union president eventually claimed that the new duties were reducing the department’s response time. 51
But the AFD had long been something of an eclectic operation, having been one of the first in the state to get into Emergency Medical Services (EMS), and many firefighters apparently saw code enforcement as the latest form of job security.
As Fire Captain Michael Macie puts it:
I think a lot of it has to do with local economics. . . . .
If you look in the surrounding cities, Schenectady, Troy, Watervliet, Green Island, Cohoes, who have paid fire departments, they’ve watched their ranks decline to almost nothing only because they weren’t providing those services.
The Albany Fire Department provides advanced life support, EMS.
We provide code enforcement.
We put out the fires.
We go to the car accidents.
We go to the chemical spills.
So the taxpayers are getting a pretty good bang for their buck, as far as they’re concerned, with us.
The guys out there work twenty-four hours, and from eight a.m. till seven or eight, nine o’clock in the evening.
They’re busy.
I’ve been here twenty-three years, and when I came on, we would just sit out in front of the fire house and you would bounce the ball, you know?
It’s not that way anymore. . . .
Everybody understands that if you want to be here and you want to get your salary, you just can’t sit around, because if you weren’t doing code enforcement and you weren’t doing EMS, you could cut the department size in half.
Some problems did arise as the Fire Department took on its new duties: Many residents initially complained that fire trucks were blocking their streets on inspections; historic preservationists argued that the city had taken code enforcement too far, and that it was tearing down historic buildings to make way for businesses; and landlords complained about excessive zeal and unprofessional inspections — pointing out, for example, that unlike the old building inspectors, firefighters made imprecise inspection appointments that could keep them waiting hours.
In the end, the Fire Department was not able to accommodate all of these complaints, but it did make some concessions, such as leaving their fire trucks behind when they went on inspections, and making an effort to schedule specific times for inspections. 52
Despite the outside complaints, many Fire Department employees took to their new duties in earnest, and eventually almost every firefighter in Albany went through 88 hours of training that qualified them to inspect structures for compliance with building and housing codes.
Moreover, Macie insists, firefighters who hit the streets on inspections discovered a natural alliance with police.
“We’re doing the code enforcement, the police are getting into the community policing aspect, and we bump into each other on the street,” he explains.
You know, I would get a call from Timmy Toraine [a community outreach officer].
He said, “You know, we really have a problem on Hudson Avenue."
"What are we going to do about it?”
And I said, “I don't know."
"Let me come up and walk with you.”
We walked in the pouring rain one night for an hour and a half just to first identify the problems, and then for me to go back and try to think, “How can I approach this?”
Because obviously when you’ve got a block that’s an eighth of a mile long with a hundred houses on it — how do you go after each one of them?
Macie saw in the community outreach officers a smaller battalion of eyes and ears who could help him keep tabs on city properties.
“The community officers . . . know everything that goes on in [their] neighborhood,” he insists, going on to explain that some will now jot down elaborate lists of potential code violations that fire fighters can follow up on.
Over time, the relationship between the fire department and the community outreach officers on code enforcement issues has grown, a process that Macie attributes to word-of-mouth.
“You know, I speak with Timmy Toraine, and later I get another call from Officer Wilcox on Second Avenue."
"He says, ‘I think I’ve got a problem here,’ because [Toraine] has said to him, ‘Geez, we could call Captain Macie.'"
"'He’s a good guy to work with and maybe he can resolve the issues that you have.’”
Macie concedes that APD officers are not experts in city codes in the way that the newly-trained firefighters now are, and that there is the potential for police to send his men on wild goose chases.
But he insists that he takes every complaint seriously, and that he has been able to educate police officers about some common misconceptions when they arise.
“If [a complaint] is not founded, . . . then I will return to get back to that community police officer and say, ‘There’s nothing we can do about that because they’re well within the law,’” Macie explains.
“He’s going to remember the next time when he sees that [situation]."
"So it’s really an educational tool for them.”
In any case, Macie simply says that he is willing to check out any concerns police raise “because that’s my job. . . ."
"If I didn’t follow up on every complaint, then the liability falls back on me: We knew about the situation and we didn’t do anything about it.”
Finally, the fact that Macie now has over 250 certified inspectors relieves some pressure that the building department may have felt to ignore questionable reports of violations.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
City Government, concluded ...
Jennings’s plan was to certify every Albany fireman as a code inspector so that the city could — in the words of one Times-Union headline — “deploy an army to fight building code violations.” 49
Albany’s Fire Chief immediately lent his support to the idea, arguing that “it’s just so beneficial to the department and the people in it to know what the hell they’re walking in to.” 50
Some firefighters turned out to be less enthusiastic, and their union president eventually claimed that the new duties were reducing the department’s response time. 51
But the AFD had long been something of an eclectic operation, having been one of the first in the state to get into Emergency Medical Services (EMS), and many firefighters apparently saw code enforcement as the latest form of job security.
As Fire Captain Michael Macie puts it:
I think a lot of it has to do with local economics. . . . .
If you look in the surrounding cities, Schenectady, Troy, Watervliet, Green Island, Cohoes, who have paid fire departments, they’ve watched their ranks decline to almost nothing only because they weren’t providing those services.
The Albany Fire Department provides advanced life support, EMS.
We provide code enforcement.
We put out the fires.
We go to the car accidents.
We go to the chemical spills.
So the taxpayers are getting a pretty good bang for their buck, as far as they’re concerned, with us.
The guys out there work twenty-four hours, and from eight a.m. till seven or eight, nine o’clock in the evening.
They’re busy.
I’ve been here twenty-three years, and when I came on, we would just sit out in front of the fire house and you would bounce the ball, you know?
It’s not that way anymore. . . .
Everybody understands that if you want to be here and you want to get your salary, you just can’t sit around, because if you weren’t doing code enforcement and you weren’t doing EMS, you could cut the department size in half.
Some problems did arise as the Fire Department took on its new duties: Many residents initially complained that fire trucks were blocking their streets on inspections; historic preservationists argued that the city had taken code enforcement too far, and that it was tearing down historic buildings to make way for businesses; and landlords complained about excessive zeal and unprofessional inspections — pointing out, for example, that unlike the old building inspectors, firefighters made imprecise inspection appointments that could keep them waiting hours.
In the end, the Fire Department was not able to accommodate all of these complaints, but it did make some concessions, such as leaving their fire trucks behind when they went on inspections, and making an effort to schedule specific times for inspections. 52
Despite the outside complaints, many Fire Department employees took to their new duties in earnest, and eventually almost every firefighter in Albany went through 88 hours of training that qualified them to inspect structures for compliance with building and housing codes.
Moreover, Macie insists, firefighters who hit the streets on inspections discovered a natural alliance with police.
“We’re doing the code enforcement, the police are getting into the community policing aspect, and we bump into each other on the street,” he explains.
You know, I would get a call from Timmy Toraine [a community outreach officer].
He said, “You know, we really have a problem on Hudson Avenue."
"What are we going to do about it?”
And I said, “I don't know."
"Let me come up and walk with you.”
We walked in the pouring rain one night for an hour and a half just to first identify the problems, and then for me to go back and try to think, “How can I approach this?”
Because obviously when you’ve got a block that’s an eighth of a mile long with a hundred houses on it — how do you go after each one of them?
Macie saw in the community outreach officers a smaller battalion of eyes and ears who could help him keep tabs on city properties.
“The community officers . . . know everything that goes on in [their] neighborhood,” he insists, going on to explain that some will now jot down elaborate lists of potential code violations that fire fighters can follow up on.
Over time, the relationship between the fire department and the community outreach officers on code enforcement issues has grown, a process that Macie attributes to word-of-mouth.
“You know, I speak with Timmy Toraine, and later I get another call from Officer Wilcox on Second Avenue."
"He says, ‘I think I’ve got a problem here,’ because [Toraine] has said to him, ‘Geez, we could call Captain Macie.'"
"'He’s a good guy to work with and maybe he can resolve the issues that you have.’”
Macie concedes that APD officers are not experts in city codes in the way that the newly-trained firefighters now are, and that there is the potential for police to send his men on wild goose chases.
But he insists that he takes every complaint seriously, and that he has been able to educate police officers about some common misconceptions when they arise.
“If [a complaint] is not founded, . . . then I will return to get back to that community police officer and say, ‘There’s nothing we can do about that because they’re well within the law,’” Macie explains.
“He’s going to remember the next time when he sees that [situation]."
"So it’s really an educational tool for them.”
In any case, Macie simply says that he is willing to check out any concerns police raise “because that’s my job. . . ."
"If I didn’t follow up on every complaint, then the liability falls back on me: We knew about the situation and we didn’t do anything about it.”
