Svante Myrick is one of the first progressives to make policy out of last summer’s protests.
Svante Myrick is one of the first progressives to make policy out of last summer's protests.
A progressive mayor’s proposal to abolish the police department of a small city in upstate New York is sparking concerns among residents that the reform effort will exacerbate a recent spike in violent crime, the town’s former police chief told National Review.
Svante Myrick — who has served as mayor of Ithaca, N.Y., since assuming the role in 2011 at age 24 — announced his comprehensive plan to replace the city’s current 63-officer department with a civilian-led “Community Solutions and Public Safety Department” in an interview with GQ Magazine last month.
Under the reimagined format, Ithaca’s streets would be patrolled by armed “public safety workers” and unarmed “community solution workers,” who would collaborate and report to a civilian director of public safety. The IPD SWAT vehicle would be retired and, according to the article, current officers would have to reapply to the city to be considered for the new civilian positions. Should they be rehired, the former officers would don redesigned uniforms baring a “more welcoming agency brand.”
“Everyone wants the police to perform better when they show up, everybody wants that,” Myrick told journalist Wesley Lowery. “What this plan is saying is that we also want the police to show up less — and that’s a radical thing for a city and a mayor to do.”
What Ithaca Police Chief Dennis Nayor considers “radical,” however, is the plan itself. For even though the IPD spent months working with Myrick and city officials on a project called “Reimagining Public Safety Collaborative,” the Ithaca police union said that Lowery’s article, which detailed the plan to repeal and replace the department, “blindsided” officers.
Retired Ithaca Police Chief Harlin R. McEwen, who wrote an op-ed in the Ithaca Voice arguing that “abolishing the city police department is not the answer,” told National Review that Nayor was not informed of the Myrick’s plan to replace the police.
“I’ve talked to many of them — I’ve talked to the chief, and others,” he explained. “The mayor says that they were included in discussions, but they really weren’t included in a meaningful way. The proposal to abolish the department and recreate a new department was basically from the mayor, and he did not inform them of that proposal, nor have any discussion with them about it. So it was a total surprise to them. They first learned about it in the GQ article.”
Myrick subsequently apologized for his premature participation in the GQ interview, saying he had “gotten out over [his] skis” and that the reports of current officers needing to reapply for the new department were incorrect. (The draft report notes that “a retirement incentive for current officers should be considered for those officers who may not want to continue with the new mission of the agency,” but offers no further clarification.)
The Ithaca Police Benevolent Association has slammed Myrick’s proposal as an “underhanded and obvious attempt to bust the union,” considering the city and IPBA have been at an impasse on labor negotiations since 2012, leaving officers without a raise for nearly a decade. Myrick has denied the claim, saying he doesn’t think he has the legal authority to eliminate the union. But McEwen said he is worried that replacing the police chief with a civilian public-safety director leaves policing vulnerable to political pressure.
“They would have no civil service tenure, or protection, or status. They would be strictly a puppet, and wouldn’t be able to independently operate a professional department,” he warned.
McEwen said that “many” members of the department “are already starting to think about applying to other places.”
“They’re just so disturbed about the way they’re being treated, primarily by the mayor and some of these local activists that are so nasty,” he said, adding that “there’s no question in my mind that all of this is weighing on” Nayor — who announced in January his plan to retire in the coming months.
“He told me that it just doesn’t make any sense for him, for his mental health, to stay, and he’s eligible to retire again — he did retire once and came back,” McEwen explained. Nayor did not return multiple requests for comment.
In August, Nayor warned that his department had seen “a significant trend” suggesting an increase in gun-related crimes. While the Ithaca Police have yet to release their 2020 crime statistics, Nayor said his office had seen 85 gun-related calls in eight months.
“That’s armed robberies, shots fired, people being shot. So we’re at 85 this year. Last year in its entirety we had 54,” he stated.
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In 2017, Ithaca conducted a similar reform overview, entitled “Reimagining Law Enforcement in Tompkins County,” which surveyed county residents about their opinions of police. Out of a total of 979 respondents, more than 60 percent reported they were “satisfied or very satisfied with the law enforcement services being provided at home.” In the city of Ithaca, 56 percent of respondents shared that sentiment, while only 13 percent reported they were unsatisfied or very unsatisfied.
Focus groups expressed similar positive sentiments, with participants recalling “times IPD officers went out of their way to introduce themselves around town,” and one participant worrying that “if Ithaca loses what it has started with community policing, they will see a rise in the ignorance, fear, and distrust that leads to officers shooting civilians, specifically community members of color.”
