Mixed Views from Board of Trustees on Survey for Police Reform

The Cold Spring Village Board of Trustees meeting was held Tuesday February 9, 2021

In last night’s Board of Trustees meeting, the leading conversation on the agenda was the survey that select members of the Board are preparing for resident input concerning their police reform policy following Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Executive Order that police forces are required to adopt a plan for reform by April 1, 2021 to be eligible for future state funding. Thus far, it has been a long process toward this statewide goal. The distribution of a survey would give residents a voice on this serious subject. This month’s board meeting began with several department reports, and was dominated by various issues relating to police reform.

Early in the meeting Larry Burke, Cold Spring Police Department’s officer-in-charge reported the tickets, incidents, and arrests of the month. In response to a question posed by Mayor Dave Merandy, Burke stated that since he had become officer-in-charge, there have been an average of 10-15 arrests per year, the majority being vehicle violations such as suspended licenses, driving without a license, and an unauthorized use of a car. Additional arrests included drug related issues and occurrences of domestic violence.

New board member Heidi Bender asked about the police department's involvement with a recent mental health incident that included the need for an ambulance. Burke took the opportunity to describe the broad array of mental health issues his department may respond to throughout the year. With seemingly no perception of the gravity of his statement, Larry Burke relayed that some of their responses to mental health crises came about when disabled children refuse to get on the school bus. “Special needs children that are refusing to get on the bus, they won’t go to school, get on the school bus, they won’t do this, they won’t do that, and we get called for that. So that will go down as a mental illness––not a mental illness, but an incident.” Burke did not make it clear who calls the police in this event or what the protocol is once police officers respond to this type of call. The board moved on quickly from this topic.

The fourteenth issue on the agenda was the “New York State Police Reform and Reinvention Collaboration Update,” a conversation that mostly surrounded the survey on which board members Kathleen Foley, Frances Murphy, and Officer-in-Charge Larry Burke have been working.

It seemed as though nearly every aspect of the survey was still being debated. In the late stages of locking down what questions will be asked in the survey, there were key factors that the board members could not agree upon amongst themselves. This included how to distribute it, with some members of the board favoring door-to-door surveying or putting physical copies in the village hall, some preferring keeping online access to the survey limited to the village’s website, and others wanting to use facebook as a distribution tool. Frances Murphy stated “so we wanted to throw that out to the village board about whether or not it should go on facebook, which will then push it out to all kinds of social media. So there's a bit of a disagreement [among the survey committee] into how far we should go with it.”

Murphy then relayed that the committee was hoping to submit the survey to the rest of the board by this Friday, February 12, with the intention of getting the survey to the public by next week. Once released, the public would have nearly two weeks (ten days) to complete the survey online. Upon hearing this, fellow board member Marie Early was surprised, and visibly frustrated that a timeline had been put in place without full board consultation.

Another new member Kathleen Foley jumped in to assure Early that the board would agree on the survey's contents before it is made public, and to clarify key aspects of the timeline. Early interjected at nearly every point. Foley also spoke about the decision to use a user-friendly website called Qualtrics as their online survey tool in order to reduce barriers for users such as needing key-codes to access the survey and to make the experience as easy as possible since it is “hard to get people to participate in surveys anyway.” One advertised feature of Qualtrics is the ability to “scrape” IP addresses to know where the responses are coming from. This feature would be distinctly used to separate the data coming from outside the village from the data coming from inside the village. Because another highly debated aspect of the survey was whose input should actually be counted, this feature is appealing to members of the board who have stated that they wish to keep the survey pool limited to residents and merchants of the village.

The argument for keeping the survey pool to village residents and merchants is that they are the ones who The Cold Spring Police Department directly serve and they therefore have more of a stake in the issue. The argument for giving the survey to a greater pool of people is the community that comes in contact with the Cold Spring Police Department is actually much larger, including residents of Philipstown, visitors, and members of neighboring communities including Peekskill and Beacon. By including their input, the survey will better reflect public opinion.

IP scraping is complicated as several residents noted during the public comment section of the meeting because IP addresses may not always be the most reliable source of information. You may be a resident of the village and take the survey outside of the village, or vice versa.

Additionally, the option to segregate data coming from outside of the village after the survey results are collected could create an interesting dynamic. If opinions coming from the larger pool do not fit the The Board of Trustees or the Police Department's agenda for their police reform plan, will those results be seriously considered? If the importance of the survey is to take public opinion into account, there is a mixed message about who’s opinion is valued.

Late in the discussion, Mayor Dave Merandy expressed confusion about where the conversation surrounding the Executive Order had gone during this meeting following a heated discussion on the same topic about a month ago. Merandy said, “it’s not hard to meet what [The Governor] is asking, the standard and bar is not that high. We could do and could have done exactly what he wanted and completed what he needs to this point at four weeks ago.” Kathleen Foley acknowledged the progress since their previous conversation, expressing, “it’s great that it lit a fire under our feet, and now we’re in agreement.” But in a seemingly contradictory response, Merandy answered, “it didn’t have to light a fire under any feet ‘cause there’s no hurry, and that’s the whole thing, it’s let do it right. We don't have to have a survey done by this week. We don’t have to have the survey done by April. We just don’t.”

“But we can,” Foley interjected. Merandy went on to say several times that there is no hurry to have a survey done anytime soon. However, if the police reform plan is submitted to the state without public input, that begs the question of if the wants and needs of the town would be reflected.

During this time, Heidi Bender took the opportunity to ask for admittance to the survey working group, a request she has made before. It was met by an immediate no from Frances Murphy, whose reasoning was that Bender’s addition would be make for too many board members in the group. If Bender were to be admitted to the group, they would have to follow freedom of information rules, meaning they would be forced to make the meetings open to the public. The response to Bender’s question “what’s wrong with that,” was, “we’d have to publish every time we talk. Every time we’d talk, we’d have to open it and have the press know that we’re having a public meeting.” Although Bender offered to take charge of communication with the press, her request was still denied. When Bender voiced her discomfort with the outcome, namely because she was concerned with the presented attitude of indifference towards the survey there was a chorus of rebuttal.

It is clear that the Board of Trustees do not have a unified idea of how to move forward in accordance with the Governor’s Executive Order on adopting a plan for police reform, let alone on creating a survey about this topic. If there is so much animosity in a meeting about a survey on reform, the question must be asked how can the village make lasting and impactful policy reforms that hold the Cold Spring Police Department accountable for their actions.