Finally, the fact that Macie now has over 250 certified inspectors relieves some pressure that the building department may have felt to ignore questionable reports of violations.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
Other Institutional Partners
Though mostly restricted to the community outreach officers, these partnerships with DGS and the Fire Department have clearly taken firm root in the APD, which has found a ready outlet for the non-criminal quality-of-life issues that police often confront.
Department trainers report that the collaboration has helped bring many APD officers into the community policing fold: At first, officers often expressed skepticism about a new philosophy that called on them to deal with issues like trash, lighting, and code violation — issues that they did consider to be a central part of police work.
But as department trainers explained that the officers did not themselves have to solve these “non-police” problems, and that they were simply expected to channel them to the appropriate partner agency, many officers reportedly conceded that the approach made sense.
But if the Fire Department and DGS have been clear success stories for the APD, some other agencies appear to be outside of the fold.
For example, a number of APD members maintain that the local power company is not always responsive to concerns about streetlights, and there has apparently been no partnership with area social service agencies on the same scale as the partnerships with Fire and DGS (though the department has stepped up cooperation with a local domestic violence agency as part of its nascent domestic violence program, described below).
Indeed, some potential partners have found themselves on the defensive since the start of community policing and the Mayor’s quality-of-life campaign.
Homeless shelters and advocates are one example, as these groups have decried stronger order maintenance as a violation of civil liberties, and they have resisted what they see as an effort to push the homeless and the agencies that serve them out of town.
Many city landlords have taken equal umbrage at recent police and city policy changes, viewing some efforts to “clean up the neighborhood” — including the stepped-up efforts to enforce building codes and Jennings’s proposals to increase fines for violations — as direct attacks on their livelihoods.
Many patrol officers seem fairly resigned about the potential for cooperation with these groups — particularly landlords, who through tactics like lease enforcement, tenant screening, and physical security have a potentially enormous influence on public safety.
One potential strategy for forcing landlords to cooperate has emerged in discussions of Pasadena’s Safe Streets Now program, which holds property owners liable for tenant behavior by imposing fines for chronic problems.
A coalition of neighborhood leaders, Fire Department officials, police, and Common Council members has emerged to press city hall to adopt a similar program, and aldermen have reportedly received some encouragement from Jennings to move forward.
But these discussions have not yet led to new legislation, and some in the city are skeptical that it will be possible to overcome landlord clout in the Common Council.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
Other Institutional Partners
Though mostly restricted to the community outreach officers, these partnerships with DGS and the Fire Department have clearly taken firm root in the APD, which has found a ready outlet for the non-criminal quality-of-life issues that police often confront.
Department trainers report that the collaboration has helped bring many APD officers into the community policing fold: At first, officers often expressed skepticism about a new philosophy that called on them to deal with issues like trash, lighting, and code violation — issues that they did consider to be a central part of police work.
But as department trainers explained that the officers did not themselves have to solve these “non-police” problems, and that they were simply expected to channel them to the appropriate partner agency, many officers reportedly conceded that the approach made sense.
But if the Fire Department and DGS have been clear success stories for the APD, some other agencies appear to be outside of the fold.
For example, a number of APD members maintain that the local power company is not always responsive to concerns about streetlights, and there has apparently been no partnership with area social service agencies on the same scale as the partnerships with Fire and DGS (though the department has stepped up cooperation with a local domestic violence agency as part of its nascent domestic violence program, described below).
Indeed, some potential partners have found themselves on the defensive since the start of community policing and the Mayor’s quality-of-life campaign.
Homeless shelters and advocates are one example, as these groups have decried stronger order maintenance as a violation of civil liberties, and they have resisted what they see as an effort to push the homeless and the agencies that serve them out of town.
Many city landlords have taken equal umbrage at recent police and city policy changes, viewing some efforts to “clean up the neighborhood” — including the stepped-up efforts to enforce building codes and Jennings’s proposals to increase fines for violations — as direct attacks on their livelihoods.
Many patrol officers seem fairly resigned about the potential for cooperation with these groups — particularly landlords, who through tactics like lease enforcement, tenant screening, and physical security have a potentially enormous influence on public safety.
One potential strategy for forcing landlords to cooperate has emerged in discussions of Pasadena’s Safe Streets Now program, which holds property owners liable for tenant behavior by imposing fines for chronic problems.
A coalition of neighborhood leaders, Fire Department officials, police, and Common Council members has emerged to press city hall to adopt a similar program, and aldermen have reportedly received some encouragement from Jennings to move forward.
But these discussions have not yet led to new legislation, and some in the city are skeptical that it will be possible to overcome landlord clout in the Common Council.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
The Committee on University and Community Relations
A more hopeful development in Albany has been the Committee on University and Community Relations, which predated community policing but dovetailed into its aims.
The Committee had its inception early in 1990, when police and community concerns about college student parties boiled over — particularly near the large University at Albany.
At that time, Mayor Whalen asked university President Vincent O’Leary to convene a task force to study souring town-gown relations and to recommend a strategy for improving them.
Eventually the task force came up with a list of twelve recommendations, ranging from reforms in the way the University licensed fraternities to changes in the way the city handled code violation complaints.
But perhaps most important was its creation of a standing committee that would monitor not just these specific recommendations, but also any new concerns residents had about University students.
Thomas Gebhardt, who as Director of Off-Campus Housing for the university became the committee’s chair, explains that the first few meetings between university officials and the community were tense: “[There were] a lot of angry people yelling and screaming,” Gebhardt remembers, conceding that some residents harbored suspicions that the effort would end up as “a smoke and mirrors committee.”
In his eyes, one of the largest underlying problems was that the two sides simply did not understand each other.
“There were a lot of stereotypes that both groups had about each other,” Gebhardt explains.
“Many long term neighbors thought that every single university student was a party animal, didn’t care about anything."
"And many students felt that every long term neighbor was some old fogey that wanted it quiet twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.”
Some of these perceptions broke down as the two sides began to interact with each other, and Gebhardt also made an effort to explain what the University could offer to the neighborhoods.
“There were a lot of myths that needed to be cleared up when the task force was created about what the University could and couldn’t do in terms of their judicial process and things like that."
"So we had to clarify all of those.”
This issue turned out to be an important one in the Committee, for part of its strong reputation in Albany seems to stem from its ability to go beyond the University’s own authority; and that ability, in turn, stems from the diverse group of players that have gradually come to join it.
Begun as an appointed body made up mostly of students, residents, and University officials, the Committee gradually evolved into a much more fluid and expansive body — one whose membership seemed instinctively driven by the need to match authority to the concerns participants were raising.
For example, because many complaints about students had to do with alcohol, the committee developed a close, if initially reluctant relationship with Albany taverns; and as residents and city officials discovered that the University at Albany was not the only local college with rowdy students, most other area college joined the committee as well.
Police came to play a particularly important role in this effort to match authority to problems.
As Gebhardt explains, the University’s own authority over unruly students off campus can be quite limited, but a close relationship with police helps to compensate.
[The University’s authority over off-campus students] is not a lot, but I think it’s enhanced by working with the police department very closely.
Because it’s amazing: Once students know that . . . the police are working with the university, that are working with the neighborhood association, that might be working with code enforcement, that might working with the Albany Fire Department — that goes a long way to having an impact.
So they know that all of those little fingers are connected.
Not everyone came willingly to the committee at first: For example, Gebhardt reports that some area colleges seemed wary of joining the committee because “to join the committee would be to admit that you were part of the problem;” and he reports that fraternities have been inconsistent participants (though this may be changing as national fraternities — increasingly in the spotlight because of problems with alcohol abuse — pressure their local chapters to take more interest in their public image).
But despite occasional reluctance, the Committee has had enormous success expanding its membership, and by 1998 its roster listed nearly 80 participants from a wide variety of Albany neighborhoods, agencies, and businesses.
The Committee’s growing clout in both the community and city government made it attractive to police as they pursued their own interagency efforts.
For example, asked why the department embraced the University Relations Committee so quickly, Assistant Chief Robert Wolfgang (who first represented police on the Committee) explains that the body “brought everyone together again.”
In addition to the neighborhood residents and students, it also brought other service providers or regulatory agencies, and the fire department, code enforcement.
So you had a lot of different organizations coming together, and as you identified the problems, there was a good chance someone there had a solution to that problem — or had the tools to create a solution to the problem. . . . .
[And] as you’re trying to get the message out, it doesn’t appear as though it’s just the work of one person and the concerns of one person, but in fact, it’s supported by many.
The result, many department members argue, has been extraordinary success in dealing with the problems that stem from the minority of students who have been unruly.
