Nearly a year after a policeman killed George Floyd outside a convenience store in Minneapolis, sparking a vast social protest movement and calls to radically rethink the role of police in society, a scenic, wooded city in central New York is doing just that.
In March, Ithaca, home to about 30,000 people and Cornell University, approved a plan to replace its 63-officer police force with an entirely new agency bearing a friendly new name seemingly designed to repel all associations to police brutality. By next year, the “Community Solutions and Public Safety Department” could become the first public safety entity in the country largely made up of public servants who will not carry guns. They will answer non-emergency calls — including minor infractions and welfare and mental health checks — while a second group of armed officers will respond to more serious or life-threatening reports.
The new agency won’t be headed by a police chief but a superintendent, who won’t necessarily have to have been in law enforcement to take on the job.
“Ithaca — this is what is coming next in policing,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, a Yale University professor and cofounder of the Center for Police Equity, which worked with the Ithaca mayor’s office, the police department, and community advocates to make it happen.
The effort in Ithaca is one of many examples of states and cities tackling criminal justice reforms and rethinking policing in the year after Floyd’s death, which incited calls in many communities to “defund the police” and what some scholars believe was the largest wave of social justice protests in the history of the United States.
But even as some cities like Ithaca embrace entirely new models of reform, sweeping changes on the national level have been elusive. Some of the most ambitious plans have stalled in state legislatures and in Congress; and some worry that a recent spike in crime rates could lead to a return to old norms and a hesitancy to reimagine public safety going forward.
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