Seneca County to host community forums on police reform beginning Monday

WATERLOO, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) — Seneca County wants to hear from the public, and will host several community forums to discuss police reform beginning Monday, September 21. 

The Seneca County Police Reform & Reinvention Collaboration will discuss community policing, use of force, procedural justice, de-escalation and implicit bias awareness at the forums.

Below are the dates, times and locations of the upcoming forums. 

• Monday, September 21 at 6 p.m.: Ovid Fire Department located at 2136 Brown St.
• Wednesday, September 23 at 6 p.m.: Seneca Falls Community Center located at 35 Water St.
• Thursday, September 24 at 6 p.m.: Waterloo Fire Department located at 39 E. Water St.

Only Seneca County residents are allowed to attend the forums, and due to COVID-19, space is limited. If you can’t make it to any of the forums or if there is no space available, you can join via a Zoom call. 

Residents can also express their opinions regarding police in a survey that was sent out by the  Seneca County Police Reform & Reinvention Collaboration Committee. The information collected in the survey will “help guide the collaboration into the direction it needs to go to get the community and the police on the same team.”

To take the survey, click here. The deadline to fill out the survey is Saturday, October 10.

Back in June, shortly after the death of George Floyd, Governor Cuomo issued an executive order forcing local government and police agencies to develop a plan that reinvents and modernizes police strategies and programs. Cuomo said there must be community participation in formulating the plan, and this plan must be enacted into local law by April 1, 2021, or local police agencies can lose state funding.

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