“That’s been a home run for us,” Tuffey says of the Committee, pointing to one particular troublespot for evidence: “In three years, the complaints I get from that area has gone from maybe fifteen a year to none or one or two or three.”
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
The Committee on University and Community Relations
A more hopeful development in Albany has been the Committee on University and Community Relations, which predated community policing but dovetailed into its aims.
The Committee had its inception early in 1990, when police and community concerns about college student parties boiled over — particularly near the large University at Albany.
At that time, Mayor Whalen asked university President Vincent O’Leary to convene a task force to study souring town-gown relations and to recommend a strategy for improving them.
Eventually the task force came up with a list of twelve recommendations, ranging from reforms in the way the University licensed fraternities to changes in the way the city handled code violation complaints.
But perhaps most important was its creation of a standing committee that would monitor not just these specific recommendations, but also any new concerns residents had about University students.
Thomas Gebhardt, who as Director of Off-Campus Housing for the university became the committee’s chair, explains that the first few meetings between university officials and the community were tense: “[There were] a lot of angry people yelling and screaming,” Gebhardt remembers, conceding that some residents harbored suspicions that the effort would end up as “a smoke and mirrors committee.”
In his eyes, one of the largest underlying problems was that the two sides simply did not understand each other.
“There were a lot of stereotypes that both groups had about each other,” Gebhardt explains.
“Many long term neighbors thought that every single university student was a party animal, didn’t care about anything."
"And many students felt that every long term neighbor was some old fogey that wanted it quiet twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.”
Some of these perceptions broke down as the two sides began to interact with each other, and Gebhardt also made an effort to explain what the University could offer to the neighborhoods.
“There were a lot of myths that needed to be cleared up when the task force was created about what the University could and couldn’t do in terms of their judicial process and things like that."
"So we had to clarify all of those.”
This issue turned out to be an important one in the Committee, for part of its strong reputation in Albany seems to stem from its ability to go beyond the University’s own authority; and that ability, in turn, stems from the diverse group of players that have gradually come to join it.
Begun as an appointed body made up mostly of students, residents, and University officials, the Committee gradually evolved into a much more fluid and expansive body — one whose membership seemed instinctively driven by the need to match authority to the concerns participants were raising.
For example, because many complaints about students had to do with alcohol, the committee developed a close, if initially reluctant relationship with Albany taverns; and as residents and city officials discovered that the University at Albany was not the only local college with rowdy students, most other area college joined the committee as well.
Police came to play a particularly important role in this effort to match authority to problems.
As Gebhardt explains, the University’s own authority over unruly students off campus can be quite limited, but a close relationship with police helps to compensate.
[The University’s authority over off-campus students] is not a lot, but I think it’s enhanced by working with the police department very closely.
Because it’s amazing: Once students know that . . . the police are working with the university, that are working with the neighborhood association, that might be working with code enforcement, that might working with the Albany Fire Department — that goes a long way to having an impact.
So they know that all of those little fingers are connected.
Not everyone came willingly to the committee at first: For example, Gebhardt reports that some area colleges seemed wary of joining the committee because “to join the committee would be to admit that you were part of the problem;” and he reports that fraternities have been inconsistent participants (though this may be changing as national fraternities — increasingly in the spotlight because of problems with alcohol abuse — pressure their local chapters to take more interest in their public image).
But despite occasional reluctance, the Committee has had enormous success expanding its membership, and by 1998 its roster listed nearly 80 participants from a wide variety of Albany neighborhoods, agencies, and businesses.
The Committee’s growing clout in both the community and city government made it attractive to police as they pursued their own interagency efforts.
For example, asked why the department embraced the University Relations Committee so quickly, Assistant Chief Robert Wolfgang (who first represented police on the Committee) explains that the body “brought everyone together again.”
In addition to the neighborhood residents and students, it also brought other service providers or regulatory agencies, and the fire department, code enforcement.
So you had a lot of different organizations coming together, and as you identified the problems, there was a good chance someone there had a solution to that problem — or had the tools to create a solution to the problem. . . . .
[And] as you’re trying to get the message out, it doesn’t appear as though it’s just the work of one person and the concerns of one person, but in fact, it’s supported by many.
The result, many department members argue, has been extraordinary success in dealing with the problems that stem from the minority of students who have been unruly.
“That’s been a home run for us,” Tuffey says of the Committee, pointing to one particular troublespot for evidence: “In three years, the complaints I get from that area has gone from maybe fifteen a year to none or one or two or three.”
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
6. Building Support in the Community
If interagency collaboration has played a key role in Albany’s community policing effort, partnerships with the community have been even more central.
In part, the APD views Albany residents and the associations they have formed as a resource police can leverage to fight crime more effectively, and the department has helped facilitate activities like citizen foot patrols to increase its effectiveness.
But the driving ideal behind Albany’s police-community partnerships is apparently a desire by police to better understand community priorities.
“I firmly believe that we work with the people, and that’s when police departments work best,” recently-promoted Deputy Chief Jack Nielsen explains.
“I always tell people that they need to go to a country where there is martial law to understand how important it is that that be the philosophy of the police department: That you work for the people.”
Nielsen concedes that there need to be limits to community control over the police, but beyond those limits community sentiment becomes absolutely central to the decisions police make.
“I don’t think that they should have hands on influence [on policy],” he explains.
“[But] beyond the housekeeping phase, beyond the officer safety, beyond the fiduciary responsibility to the tax payer . . . the philosophy has to be that what is most important is the perception of the part of the people of how they are policed.”
Tuffey echoes Nielsen’s sentiments, explaining that he considers community reactions to be an important means for monitoring department performance and fine-tuning its programs.
As an example, he describes the process whereby the boundaries of the department’s foot beats have evolved.
“We always get letters or we go to community meetings and we get input from them,” Tuffey explains.
“There have been times when we had to extend one beat a different way because some of the people thought it should be extended a little bit."
"So, you let the guy walk a couple of extra blocks or walk on the other side of the street.”
Asked if such requests don’t have the potential to dilute the program that was designed, Tuffey responds:
Let’s be honest: If you’re on a beat and you’re at one of the beat, whether you’re three blocks away or four blocks away, it’s going to take you relatively the same amount of time to get [across].
And usually there’s a car close anyway, so it’s not really a issue, unless they’re all tied up.
Was it a big thing for us the Police Department?
No.
But is it a big thing for the community to have us give them better service?
Yes, absolutely, that’s what we’re here for.
Tuffey’s concern for providing the community the services that they seem to want is equally apparent in his refusal to consider call-diversion schemes, despite some officers’ perceptions that their workload was too heavy for them to undertake some of the new tasks the department expects of them.
“That will never, ever, happen as long as I’m here,” Tuffey says of call-diversion programs like phone reporting.
The purpose of community policing is to give people what they want.
And if my house is burglarized and my bike is stolen, I don’t want to see a telephone report.
I want the police over there . . .
One of the guys brought it up in the Commanders meeting and wanted to do that.
He didn’t know my philosophy on that and everybody at the table knew it.
And oh boy, he said “sorry.”
I said, “Do yourself a favor, if you’re going to bring something up like that, you ought to check before you bring it up.”
I don’t think that’s the proper way to do things.
I really, really don’t. . . .
People pay taxes to get service.
And as far as I’m concerned, they will get the best service that I can help them get.
But if community policing aimed to “give people what they want,” the APD faced a need to learn what exactly it was that the community wanted.
Of course, the APD had always kept a window open to community sentiment through the formal political system.
But in the era of community policing, department managers apparently felt a need to find other ways to strike up a dialogue with the residents they served.
Patrol officers on the beat answered this need most directly for Albany.
First of all, foot patrol officers presumably had a particularly fine-grained understanding of community leadership and community concerns.
But the rest of the patrol force was also encouraged to develop closer ties with the public, and while some department members feel that their sectors were too large to make this proposition a reality, there are some stories of success, like the “liaison” programs spearheaded by Signer’s team.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
6. Building Support in the Community
If interagency collaboration has played a key role in Albany’s community policing effort, partnerships with the community have been even more central.
In part, the APD views Albany residents and the associations they have formed as a resource police can leverage to fight crime more effectively, and the department has helped facilitate activities like citizen foot patrols to increase its effectiveness.
But the driving ideal behind Albany’s police-community partnerships is apparently a desire by police to better understand community priorities.
“I firmly believe that we work with the people, and that’s when police departments work best,” recently-promoted Deputy Chief Jack Nielsen explains.
“I always tell people that they need to go to a country where there is martial law to understand how important it is that that be the philosophy of the police department: That you work for the people.”
Nielsen concedes that there need to be limits to community control over the police, but beyond those limits community sentiment becomes absolutely central to the decisions police make.
