After a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the neck of George Floyd for nearly 10 minutes, police departments around the country promised wide-ranging systemic reforms.
Six years later, in New York State, the results are mixed at best.
Albany Times Union reporter Sarah Trafton recently took a deep dive into where things stand with the state's police reform initiatives.
Click the play button to listen to the full conversation.
Read Sarah Trafton's reporting here: New York’s police reforms promised change. Five years later, results are uneven.
See the full interview transcript below.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Dingman: If you could, Sarah, take us back to late spring, early summer of 2020, those early days after George Floyd was killed. What was happening by way of response here in upstate communities and how did that reflect what was also happening all over the country?
Trafton: There were a lot of emotionally charged protests happening in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. There was a lot of police responding to the protests, dressed in in riot gear, and that sometimes led to confrontations with civilians. It was a very intense time.
Dingman: Another thing I remember from that time is this real sense of pressure on elected officials to have some sort of reaction to all of this, to make it clear that they were hearing what was happening in the streets as part of these protests.
Here in New York State, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo actually created some mandates around policing. Tell us what he specifically implemented at that time.
Trafton: He implemented a number of reforms at the the state level. One example is banning chokeholds. He also established a special office within the Attorney General's office, the Office of Special Investigation, and that office is tasked with investigating civilian deaths by police.
Dingman: One of the things you reported on for this series was how things have been going with that office. Tell us what you found.
Trafton: Since it was established in 2021, the Office of Special Investigation has reviewed nearly 1,400 cases. Of the 142 completed investigations, only 11resulted in charges being filed, and of those, seven resulted in convictions. And what we found was that the threshold for prosecuting police in these cases is is very high.
In New York State law, you know, if you're afraid for your life, a lot of times you can argue you acted in self-defense. If there's a way to safely get out of the situation, civilians have an obligation to do so. But law enforcement don't have that same obligation if they have reason to believe a a crime has occurred. It's very hard to disprove that that their actions were justified.
Dingman: So, if I'm hearing you right, the attempts to prosecute officers ran into the same obstacles in those proceedings as they would have in a regular civilian proceeding outside of the special investigations.
Trafton: Yeah, essentially they often don't end up prosecuting them because of just the how high the the legal standard is. Unless anything changes with that legal standard, they're still going to have a very hard time prosecuting these cases.
Dingman: One of the other things that former-Governor Cuomo implemented at that time was the creation of civilian review boards. There have been some hiccups there, particularly here in Albany, where the board has struggled to retain members. What is the status of those boards more broadly?
Trafton: We looked at reform plans proposed in 173 places, and 24 of those places proposed some type of civilian review board. What we found was that often these boards weren't actually formed. There was no legal requirement that they had to be formed.
Basically, community stakeholders said they wanted them, but there was not really follow through in a lot of these cases.
Dingman: Another factor in all of this that came up at the time was the question of minority representation on police forces. George Floyd, of course, was a Black man, hardly the first Black man to be killed by police and spark wide-ranging protests, where the police are accused of not representing the minority communities that they serve. Talk a little bit about how that piece of all this has unfolded, because in a lot of departments there was a push to try to have the police forces be more diverse.
Trafton: What we've seen in the past five or so years is that there have been modest increases statewide in Black, Hispanic, and female officers.
Schenectady, from 2021 to 2024, they've tripled the number of women on their force. But when we analyzed that data against population data, there are still significant gaps in in representation.
Dingman: There are some points of progress that have come up in your reporting. I realize a lot of this conversation is focused on things that have not really developed, I think, in the way that many people who advocate for police reform would have liked. But there are some signs that things are changing. Anything else that comes to mind for you along those lines?
Trafton: While we did see generally, an upward trend in use of force incidents, part of the reason that is because agencies are getting better at reporting it. So in a way, it is a positive that they're more accurately reporting use of force incidents.
Dingman: So, even if the the number of incidents is going up, we know that they're happening. What impressions did you come away with in terms of where the — at least in New York — debate about community policing stands? Do you think it is in a fundamentally different place now than it was in 2020 and 2021?
Trafton: I do think it's in a different place because there's less pressure for most people. It's not as top-of-mind as it was in 2020. For some agencies, they're still moving in that direction regardless of whether there's a state mandate or not. I think there's other places where that motivation might be needed. And for some places, their reform plans may have been more of an exercise to get done, to check their boxes. I'm not sure that every place is going to be revisiting this and seeing how far they've come.
