New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Friday he will sign an executive order requiring local governments to work with police agencies to rework policing policies and programs in their communities.
Mr. Cuomo said the new initiative — the New York State Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative — comes as the country reaches an inflection point.
In announcing the plan, the Democratic governor displayed a list of 19 Black Americans killed in the U.S., starting with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and ending with George Floyd this year.
“I think it wasn’t just about Mr. Floyd’s death. I think it was the cumulative impact,” Mr. Cuomo said. “I think it took that repeated articulation to get the country to this point.”
The plan requires communities to come up with a plan that “reinvents and modernizes” policing practices, specifically addressing use of force, crowd management, bias awareness training, de-escalation training, restorative justice practices and other issues.
The plans must be enacted by April 1 in order to be eligible for state funding.
Mr. Cuomo said the point of the executive order is to restore trust.
“Were not going to fund police agencies in this state that can’t look at what is happening, come to terms with it, and reform themselves,” he said.
The viral video of Floyd’s death — showing a white police officer kneeling on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds as he pleaded for help — sparked a nationwide outrage. Protesters have marched for more than two weeks against racial inequality and demanding substantial changes to policing practices in the U.S.
The governor also signed into law Friday a series of overhaul bills passed this week that will criminalize chokeholds — which have already been banned as a matter of policy in New York — release police disciplinary records, and criminalize false race-based 911 calls. A special investigator would be appointed for police-involved killings.
The executive order comes the movement to abolish or defund the police from liberal groups has rapidly gained traction in the aftermath of Floyd’s killing in Minnesota.
The proposals put forward by key groups such as Black Lives Matter and other activists have called for gearing specific teams to respond to specific issues, including mental health responders for those kinds of crises, street outreach teams for homeless individuals, social workers for domestic violence calls. They’ve also called for a greater emphasis on “restorative justice” which would mediate issues between the victim and offender for crimes such as theft or property damage.
It would change how police handle more common issues in their purview, such as eliminating traffic stops in favor of mailing tickets or decriminalizing some drug-related infractions such as marijuana possession.
The demands have gained little traction among Democrats in D.C. who are generally staying away from endorsing those movements, but Democratic state officials in Los Angeles and Minnesota have taken dramatic steps to restructure their police departments.
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