“I don’t think that they should have hands on influence [on policy],” he explains.
“[But] beyond the housekeeping phase, beyond the officer safety, beyond the fiduciary responsibility to the tax payer . . . the philosophy has to be that what is most important is the perception of the part of the people of how they are policed.”
Tuffey echoes Nielsen’s sentiments, explaining that he considers community reactions to be an important means for monitoring department performance and fine-tuning its programs.
As an example, he describes the process whereby the boundaries of the department’s foot beats have evolved.
“We always get letters or we go to community meetings and we get input from them,” Tuffey explains.
“There have been times when we had to extend one beat a different way because some of the people thought it should be extended a little bit."
"So, you let the guy walk a couple of extra blocks or walk on the other side of the street.”
Asked if such requests don’t have the potential to dilute the program that was designed, Tuffey responds:
Let’s be honest: If you’re on a beat and you’re at one of the beat, whether you’re three blocks away or four blocks away, it’s going to take you relatively the same amount of time to get [across].
And usually there’s a car close anyway, so it’s not really a issue, unless they’re all tied up.
Was it a big thing for us the Police Department?
No.
But is it a big thing for the community to have us give them better service?
Yes, absolutely, that’s what we’re here for.
Tuffey’s concern for providing the community the services that they seem to want is equally apparent in his refusal to consider call-diversion schemes, despite some officers’ perceptions that their workload was too heavy for them to undertake some of the new tasks the department expects of them.
“That will never, ever, happen as long as I’m here,” Tuffey says of call-diversion programs like phone reporting.
The purpose of community policing is to give people what they want.
And if my house is burglarized and my bike is stolen, I don’t want to see a telephone report.
I want the police over there . . .
One of the guys brought it up in the Commanders meeting and wanted to do that.
He didn’t know my philosophy on that and everybody at the table knew it.
And oh boy, he said “sorry.”
I said, “Do yourself a favor, if you’re going to bring something up like that, you ought to check before you bring it up.”
I don’t think that’s the proper way to do things.
I really, really don’t. . . .
People pay taxes to get service.
And as far as I’m concerned, they will get the best service that I can help them get.
But if community policing aimed to “give people what they want,” the APD faced a need to learn what exactly it was that the community wanted.
Of course, the APD had always kept a window open to community sentiment through the formal political system.
But in the era of community policing, department managers apparently felt a need to find other ways to strike up a dialogue with the residents they served.
Patrol officers on the beat answered this need most directly for Albany.
First of all, foot patrol officers presumably had a particularly fine-grained understanding of community leadership and community concerns.
But the rest of the patrol force was also encouraged to develop closer ties with the public, and while some department members feel that their sectors were too large to make this proposition a reality, there are some stories of success, like the “liaison” programs spearheaded by Signer’s team.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
6. Building Support in the Community
Neighborhood Associations and Community Policing
Off the street, the APD redoubled its efforts to make contact with the city’s community organizations — especially its maturing system of Neighborhood Associations (NAs).
Here too the patrol force played a central role: “Rather than this centralized community relations [unit],” Grebert explains, referring to the APD unit that had traditionally responded to NA requests to talk with police, “it was the members of the [sector] teams and their supervisors that would go to [NA] meetings.”
To help jump-start this relationship, the APD included many community leaders in some of its early training sessions, including not just NA presidents, but also representatives of non-neighborhood community groups like a citywide Gay and Lesbian Association and a few business groups.
Moreover, at the outset of Albany’s community policing program, Grebert and other department managers met extensively with city Neighborhood Associations to solicit their ideas about their plans.
The APD further cultivated its ties to city neighborhood groups by creating a citizen’s advisory board called the Community Police Council that counted NA leaders prominently among its members.
The Council first came up during the early discussions of community policing in 1994, when some APD members proposed creating a broadly representative body that could serve as a regular forum for airing neighborhood concerns.
The idea went nowhere at first, but neighborhood leaders who remembered it eventually decided to try to put it back on the agenda.
The first step came in the fall of 1995, when the Council of Albany Neighborhood Associations (CANA) presented a draft of its own plan for an advisory board to Jennings and the police department.
Maria Parisella, who drafted and revised the original plan, explains the idea as follows:
The Council of Albany Neighborhood Associations felt that there should be some kind of permanent forum for civilians and cops to discuss community policing.
There are a lot of other things that we do together, but this is devoted solely to considering [community policing], understanding the program, understanding how it works and advising the Mayor and the Chief in how we feel it can be improved.
While some police apparently saw the proposal more narrowly as a forum where citizens would nominate their current neighborhood problems, Parisella had broader ambitions, hoping that the new Council would serve as a way citizens could help make corrections to the APD’s evolving community policing program.
“I said it to my own neighborhood association: I think we need to have a group that just keeps looking at how this is going and how we can improve it,” Parisella remembers.
“We know we have to address some of the day-to-day issues, but this is not to replace the beat cop sitting down in his neighborhood.”
Parisella’s first plan suggested that each of the city’s 28 NAs should send a single delegate to the Council, and that this group would be joined by representatives of the police department.
Jennings and Tuffey, however, had a different idea.
“We sent the proposal to the Mayor and he broadened it,” Parisella explains.
“He said, ‘That’s a great idea, but I would like to also have some common council people in and some community reps and some people from community organizations.’”
Over the course of the next several months, CANA revised its draft, and the final proposal called for a “broadly representative” council that included police, residents, business, education, clergy, government, community organizations, and the media.
How closely Jennings followed the CANA plan — for in the end it was the Mayor who appointed most of the Council’s membership — is a matter of interpretation.
Parisella reports being fairly happy with the Council that emerged.
I know we represent what CANA had in mind because we represent various parts of the City neighborhoods, tenants and homeowners.
But I think we also represent what the Mayor had in mind.
The community groups don’t cover every base: [For example,] there’s no gay and lesbian [delegate], although we did propose a gay and lesbian organization member. . . .
I think he chose groups that he was most comfortable with for this round.
But I think . . . we represent pretty closely a broad base.
But Deputy Chief Grebert, who had been one of the police managers to push the Council idea in its initial incarnation, was somewhat disappointed with the process that emerged.
“We originally wanted to do it [with] representatives of neighborhood associations, representatives of business associations and civic associations, school district, religious community, media,” Grebert remembers.
“[But] I was surprised to see many of the same faces on this as on many of the other police-related committees."
"We certainly appreciate people’s commitment, but we were looking for some fresh faces to work with.”
The problem, Grebert explains, was not so much that some groups were under-represented: It was simply that because of their other commitments, Council members were not fully invested in the new body and its aims.
“I don’t think I’ve heard, ‘Gee, we’ve been left out.'"
"What I have heard is, ‘Gee, I couldn’t make it because . . . I’m also on the community police relations board [a ten-year-old board that reviews complaints against police] and I had to go to that meeting last night.’"
". . . Four or five of the people who were on that group were also put on the community police advisory council.”
In any case, the Council began its monthly meetings in November of 1996, exactly two years after the community outreach officers hit the street.
During its first year, the Council mainly sought to understand how community policing works in Albany, and it invited managers and officers from essentially every APD unit to help delegates understand how the department operated.
But the group has also sought to push for a few substantive reforms, such as a comprehensive brochure that explained community policing to the community, bicycle patrols as part of the community outreach effort, and more community involvement in department ceremonies.
“If anyone who we represent asks us to bring an issue to the table, we will,” Parisella explains.
We don’t take votes on these things: We just try to bring it to the table, have it discussed and if we feel strongly about something, we will just keep asking for it.
Like this brochure.
At first it was like, “Yes, that’s a good idea.”
[But] almost every single meeting we said, “We really want this brochure.”
So after a couple of months, they knew we were serious about it and they went ahead and did it.
It was that kind of a give and take.
We certainly don’t have any juice over the department: We’re just in an advisory capacity.
But when something is important to us, the department assumes that it’s important to the people we represent.
Some of the Council’s proposals have already come to fruition, notably the bicycle patrols, which Parisella points to as a significant example of the group’s influence.
“Bicycle patrols had been proposed at times and the Deputy [Chief] said, ‘This is not something that’s in our plan,’” she remembers.
“[But] at the CANA meeting, . . . we had been asked in particular by an association to bring that to the table."
"[And] there was enough support both on the Council and in the community that the Mayor went ahead and started a bicycle patrol last summer.”
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
6. Building Support in the Community
Neighborhood Associations and Community Policing
Off the street, the APD redoubled its efforts to make contact with the city’s community organizations — especially its maturing system of Neighborhood Associations (NAs).
Here too the patrol force played a central role: “Rather than this centralized community relations [unit],” Grebert explains, referring to the APD unit that had traditionally responded to NA requests to talk with police, “it was the members of the [sector] teams and their supervisors that would go to [NA] meetings.”
