The most ambitious effort yet to reform policing may be happening in Ithaca, New York

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.

“IPD currently spends one third of its time responding to calls for service that essentially never lead to arrests,” Myrick writes in the report’s introduction. “Those calls, as well as a majority of patrol activity, can and should be handled by unarmed Community Solution Workers well trained in de-escalation and service delivery. This will allow our new Public Safety Workers to focus on preventing, interrupting and solving serious crime.”

I am really excited for this and I think a city with a population of just a few tens of thousand of people would be the perfect place to experiment with some of these novel ideas for police reform. I really appreciate the recognition that so many emergency situations that police are involved in today don't necessarily need them and would be better handled by folks focused on de-escalation instead. I also really like that they are fully outsourcing mental health emergencies to social workers, rather than sending in cops for a situation they are not at all trained to handle.

There still seems to be a long way to go for this to become enacted, but I am hopeful that the city council picks this up and runs with it.