EDITORIAL: City, citizens deserve praise for police plan

Oct. 8—The Oneonta Common Council approved its Implementation Plan for Police Reform and Reinvention at Tuesday night's Council meeting. We think the city deserves a figurative pat on the back for taking that step, and for the process that got it there.

Such plans were mandated by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to address a crisis in confidence in police after some well-publicized incidents of police misconduct in 2020 — most notably the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin.

While many local municipalities did little real work to create the plans — even putting police in charge of their own reviews in many cases and rubber-stamping the result — the city of Oneonta did a good job of bringing in diverse voices and conducting the process with transparency.

The police reform plan was created by the Community Advisory Board, which had representatives from the Oneonta NAACP, Hartwick College, SUNY Oneonta, the Oneonta Commission on Community Relations and Human Rights, the Common Council and the city personnel director, in 2020. The board's plan was adopted on March 31, and a committee of Council members was formed to go over the plan and come up with a detailed plan to implement it.

We'd also note the positive contribution of former Oneonta Police Chief Doug Brenner who, unlike his counterparts elsewhere, did not view public scrutiny of his department's service to the public as an intrusion. Confident that the department was already operating in a responsible way, he participated in the process rather than opposing it or trying to take it over.

The plan was the subject of vigorous discussion and not everyone is happy with the result. Some think it restrains police too much. Others, not enough.

That sounds like good, middle ground to us. It's an indicator the committee got it right.

It remains to be seen if such plans will have much impact statewide, but it's good that the lid got lifted a little on these closed societies of public servants.

At the time of the plan's filing in April of this year, Oneonta Mayor Gary Herzig expressed satisfaction with the process.

"We're very pleased with how the process went and we're very proud of the outcome," he said.

Herzig said that at that time neither he nor Brenner, who retired in January, nor then-acting chief Lt. Christopher Witzenburg, who has since been promoted to chief, sat on the city's community advisory board.

"We really took it to heart that this should be a citizen-driven, community-driven initiative," he said. "We let them go and control the direction. They were not led by the police, they were not led by me," he said. "Anybody who wanted to be a part of the subcommittees could be," Herzig said. "Nobody was turned away."

That's democracy, and we appreciate the citizens who stepped up to participate.

How nice it would be to see that kind of interest in the many facets of local government more often.