To help jump-start this relationship, the APD included many community leaders in some of its early training sessions, including not just NA presidents, but also representatives of non-neighborhood community groups like a citywide Gay and Lesbian Association and a few business groups.
Moreover, at the outset of Albany’s community policing program, Grebert and other department managers met extensively with city Neighborhood Associations to solicit their ideas about their plans.
The APD further cultivated its ties to city neighborhood groups by creating a citizen’s advisory board called the Community Police Council that counted NA leaders prominently among its members.
The Council first came up during the early discussions of community policing in 1994, when some APD members proposed creating a broadly representative body that could serve as a regular forum for airing neighborhood concerns.
The idea went nowhere at first, but neighborhood leaders who remembered it eventually decided to try to put it back on the agenda.
The first step came in the fall of 1995, when the Council of Albany Neighborhood Associations (CANA) presented a draft of its own plan for an advisory board to Jennings and the police department.
Maria Parisella, who drafted and revised the original plan, explains the idea as follows:
The Council of Albany Neighborhood Associations felt that there should be some kind of permanent forum for civilians and cops to discuss community policing.
There are a lot of other things that we do together, but this is devoted solely to considering [community policing], understanding the program, understanding how it works and advising the Mayor and the Chief in how we feel it can be improved.
While some police apparently saw the proposal more narrowly as a forum where citizens would nominate their current neighborhood problems, Parisella had broader ambitions, hoping that the new Council would serve as a way citizens could help make corrections to the APD’s evolving community policing program.
“I said it to my own neighborhood association: I think we need to have a group that just keeps looking at how this is going and how we can improve it,” Parisella remembers.
“We know we have to address some of the day-to-day issues, but this is not to replace the beat cop sitting down in his neighborhood.”
Parisella’s first plan suggested that each of the city’s 28 NAs should send a single delegate to the Council, and that this group would be joined by representatives of the police department.
Jennings and Tuffey, however, had a different idea.
“We sent the proposal to the Mayor and he broadened it,” Parisella explains.
“He said, ‘That’s a great idea, but I would like to also have some common council people in and some community reps and some people from community organizations.’”
Over the course of the next several months, CANA revised its draft, and the final proposal called for a “broadly representative” council that included police, residents, business, education, clergy, government, community organizations, and the media.
How closely Jennings followed the CANA plan — for in the end it was the Mayor who appointed most of the Council’s membership — is a matter of interpretation.
Parisella reports being fairly happy with the Council that emerged.
I know we represent what CANA had in mind because we represent various parts of the City neighborhoods, tenants and homeowners.
But I think we also represent what the Mayor had in mind.
The community groups don’t cover every base: [For example,] there’s no gay and lesbian [delegate], although we did propose a gay and lesbian organization member. . . .
I think he chose groups that he was most comfortable with for this round.
But I think . . . we represent pretty closely a broad base.
But Deputy Chief Grebert, who had been one of the police managers to push the Council idea in its initial incarnation, was somewhat disappointed with the process that emerged.
“We originally wanted to do it [with] representatives of neighborhood associations, representatives of business associations and civic associations, school district, religious community, media,” Grebert remembers.
“[But] I was surprised to see many of the same faces on this as on many of the other police-related committees."
"We certainly appreciate people’s commitment, but we were looking for some fresh faces to work with.”
The problem, Grebert explains, was not so much that some groups were under-represented: It was simply that because of their other commitments, Council members were not fully invested in the new body and its aims.
“I don’t think I’ve heard, ‘Gee, we’ve been left out.'"
"What I have heard is, ‘Gee, I couldn’t make it because . . . I’m also on the community police relations board [a ten-year-old board that reviews complaints against police] and I had to go to that meeting last night.’"
". . . Four or five of the people who were on that group were also put on the community police advisory council.”
In any case, the Council began its monthly meetings in November of 1996, exactly two years after the community outreach officers hit the street.
During its first year, the Council mainly sought to understand how community policing works in Albany, and it invited managers and officers from essentially every APD unit to help delegates understand how the department operated.
But the group has also sought to push for a few substantive reforms, such as a comprehensive brochure that explained community policing to the community, bicycle patrols as part of the community outreach effort, and more community involvement in department ceremonies.
“If anyone who we represent asks us to bring an issue to the table, we will,” Parisella explains.
We don’t take votes on these things: We just try to bring it to the table, have it discussed and if we feel strongly about something, we will just keep asking for it.
Like this brochure.
At first it was like, “Yes, that’s a good idea.”
[But] almost every single meeting we said, “We really want this brochure.”
So after a couple of months, they knew we were serious about it and they went ahead and did it.
It was that kind of a give and take.
We certainly don’t have any juice over the department: We’re just in an advisory capacity.
But when something is important to us, the department assumes that it’s important to the people we represent.
Some of the Council’s proposals have already come to fruition, notably the bicycle patrols, which Parisella points to as a significant example of the group’s influence.
“Bicycle patrols had been proposed at times and the Deputy [Chief] said, ‘This is not something that’s in our plan,’” she remembers.
“[But] at the CANA meeting, . . . we had been asked in particular by an association to bring that to the table."
"[And] there was enough support both on the Council and in the community that the Mayor went ahead and started a bicycle patrol last summer.”
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
6. Building Support in the Community
Neighborhood Associations and Community Policing
Off the street, the APD redoubled its efforts to make contact with the city’s community organizations — especially its maturing system of Neighborhood Associations (NAs).
Here too the patrol force played a central role: “Rather than this centralized community relations [unit],” Grebert explains, referring to the APD unit that had traditionally responded to NA requests to talk with police, “it was the members of the [sector] teams and their supervisors that would go to [NA] meetings.”
To help jump-start this relationship, the APD included many community leaders in some of its early training sessions, including not just NA presidents, but also representatives of non-neighborhood community groups like a citywide Gay and Lesbian Association and a few business groups.
Moreover, at the outset of Albany’s community policing program, Grebert and other department managers met extensively with city Neighborhood Associations to solicit their ideas about their plans.
The APD further cultivated its ties to city neighborhood groups by creating a citizen’s advisory board called the Community Police Council that counted NA leaders prominently among its members.
The Council first came up during the early discussions of community policing in 1994, when some APD members proposed creating a broadly representative body that could serve as a regular forum for airing neighborhood concerns.
The idea went nowhere at first, but neighborhood leaders who remembered it eventually decided to try to put it back on the agenda.
The first step came in the fall of 1995, when the Council of Albany Neighborhood Associations (CANA) presented a draft of its own plan for an advisory board to Jennings and the police department.
Maria Parisella, who drafted and revised the original plan, explains the idea as follows:
The Council of Albany Neighborhood Associations felt that there should be some kind of permanent forum for civilians and cops to discuss community policing.
There are a lot of other things that we do together, but this is devoted solely to considering [community policing], understanding the program, understanding how it works and advising the Mayor and the Chief in how we feel it can be improved.
While some police apparently saw the proposal more narrowly as a forum where citizens would nominate their current neighborhood problems, Parisella had broader ambitions, hoping that the new Council would serve as a way citizens could help make corrections to the APD’s evolving community policing program.
“I said it to my own neighborhood association: I think we need to have a group that just keeps looking at how this is going and how we can improve it,” Parisella remembers.
“We know we have to address some of the day-to-day issues, but this is not to replace the beat cop sitting down in his neighborhood.”
Parisella’s first plan suggested that each of the city’s 28 NAs should send a single delegate to the Council, and that this group would be joined by representatives of the police department.
Jennings and Tuffey, however, had a different idea.
“We sent the proposal to the Mayor and he broadened it,” Parisella explains.
“He said, ‘That’s a great idea, but I would like to also have some common council people in and some community reps and some people from community organizations.’”
Over the course of the next several months, CANA revised its draft, and the final proposal called for a “broadly representative” council that included police, residents, business, education, clergy, government, community organizations, and the media.
How closely Jennings followed the CANA plan — for in the end it was the Mayor who appointed most of the Council’s membership — is a matter of interpretation.
Parisella reports being fairly happy with the Council that emerged.
I know we represent what CANA had in mind because we represent various parts of the City neighborhoods, tenants and homeowners.
But I think we also represent what the Mayor had in mind.
The community groups don’t cover every base: [For example,] there’s no gay and lesbian [delegate], although we did propose a gay and lesbian organization member. . . .
I think he chose groups that he was most comfortable with for this round.
But I think . . . we represent pretty closely a broad base.
But Deputy Chief Grebert, who had been one of the police managers to push the Council idea in its initial incarnation, was somewhat disappointed with the process that emerged.