But after the death of George Floyd last summer, New York governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that required “each local government in the State to adopt a policing reform plan by April 1, 2021” — pushing Ithaca’s reformers back into action.
The city subsequently partnered with the Center for Policing Equity, an anti-racist police-reform organization that believes that “the vicious legacy of White supremacy is a root cause of suffering across the globe” and that “systems that support White supremacy must be resisted and dismantled,” per its webpage.
Josh Young, who serves as deputy senior vice president of Justice Initiatives at the Center for Policing Equity, told National Review that Ithaca “engaged with us” and “asked us to serve as their thought partner” after Cuomo’s executive order.
“This is their city and their county, but we served mostly as facilitators and consultants and the thought partner from the outside,” he explained. The draft report describes the organization’s role as working to “provide process guidance and ensure organizational accountability.”
With that vision in mind, and in line with Cuomo’s order, the reform project sought “to promote equity in the data collection process” as well as “over-sample from specific communities” by targeting specific demographics — including African Americans, Latinos, LGBT individuals, homeless, and formerly incarcerated persons — to get their opinions on local police.
In its overview of the Ithaca Police Department, the city notes that “IPD has historically been very involved in community outreach” and spent “over 518 hours” in cultural competency-based training in 2019 — yet recommends that the current department be replaced with an agency that will “institute ongoing culturally responsive community engagement activities that rebuild trust with community.”
Myrick told NPR in an interview that part of the problem was “the presence of guns, the presence of a militarized force” which “triggers people who are carrying past traumas.”
McEwen said he supported a number of proposals, including the push to incorporate a unit of social workers to assist police on nonviolent calls. “The biggest problem is that we do not have a good mental health drug counseling team that’s available 24 hours,” he stated.
But the top-line takeaway, to reimagine the Ithaca police, strikes him as “not reasonable” and an attempt “to try some social experiment.”
“There are things that can be done — there’s a list of 19 proposals. Many of them are good,” he said. “The problem is this one has seized the whole discussion and detracted from doing positive kinds of things. This is a very negative kind of thing.”
The former police chief also said that he has spoken with dozens of local residents who think the plan goes too far, but are “afraid to speak out” because of the threat of being targeted by progressives — though McEwen added that he has not been harassed since publishing his opinion.
“I’ve had dozens of calls from citizens of the city and the county after I released my letter, and many people that are born and raised here and live here, they’re afraid to speak out,” he said. “These protesters have been nasty and ugly to the police and public. In protests they’ve been swearing at them in their face and throwing things at them, and the public is generally very worried about getting engaged. I think if there was a poll taken of the public at large, and not just listening to 40 or 50 activists, it would be clear to the mayor and to the other people that the public doesn’t support this.”
Young, the Center for Policing Equity official, echoed McEwen’s assessment of possible reform, noting that both city residents and law enforcement agree that “when people call 911, there should be the option for the dispatcher to send a variety of professionals, not just someone with a badge and a gun.” But he pushed back on the assumption that such a shift could occur while maintaining the existing police department.
Young’s organization has received funding from the Open Society Foundations, the progressive philanthropic group founded by billionaire George Soros.
In July 2020, the group announced it would spend $220 million “in efforts to achieve racial equality in America,” according to the New York Times. Of that amount, $70 million was allocated “in local grants supporting changes to policing and criminal justice.” It is unclear if the Center for Policing Equity received any portion of that $70 million; Young said he had “absolutely no idea” if the organization had received any of the grant money, and neither Myrick and his office nor Open Society returned multiple requests for comment.
But Alexander Soros, deputy chair of Open Society, has referred to himself as “co-chair” of the “Svante Myrick fan club,” and shared news of the proposed police change on Twitter.
Welcoming @AndrewGillum back to NYC – co-chairs of the @SvanteMyrick fan club. Loving his initiative to register 1 million voters by 2020! #SvanteMyrickFanClub pic.twitter.com/qlyBLxaFnm
— Alexander Soros, PhD (@AlexanderSoros) March 27, 2019
As for its implementation, Myrick’s proposal still needs approval from the Ithaca Common Council and the Tompkins County Legislature — which both declined to approve a drug-plan overhaul that Myrick drew up in 2016, which also drew national praise from progressives.
McEwen said he spoke to county officials last week, and argued for a more broad polling of public opinion to determine what the majority of constituents believe.
“I said to them, you know, there’s a lot of people that are very concerned about this, but they’re very reluctant to get engaged publicly,’” he recalled. “I’m absolutely positive because of the calls I’m getting, you’d find that people don’t support this kind of drastic proposal.”