CIVIL RIGHTS
A Moment of Reckoning, State Senate Leader Says
Cuomo signs Say Their Name Agenda, orders local police forces to devise reform plans
BY EMILY DAVENPORT
During his daily briefing
on Friday, Governor
Andrew Cuomo signed
new reforms into law
that are meant to start to reshape
the justice system in New York
State.
Known as the “Say Their Name
Agenda,” the reforms include repealing
50-A, making the disciplinary
records of police offi cers more
transparent and available should
that offi cer be accused of misconduct.
The reforms also include
banning chokeholds, making false
race-related 911 calls a hate crime,
and assigning the attorney general
to serve as the special prosecutor
in these cases.
But the governor went a step
further Friday by also signing an
executive order requiring police departments
across New York to work
with their communities to devise a
plan to modernize and reform their
policing strategies — or risk losing
state funding next year.
Cuomo was joined by Senate
Majority Leader Andrea Stewart
Cousins, Assembly Speaker
Carl Heastie and the Reverend Al
Sharpton for the signing of these
bills, as well as Gwen Carr, the
mother of Eric Garner, who died
after a police chokehold on Staten
Island in 2014, Valerie Bell, mother
of Sean Bell, who was killed in a
hail of police bullets following his
bachelor’s party in 2006, and Hazel
Dukes, president of the NAACP
New York State Conference.
“New York State is the progressive
capital, we never sit back and
say just what the nation should
do,” said Cuomo. “We show the nation
what it should do.”
Cuomo acknowledged that this
is only the beginning and that
Governor Andrew Cuomo, fl anked by the Reverend Al Sharpton, Hazel Dukes, Valerie Bell, Gwen Carr,
Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.
for more change to come the federal
government needs to step up
and reform the education system,
step up its efforts to combat child
poverty, create affordable housing,
and reshape the nation’s criminal
justice reform.
“Why does a child who happens
to be born to a poor family have
a second-rate education to those
who are born in wealthier communities?
Why do we still have child
poverty in this nation? How do you
justify that?” said Cuomo. “Affordable
housing is needed across the
country because the federal government
went out of the affordable
housing business. It was the one
responsibility that the federal government
used to undertake.”
Under the executive order Cuomo
signed, called the New York
State Police Reform & Reinvention
Collaborative, Cuomo is requiring
local governments and police agencies
to devise a plan that reinvents
and modernizes police strategies
and programming in their communities.
The plans must include
ways to address use of force by offi -
KEVIN P. COUGHLIN/ NEW YORK STATE GOVERNOR’S OFFICE
cers, crowd controlling tactics, implicit
bias awareness, community
management, de-escalating training,
restorative justice practices,
community-based outreach, and a
transparent citizen complaint disposition
procedure.
Each police department’s community
must be involved in the
planning process. New plans must
be enacted by April 1, 2021 —
those who do not pass new reforms
by then will not be eligible for state
funding, the governor said.
“We’re going to say to every police
department, sit down at the table
with the local community, address
the issues, get to the root, get
a plan, pass through local government
— and if you don’t you’re not
going to get any additional state
funds,” said Cuomo. “We’re not going
to, as a state government, subsidize
improper police tactics.”
“We are at a moment of reckoning,
there is no question about it,”
said Stewart-Cousins. “We know
this isn’t a cure. We know this is
the beginning of a movement to
bring justice to a system that has
long been unjust.”
“I was recently asked in an interview,
‘Why now, why did it happen
now?’ with George Floyd,” said
Heastie. “When it happened with
Amadou Diallo, we thought it was
time. When it happened with Anthony
Baez, we thought it was time.
When it happened with Eric Garner,
we thought it was time. When
it happened with Sean Bell, we
thought it was time. When it happened
with Ramarley Graham, we
thought it was time. But for some
reason, I think what people viewed
touched a nerve — watching a man
being suffocated by strangulation,
crying for his deceased mother, I
think struck a nerve.”
“I joined the Civil Rights Movement
as a teenager, when I was 13
I became part of Dr. King’s branch
here. We were told you start with
demonstration to lead to legislation,
then reconciliation,” said
Sharpton. “Without the legislation,
the demonstration is just an exercise.
This is not an exercise, this is
to change things.”
Tina Luongo, the out queer attorney
in-charge of the Criminal
Defense Practice at the Legal Aid
Society, said, “Finally, after years
of advocacy, New York has struck
down one of the nation’s most secretive
laws, a law that shielded
police misconduct from public
scrutiny. Sadly, we will never know
the full breadth and depth of the
injustices created under the previous
system that deprived New
Yorkers access to this fundamental
information. But our clients — the
majority from communities of color
— should know that the Legal Aid
Society will leverage this rightful
change in statue to wage an unrelenting
campaign for police accountability
in a way that the New
York City Police Department has
never seen before.”
➤ CHADWICK MOORE, from p.15
use a capital “B” when refering to
Black folks.
“Firstly, black is not with a capital
‘B,’” he wrote. “That’s a recent,
weird leftist media style guide
thing.”
Among the many other infl ammatory
things Moore has said in
the past, he made news last year
for criticizing the City of New York
because “taxpayer-funded Gay
Pride advertisements explicitly
don’t include any white people.”
In numerous media profi les,
Moore has contended that his
right wing turn came after he
wrote what many charged was
an overly credulous and generous
2017 profi le for Out magazzine of
right-wing gay provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos,
who at the time was
a Breitbart contributor. The piece,
run with a fashion shot of Yiannopoulos
dressed as a clown, drew
fi erce pushback against the magazine
and Moore.
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