“We originally wanted to do it [with] representatives of neighborhood associations, representatives of business associations and civic associations, school district, religious community, media,” Grebert remembers.
“[But] I was surprised to see many of the same faces on this as on many of the other police-related committees."
"We certainly appreciate people’s commitment, but we were looking for some fresh faces to work with.”
The problem, Grebert explains, was not so much that some groups were under-represented: It was simply that because of their other commitments, Council members were not fully invested in the new body and its aims.
“I don’t think I’ve heard, ‘Gee, we’ve been left out.'"
"What I have heard is, ‘Gee, I couldn’t make it because . . . I’m also on the community police relations board [a ten-year-old board that reviews complaints against police] and I had to go to that meeting last night.’"
". . . Four or five of the people who were on that group were also put on the community police advisory council.”
In any case, the Council began its monthly meetings in November of 1996, exactly two years after the community outreach officers hit the street.
During its first year, the Council mainly sought to understand how community policing works in Albany, and it invited managers and officers from essentially every APD unit to help delegates understand how the department operated.
But the group has also sought to push for a few substantive reforms, such as a comprehensive brochure that explained community policing to the community, bicycle patrols as part of the community outreach effort, and more community involvement in department ceremonies.
“If anyone who we represent asks us to bring an issue to the table, we will,” Parisella explains.
We don’t take votes on these things: We just try to bring it to the table, have it discussed and if we feel strongly about something, we will just keep asking for it.
Like this brochure.
At first it was like, “Yes, that’s a good idea.”
[But] almost every single meeting we said, “We really want this brochure.”
So after a couple of months, they knew we were serious about it and they went ahead and did it.
It was that kind of a give and take.
We certainly don’t have any juice over the department: We’re just in an advisory capacity.
But when something is important to us, the department assumes that it’s important to the people we represent.
Some of the Council’s proposals have already come to fruition, notably the bicycle patrols, which Parisella points to as a significant example of the group’s influence.
“Bicycle patrols had been proposed at times and the Deputy [Chief] said, ‘This is not something that’s in our plan,’” she remembers.
“[But] at the CANA meeting, . . . we had been asked in particular by an association to bring that to the table."
"[And] there was enough support both on the Council and in the community that the Mayor went ahead and started a bicycle patrol last summer.”
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
6. Building Support in the Community
Neighborhood Associations and Community Policing
Off the street, the APD redoubled its efforts to make contact with the city’s community organizations — especially its maturing system of Neighborhood Associations (NAs).
Here too the patrol force played a central role: “Rather than this centralized community relations [unit],” Grebert explains, referring to the APD unit that had traditionally responded to NA requests to talk with police, “it was the members of the [sector] teams and their supervisors that would go to [NA] meetings.”
To help jump-start this relationship, the APD included many community leaders in some of its early training sessions, including not just NA presidents, but also representatives of non-neighborhood community groups like a citywide Gay and Lesbian Association and a few business groups.
Moreover, at the outset of Albany’s community policing program, Grebert and other department managers met extensively with city Neighborhood Associations to solicit their ideas about their plans.
The APD further cultivated its ties to city neighborhood groups by creating a citizen’s advisory board called the Community Police Council that counted NA leaders prominently among its members.
The Council first came up during the early discussions of community policing in 1994, when some APD members proposed creating a broadly representative body that could serve as a regular forum for airing neighborhood concerns.
The idea went nowhere at first, but neighborhood leaders who remembered it eventually decided to try to put it back on the agenda.
The first step came in the fall of 1995, when the Council of Albany Neighborhood Associations (CANA) presented a draft of its own plan for an advisory board to Jennings and the police department.
Maria Parisella, who drafted and revised the original plan, explains the idea as follows:
The Council of Albany Neighborhood Associations felt that there should be some kind of permanent forum for civilians and cops to discuss community policing.
There are a lot of other things that we do together, but this is devoted solely to considering [community policing], understanding the program, understanding how it works and advising the Mayor and the Chief in how we feel it can be improved.
While some police apparently saw the proposal more narrowly as a forum where citizens would nominate their current neighborhood problems, Parisella had broader ambitions, hoping that the new Council would serve as a way citizens could help make corrections to the APD’s evolving community policing program.
“I said it to my own neighborhood association: I think we need to have a group that just keeps looking at how this is going and how we can improve it,” Parisella remembers.
“We know we have to address some of the day-to-day issues, but this is not to replace the beat cop sitting down in his neighborhood.”
Parisella’s first plan suggested that each of the city’s 28 NAs should send a single delegate to the Council, and that this group would be joined by representatives of the police department.
Jennings and Tuffey, however, had a different idea.
“We sent the proposal to the Mayor and he broadened it,” Parisella explains.
“He said, ‘That’s a great idea, but I would like to also have some common council people in and some community reps and some people from community organizations.’”
Over the course of the next several months, CANA revised its draft, and the final proposal called for a “broadly representative” council that included police, residents, business, education, clergy, government, community organizations, and the media.
How closely Jennings followed the CANA plan — for in the end it was the Mayor who appointed most of the Council’s membership — is a matter of interpretation.
Parisella reports being fairly happy with the Council that emerged.
I know we represent what CANA had in mind because we represent various parts of the City neighborhoods, tenants and homeowners.
But I think we also represent what the Mayor had in mind.
The community groups don’t cover every base: [For example,] there’s no gay and lesbian [delegate], although we did propose a gay and lesbian organization member. . . .
I think he chose groups that he was most comfortable with for this round.
But I think . . . we represent pretty closely a broad base.
But Deputy Chief Grebert, who had been one of the police managers to push the Council idea in its initial incarnation, was somewhat disappointed with the process that emerged.
“We originally wanted to do it [with] representatives of neighborhood associations, representatives of business associations and civic associations, school district, religious community, media,” Grebert remembers.
“[But] I was surprised to see many of the same faces on this as on many of the other police-related committees."
"We certainly appreciate people’s commitment, but we were looking for some fresh faces to work with.”
The problem, Grebert explains, was not so much that some groups were under-represented: It was simply that because of their other commitments, Council members were not fully invested in the new body and its aims.
“I don’t think I’ve heard, ‘Gee, we’ve been left out.'"
"What I have heard is, ‘Gee, I couldn’t make it because . . . I’m also on the community police relations board [a ten-year-old board that reviews complaints against police] and I had to go to that meeting last night.’"
". . . Four or five of the people who were on that group were also put on the community police advisory council.”
In any case, the Council began its monthly meetings in November of 1996, exactly two years after the community outreach officers hit the street.
During its first year, the Council mainly sought to understand how community policing works in Albany, and it invited managers and officers from essentially every APD unit to help delegates understand how the department operated.
But the group has also sought to push for a few substantive reforms, such as a comprehensive brochure that explained community policing to the community, bicycle patrols as part of the community outreach effort, and more community involvement in department ceremonies.
“If anyone who we represent asks us to bring an issue to the table, we will,” Parisella explains.
We don’t take votes on these things: We just try to bring it to the table, have it discussed and if we feel strongly about something, we will just keep asking for it.
Like this brochure.
At first it was like, “Yes, that’s a good idea.”
[But] almost every single meeting we said, “We really want this brochure.”
So after a couple of months, they knew we were serious about it and they went ahead and did it.
It was that kind of a give and take.
We certainly don’t have any juice over the department: We’re just in an advisory capacity.
But when something is important to us, the department assumes that it’s important to the people we represent.
Some of the Council’s proposals have already come to fruition, notably the bicycle patrols, which Parisella points to as a significant example of the group’s influence.
“Bicycle patrols had been proposed at times and the Deputy [Chief] said, ‘This is not something that’s in our plan,’” she remembers.
“[But] at the CANA meeting, . . . we had been asked in particular by an association to bring that to the table."
"[And] there was enough support both on the Council and in the community that the Mayor went ahead and started a bicycle patrol last summer.”
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
6. Building Support in the Community
The Rise of Neighborhood Power in Albany
Reforms like the Community Police Council and the initiatives it has spawned would clearly not have been possible without Albany’s well-organized system of Neighborhood Associations.
In fact, one of the major differences between the community policing efforts of today and the neighborhood outreach units of the 1970s is organized community involvement.
“There was none of the emphasis on partnerships,” Grebert explains of the neighborhood outreach unit where he worked twenty years ago.
“The community was still the bad guys.”
Indeed, it is hard to see how things could have been otherwise in the earlier period, for neighborhood organization was a new and somewhat renegade force at the time: A few groups had been around for many years, notably the Center Square Association, whose 1958 birthdate makes it the oldest NA existing in Albany today.
But neighborhood organization did not truly take off until the 1970s, and it is worth reviewing that history here.
