The Albany Common Council has passed legislation to fix the city’s police discipline arbitration process. It comes after a state judge ruled the city's previous policy was too vague.
But, city officials still have a lot of work to do before an arbitrator can hear police discipline cases. Capital Region Bureau Chief Grant Ashley joined Lucas Willard on Northeast Report to discuss more.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Willard: Albany has this “Public Safety Commissioner” who can arbitrate police discipline disputes – why and how was that created?
Ashley: Public Safety Commissioner is a part-time role. It was created in 2022 to standardize police discipline. When the police chief and a police officer can’t agree on a punishment for an infraction, they used to go to a third party arbitrator to settle the dispute. The big difference is the Public Safety Commissioner does that in house.
I spoke to Common Councilmember Tom Hoey, who chairs the Public Safety Committee and sponsored this legislation. He told me it was difficult to get arbiters to hear cases.
Hoey: The problem that we've run into there's not that many independent arbitrators around. There was one person in Connecticut, and it took it takes like more than a year to try to set something up.
Ashley: They found this old provision in the city charter that allowed a “Commissioner of Public Safety” to hear these disciplinary cases, so they created the role.
Willard: A State Appellate Division judge ruled this spring that the Public Safety Commissioner’s job was too vague, what happened there?
Ashley: That was the result of a lawsuit brought by the Albany Police Benevolent Association, which is the union for officers.
Albany PBA president Michael Delano told me that he believes the law was meant to circumvent police officers' union contract. He called the law anti-union and said it could hurt recruitment. And his concerns boil down to the fact that he doesn't see the Public Safety Commissioner as a neutral arbiter. That's a person who's hired by the mayor.
Delano: That may not be a problem with certain chiefs and certain mayors, and it may be for others. I don't know. It’s not personal. We have to watch. We have to look out for our members going forward, even when we're not here.
Ashley: The court ruled this was all legal under the city charter – just too vague. Last night's amendments were meant to fix that.
I spoke to John Reilly, who’s the counsel for the mayor. He says the old law was just too open-ended
Reilly: There wasn't a timeline, not enough information on notice procedures for affected employees. What were the due process protections? Really, things that you know promote consistent and constitutionally sound administration of a disciplinary framework. So the changes set out to address that.
Willard: What's next for this Public Safety Commissioner?
Ashley: The public safety commissioner was Gary Stiglmeier. He hasn't been able to hear any cases for years because of a court order blocking those hearings. Nobody would get into specifics, but Reilly told me there was a "small number of officers waiting for a hearing."
In theory, those cases could be heard, but Stiglmeier resigned in December. He says that Albany Mayor Dorsey Applyrs wanted him out. Applyrs has denied that.
Reilly told me they've been trying to hire somebody since then, but nobody's taken the offer. He thinks that's due to all the uncertainty around the role, and he says they've made an offer to a candidate recently, and they expect to hear back this month. But Delano says they're going to appeal that court decision we talked about earlier to the Court of Appeals, which is the highest court in the state. So, they might not be out of the woods just yet.
