JAMESTOWN – Local police agencies have finalized their draft plans for the New York State Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative initiative.
The plans are the result of a mandate issued by Gov. Andrew Cuomo last summer in the wake of the George Floyd death at the hands of police in Minneapolis, and which resulted in national protests against law enforcement. Under the governor’s directive, every police agency in New York state is required to access its operations and prepare a reform plan, based, in part, on input from the public. As part of his mandate, Gov. Cuomo said that any police agency that doesn’t present a reform plan could risk losing state aid.
Locally, Chautauqua County Sheriff James Quattrone announced last week his office’s draft plan was completed. That plan is now being reviewed in a series of public input sessions taking place this week and next week. A deadline for written input is March 10.
Meanwhile, the Jamestown Police Department has also completed its draft plan. During a conversation this with Jamestown Mayor Eddie Sundquist, the mayor said that plan will be released to the public in the coming days, while also explaining the process for collecting input for the plan.
“The police reform committee, which is comprised of the public safety committee, as well as our police department and some other components of the city, worked diligently to draft a reinvention program and looked at different portions of what we currently do in the city and where we should be going, in conjunction with the multiple stakeholder group meetings they held through the city and with the survey information we got from folks across the city who supplied that survey information,” Sundquist explained.
Video of the input sessions can be found at the city of Jamestown website.
Sundquist also said now that a draft plan is in place, it will now be put before the public for a final round of input before being passed along to state officials.
“We’ve taken all that information and put into a draft, and that will be released to the public for comment. Then the City Council’s Public Safety Committee will host an information session and an additional public input session later this month. The plan will then be finalized and voted by the City Council for approval by the end of this month, and then submitted to the state,” Sundquist said.
No date has been selected yet for when the public safety committee will review and discuss the plan, but the next two scheduled meetings are for March 8 and March 22.
Meanwhile, the Sheriff’s office held its first streaming input session for its plan on Tuesday, with the next one scheduled for Thursday at 6:30 p.m. All meetings are being streamed at Facebook.com/ChautCoSheriff.
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