At that time, Center Square residents in particular pressed the city more and more insistently to enforce zoning laws and building codes, feeling that their neighborhood was losing its historic character as landowners illegally subdivided one-family homes.
The city, however, seemed to have no intention of responding to Center Square’s complaints.
“Everytime we called the city, I used to hear the song and dance about how busy they were dealing with the concerns of the United Tenants association,” explains Harold Rubin, Center Square’s president in the early 1970s and the chairman of its zoning committee for many years before and after that time.
“So I contacted the head of that Association . . . I assumed [city officials] were telling United Tenants they could not deal with their problems because Center Square was bugging the hell out of them.”
Roger Markovics, then the head of United Tenants of Albany, was apparently somewhat wary of Rubin during their first meetings in 1974.
“Center Square has a reputation of being . . . a bunch of gentrifiers over here, middle class types — not the type of people he normally dealt with,” Rubin explains.
“And so [in] our early meetings, they were looking at who the hell we were.”
But after discussing their respective and mutual concerns, they were able to find some common ground, and the two organizations joined up with a number of other groups — including five more neighborhood associations and interest groups like the Albany Taxpayer’s Association and the League of Women Voters — to form what would eventually become known as the Coalition for Effective Code Enforcement.
The Coalition quickly came up with an eleven-point plan that described an agenda of issues it wanted to take up with the city.
“It was a very radical program,” Rubin remembers sardonically of the plan.
Such as: “Handle complaints in an orderly manner” — first-come, first-serve more-or-less.
“Fine violators.”
“Publicize violations.”
“Have the employees take civil service exams for their positions so they can be competent.”
Roger used to say that no inspection was ever done in the afternoon: They worked a half a day.
At one time, five of the code inspectors were ministers.
And I wondered, “What special training is it for the ministry that qualified a person to become a code enforcement inspector?”
This was a political payoff.
At first the city moved slowly on the new Coalition’s sometimes elaborate proposals: For example, after researching the subject with three national code enforcement agencies, the Coalition presented the Building Department with a 43-page document — complete with sample inspection forms — that they unsuccessfully asked the city to adopt.
But whatever its immediate successes, the coalition served as a starting point for Albany’s future alliance of neighborhood associations.
One milestone down this road came in 1975, when a regionally-based nonprofit called the Council of Community Services successfully petitioned the United Way to fund a new agency called the Neighborhood Resource Center (NRC).
Over the years NRC provided many forms of help to struggling neighborhood groups, including secretarial services like sending out meeting notices, advice about organizing and maintaining groups, and space for holding neighborhood meetings.
NRC did not try to organize neighborhood groups on its own, believing that communities should be organized from the inside rather than the outside. 53
But by providing a focal point for neighborhood energy, the new agency effectively helped organize existing groups into a larger and more powerful coalition.
That process got started in the Spring of 1976, when NRC director Tom Mayer hosted a meeting of eight neighborhood associations that was the first in what was to become a series of informal meetings for many of the city’s NAs.
By 1977, the participants (which then numbered eleven NAs) adopted a formal “Statement of Goals” that highlighted such policy concerns as housing, service delivery, and education; and by 1981, the group (then grown to eighteen members) adopted a set of by-laws and formally incorporated as the Council of Albany Neighborhood Associations.
CANA markedly advanced the neighborhood movement by gaining significant power in city politics — particularly through its relationship with Mayor Whalen.
CANA had begun cultivating that relationship in 1981, when Rubin learned that Corning intended to nominate Whalen for President of the Common Council, and by implication as his successor for the Mayor’s job.
“I called him up to meet with him,” Rubin remembers of Whalen at the time.
I wanted to meet with him with a couple people from CANA, [but] he didn’t want to meet with a group.
I just went by myself.
And I felt very uncomfortable speaking to him on my own, because it looks like I’m cutting a deal.
And I don’t like that whole idea.
But I went and spent about an hour and a half with him, telling him of our concerns.
[And] he had an understanding of where we were coming from.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
6. Building Support in the Community
The Rise of Neighborhood Power in Albany
Reforms like the Community Police Council and the initiatives it has spawned would clearly not have been possible without Albany’s well-organized system of Neighborhood Associations.
In fact, one of the major differences between the community policing efforts of today and the neighborhood outreach units of the 1970s is organized community involvement.
“There was none of the emphasis on partnerships,” Grebert explains of the neighborhood outreach unit where he worked twenty years ago.
“The community was still the bad guys.”
Indeed, it is hard to see how things could have been otherwise in the earlier period, for neighborhood organization was a new and somewhat renegade force at the time: A few groups had been around for many years, notably the Center Square Association, whose 1958 birthdate makes it the oldest NA existing in Albany today.
But neighborhood organization did not truly take off until the 1970s, and it is worth reviewing that history here.
At that time, Center Square residents in particular pressed the city more and more insistently to enforce zoning laws and building codes, feeling that their neighborhood was losing its historic character as landowners illegally subdivided one-family homes.
The city, however, seemed to have no intention of responding to Center Square’s complaints.
“Everytime we called the city, I used to hear the song and dance about how busy they were dealing with the concerns of the United Tenants association,” explains Harold Rubin, Center Square’s president in the early 1970s and the chairman of its zoning committee for many years before and after that time.
“So I contacted the head of that Association . . . I assumed [city officials] were telling United Tenants they could not deal with their problems because Center Square was bugging the hell out of them.”
Roger Markovics, then the head of United Tenants of Albany, was apparently somewhat wary of Rubin during their first meetings in 1974.
“Center Square has a reputation of being . . . a bunch of gentrifiers over here, middle class types — not the type of people he normally dealt with,” Rubin explains.
“And so [in] our early meetings, they were looking at who the hell we were.”
But after discussing their respective and mutual concerns, they were able to find some common ground, and the two organizations joined up with a number of other groups — including five more neighborhood associations and interest groups like the Albany Taxpayer’s Association and the League of Women Voters — to form what would eventually become known as the Coalition for Effective Code Enforcement.
The Coalition quickly came up with an eleven-point plan that described an agenda of issues it wanted to take up with the city.
“It was a very radical program,” Rubin remembers sardonically of the plan.
Such as: “Handle complaints in an orderly manner” — first-come, first-serve more-or-less.
“Fine violators.”
“Publicize violations.”
“Have the employees take civil service exams for their positions so they can be competent.”
Roger used to say that no inspection was ever done in the afternoon: They worked a half a day.
At one time, five of the code inspectors were ministers.
And I wondered, “What special training is it for the ministry that qualified a person to become a code enforcement inspector?”
This was a political payoff.
At first the city moved slowly on the new Coalition’s sometimes elaborate proposals: For example, after researching the subject with three national code enforcement agencies, the Coalition presented the Building Department with a 43-page document — complete with sample inspection forms — that they unsuccessfully asked the city to adopt.
But whatever its immediate successes, the coalition served as a starting point for Albany’s future alliance of neighborhood associations.
One milestone down this road came in 1975, when a regionally-based nonprofit called the Council of Community Services successfully petitioned the United Way to fund a new agency called the Neighborhood Resource Center (NRC).
Over the years NRC provided many forms of help to struggling neighborhood groups, including secretarial services like sending out meeting notices, advice about organizing and maintaining groups, and space for holding neighborhood meetings.
NRC did not try to organize neighborhood groups on its own, believing that communities should be organized from the inside rather than the outside. 53
But by providing a focal point for neighborhood energy, the new agency effectively helped organize existing groups into a larger and more powerful coalition.
That process got started in the Spring of 1976, when NRC director Tom Mayer hosted a meeting of eight neighborhood associations that was the first in what was to become a series of informal meetings for many of the city’s NAs.
By 1977, the participants (which then numbered eleven NAs) adopted a formal “Statement of Goals” that highlighted such policy concerns as housing, service delivery, and education; and by 1981, the group (then grown to eighteen members) adopted a set of by-laws and formally incorporated as the Council of Albany Neighborhood Associations.
CANA markedly advanced the neighborhood movement by gaining significant power in city politics — particularly through its relationship with Mayor Whalen.
CANA had begun cultivating that relationship in 1981, when Rubin learned that Corning intended to nominate Whalen for President of the Common Council, and by implication as his successor for the Mayor’s job.
“I called him up to meet with him,” Rubin remembers of Whalen at the time.
I wanted to meet with him with a couple people from CANA, [but] he didn’t want to meet with a group.
I just went by myself.
And I felt very uncomfortable speaking to him on my own, because it looks like I’m cutting a deal.
And I don’t like that whole idea.
But I went and spent about an hour and a half with him, telling him of our concerns.
