Defund the police - Ithaca, New York

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Gorgeous town and the home of Cornell University. From the Cornell Sun:

Ithaca Police Officers Grapple With Department Overhaul
Mayor Svante Myrick ’09 announced on Feb. 22 a proposal to end the current version of the Ithaca Police Department and to reimagine public safety — but the IPD said it had not been adequately informed before its release.

During last week’s Common Council Committee of the Whole and Reimagining Public Safety Collaborative meetings, Myrick apologized to the IPD for speaking to the magazine GQ before the IPD and to the members of the Common Council. IPD officers said they found out about the details of the proposal through the GQ article rather than from Myrick himself.

“I want to reiterate my sincere apology for both speaking to the reporter [from GQ] before speaking to the Police Union about this recommendation and realizing … the timing, the tone was inappropriate,” Myrick said in the Reimagining Public Safety meeting on Thursday.

The GQ article can be found here:

The Most Ambitious Effort Yet to Reform Policing May Be Happening In Ithaca, New York
It’s been nine months since the George Floyd protests thrust “Defund the Police'' and other abolitionist rhetoric into mainstream political discourse, yet the results have been meager so far. While some municipalities have sliced significant chunks from their police budgets—$150 million in both Los Angeles and Austin, Texas—a Bloomberg News review found that about half of the nation’s largest cities saw their 2021 police budgets either increase or stay the same. Of those departments that have cut back police funding, the Associated Press found, defunding has been modest, not monumental.

Yet even as mainstream political operatives have declared the concept a political loser—just last week President Biden reiterated his opposition to defunding during a CNN town hall—a handful of cities have significantly reexamined the role of their police. In Berkeley, Ca., armed officers no longer conduct traffic stops or respond to mental health and homelessness calls. Portland ended the deployment of “school resource officers,” long linked to the criminalization of Black and brown youth and the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.

And now, in a proposal announced today, the mayor of Ithaca, NY will attempt the most radical reimagining of policing in the post-George Floyd era so far: abolishing the city’s police department as currently constructed and replacing it with a reimagined city agency.

In a nearly 100-page report obtained by GQ, Mayor Svante Myrick will propose replacing the city’s current 63-officer, $12.5 million a year department with a “Department of Community Solutions and Public Safety” which would include armed “public safety workers” and unarmed “community solution workers,” all of whom will report to a civilian director of public safety instead of a police chief. Under the proposal, all current officers would have to re-apply for a position with the new department.

This is not good public policy. This is a utopian wet dream and it wil blow up in their faces.  Good and hard. Ithaca has a population of around 30,000 citizens. This will raise crime and encourage liberals to move there.  And the downward spiral commences.  Another example of something that "sounds good" instead of something that actually "does good". The good citizens of Ithaca voted this moron into office - let them deal with his idiocy...

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on March 5, 2021 5:53 PM.

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