Patti Singer
pattisinger@minorityreporter.net
The Police Accountability Board, which is asking for approximately $5 million in the upcoming city budget, has scheduled three public forums to explain their request and answer questions.
Forums are scheduled for 6 p.m. May 4, 6 p.m. May 11 and 5 p.m. May 16.
The forums will be livestreamed at facebook.com/rocpab and youtube.com/rochesterPAB. If you can’t observe in real time, you can email questions to pab@cityofrochester.gov.
The current PAB budget is $400,000.
The PAB said its $5 million request would give it $1 for every $20 spent on policing. The PAB cited Campaign Zero, a national police reform campaign, that claims the ratio is the “bare-minimum level necessary for adequate police accountability board funding.”
In its proposal, the PAB said funding between the curretn $400,000 and requested $5 million would mean “likely failure.” At that level, the PAB said it would take between 90 and more than 720 days to complete the average full investigation. It cited a statistic that between 17 percent to all investigations would last more than six months.
The budget proposal said $10 million would give the PAB the “best odds of success,” saying at that level it would take 45-60 days to complete the average full investigation and that 4 percent to 11 percent of investigations would take more than six months.
The PAB received $500,000 from the state for the upcoming fiscal year.
A quick guide to the document called the budget “an operational blueprint” for building the agency into “a national model for community-led policy oversight.”
The PAB said its $5 million request from the city would would cover:
- Bureau of Officer Accountability that would handle complaints (31 staff and $2.27 million)
- Bureau of Systemic Change that would handle oversight of the RPD, craft police policies and rules for behavior (12 staff, $887,000)
- Bureau of Administration that would house the executive director, education and operations (13 staff, $969,000)
Other costs for services and non-personnel expenses were put at $850,000.
In the proposal, the PAB said it would receive between 400 and 480 complaints a year and investigate about 75%, or around 360.
However, data from the city showed there were 375 complaints from 2011 through 2019. The data is at www.cityofrochester.gov/PSSannualreports/.
The PAB still is awaiting a court decision on whether it will have discipline powers over police officers.