[And] he had an understanding of where we were coming from.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
6. Building Support in the Community
The Rise of Neighborhood Power in Albany, continued ...
Whalen agreed to speak before the emerging CANA group once he took office in 1982 as Council President, and that appearance set a precedent that has continued on to this day: Even after he became Mayor, Whalen addressed the January CANA meeting with such regularity that the event eventually became known as the Mayor’s “State of the City Address.”
At times, Rubin reports, there was some tension about exactly who set the terms of these appearances: “What I would do is write a letter to the Mayor and suggest certain topics, and one time he wrote back that I was trying to give the Rubin agenda,” Rubin remembers.
“I said, ‘Look, the floor is yours, [but] these are things that have come up during the past year which are of concern.”
Nevertheless, despite such minor disagreements, the January speeches helped to reshape CANA’s relationship with the city fundamentally.
Not only has Mayor Jennings continued the tradition set by Whalen, but Rubin believes that at the time, Whalen’s appearances helped coax some wary heads of Albany agencies to talk directly with the neighborhoods: “At the very beginning they were very, very reluctant,” Rubin remembers of agency heads he invited to speak.
“But when Tom Whalen kept coming to the meetings, he established a precedent: If the Mayor can go, it was kind of hard for them to turn us down.”
It would, however, be an oversimplification to say that Whalen handed CANA its influence in city hall, for the neighborhoods were willing and able to be confrontational when necessary.
One example centers on required public hearings for the city budget, which CANA reportedly used to great effect.
Most simply, the neighborhoods made many critical comments on both the form and substance of annual city budgets, and Rubin believes this input had a real impact.
But he also explains that CANA did not stop there:
We used to use the budget hearings as a means of griping about other things, because most other issues did not have hearings.
For example, at one of the meetings one of our delegates got up and said “we should eliminate the building department and save the $350,000,” which was the amount they were paying.
“Because they don’t do anything anyway."
"Save the money.”
I mean that was the way we would use to make our views known.
And since we were the only game in town . . . in terms of speaking at the public hearings on the city budget, . . . we got tremendous press coverage.
And you know, the media doesn’t cover good news, they cover controversy.
And when we would testify against something, that’s controversy.
In an equally confrontational spirit, Rubin describes one of the neighborhoods’ central strategies as going to court, and this was particularly true of Center Square: “We went to court lots of time,” Rubin remembers.
“Some times we won, and some times we lost."
"But the very fact that we were ready to go to court probably stopped some of the worst abominations that would have occurred otherwise.”
To be sure, navigating the machine-influenced legal system was not always easy, as attorneys had to know which judges they should try to go before, and they sometimes had to appeal cases out of the local system altogether.
But Center Square in particular was usually able to get pro bono legal help either from its own residents or from other NAs, who, Rubin insists, “understood what we were trying to do, and were prepared to help out.”
CANA’s sometimes confrontational relationship with city hall contrasted with its hands-off attitude towards the political party.
Conscious that local politicians might view Neighborhood Associations as a threat, Rubin and others constantly tried to dispel that view.
“In the early years, everybody would ask me, ‘When are you running for office?’” he recalls.
“They assumed that I became president of the Center Square Association and later head of CANA because I had a political agenda — that I was going to run for some office.”
But Rubin overtly tried to distance himself and CANA from electoral politics, insisting that he was “not enrolled in the party” and that he was “not a spokesman who was out shopping around for a higher level job.”
This philosophy became a matter of organizational policy with CANA, which asked any NA official who ran for public office to step down from the NA position first.
Indeed, Rubin and the rest of CANA’s board made a more general effort to focus neighborhood groups away from Democratic Committee headquarters and towards city hall.
Rubin explains:
We deal with the City: We deal with the Mayor; we deal with the elected officials; we deal with the people whose salaries we pay.
We don’t deal with the politics side of it.
Mayor Corning, later on in his life, became chairman of the Democratic Party.
When we met with him, we did not meet with him as Chairman.
We met with him as a Mayor.
I’m not enrolled in the [Democratic] Party.
I didn’t know who our committeeman was, I wasn’t interested in knowing who he was.
He did his thing or she did her thing. . . .
I probably have spoken to I don’t know how many groups to help them organize Neighborhood Associations or keep them going, and what I would point out is this: You don’t go to the committeemen to ask them to do something, because you are asking for a favor.
What we want are those services that the city is supposed to provide, as a right, not as a favor.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies, continued ...
6. Building Support in the Community
The Rise of Neighborhood Power in Albany, continued ...
Whalen agreed to speak before the emerging CANA group once he took office in 1982 as Council President, and that appearance set a precedent that has continued on to this day: Even after he became Mayor, Whalen addressed the January CANA meeting with such regularity that the event eventually became known as the Mayor’s “State of the City Address.”
At times, Rubin reports, there was some tension about exactly who set the terms of these appearances: “What I would do is write a letter to the Mayor and suggest certain topics, and one time he wrote back that I was trying to give the Rubin agenda,” Rubin remembers.
“I said, ‘Look, the floor is yours, [but] these are things that have come up during the past year which are of concern.”
Nevertheless, despite such minor disagreements, the January speeches helped to reshape CANA’s relationship with the city fundamentally.
Not only has Mayor Jennings continued the tradition set by Whalen, but Rubin believes that at the time, Whalen’s appearances helped coax some wary heads of Albany agencies to talk directly with the neighborhoods: “At the very beginning they were very, very reluctant,” Rubin remembers of agency heads he invited to speak.
“But when Tom Whalen kept coming to the meetings, he established a precedent: If the Mayor can go, it was kind of hard for them to turn us down.”
It would, however, be an oversimplification to say that Whalen handed CANA its influence in city hall, for the neighborhoods were willing and able to be confrontational when necessary.
One example centers on required public hearings for the city budget, which CANA reportedly used to great effect.
Most simply, the neighborhoods made many critical comments on both the form and substance of annual city budgets, and Rubin believes this input had a real impact.
But he also explains that CANA did not stop there:
We used to use the budget hearings as a means of griping about other things, because most other issues did not have hearings.
For example, at one of the meetings one of our delegates got up and said “we should eliminate the building department and save the $350,000,” which was the amount they were paying.
“Because they don’t do anything anyway."
"Save the money.”
I mean that was the way we would use to make our views known.
And since we were the only game in town . . . in terms of speaking at the public hearings on the city budget, . . . we got tremendous press coverage.
And you know, the media doesn’t cover good news, they cover controversy.
And when we would testify against something, that’s controversy.
In an equally confrontational spirit, Rubin describes one of the neighborhoods’ central strategies as going to court, and this was particularly true of Center Square: “We went to court lots of time,” Rubin remembers.
“Some times we won, and some times we lost."
"But the very fact that we were ready to go to court probably stopped some of the worst abominations that would have occurred otherwise.”
To be sure, navigating the machine-influenced legal system was not always easy, as attorneys had to know which judges they should try to go before, and they sometimes had to appeal cases out of the local system altogether.
But Center Square in particular was usually able to get pro bono legal help either from its own residents or from other NAs, who, Rubin insists, “understood what we were trying to do, and were prepared to help out.”
CANA’s sometimes confrontational relationship with city hall contrasted with its hands-off attitude towards the political party.
Conscious that local politicians might view Neighborhood Associations as a threat, Rubin and others constantly tried to dispel that view.
“In the early years, everybody would ask me, ‘When are you running for office?’” he recalls.
“They assumed that I became president of the Center Square Association and later head of CANA because I had a political agenda — that I was going to run for some office.”
But Rubin overtly tried to distance himself and CANA from electoral politics, insisting that he was “not enrolled in the party” and that he was “not a spokesman who was out shopping around for a higher level job.”
This philosophy became a matter of organizational policy with CANA, which asked any NA official who ran for public office to step down from the NA position first.
Indeed, Rubin and the rest of CANA’s board made a more general effort to focus neighborhood groups away from Democratic Committee headquarters and towards city hall.
Rubin explains:
We deal with the City: We deal with the Mayor; we deal with the elected officials; we deal with the people whose salaries we pay.
We don’t deal with the politics side of it.
Mayor Corning, later on in his life, became chairman of the Democratic Party.
When we met with him, we did not meet with him as Chairman.
We met with him as a Mayor.
I’m not enrolled in the [Democratic] Party.
I didn’t know who our committeeman was, I wasn’t interested in knowing who he was.
He did his thing or she did her thing. . . .
I probably have spoken to I don’t know how many groups to help them organize Neighborhood Associations or keep them going, and what I would point out is this: You don’t go to the committeemen to ask them to do something, because you are asking for a favor.
What we want are those services that the city is supposed to provide, as a right, not as a favor.
TO BE CONTINUED ...