The New Rochelle Community-Police Partnership Board (CPPB) held its second so-called listening tour last night, this time at the August E. Mascaro Unit of the Boys’ & Girls’ Clubs of New Rochelle on 7th Street in the West End of New Rochelle.
While an improvement over the previous meeting, there were several notable issues including a highly charged exchange involving New Rochelle Police Commissioner Robert Gazzola and a young, Black woman over Alec McKenna and Kamal Flowers.
The CPPB appears to have gotten our memo after a disastrous first outing at the Family Life Center at the Bethesda Baptist Church of New Rochelle on Lincoln Avenue.
The meeting was shorter (cut from more than 2 hours to a little over a hour), toned down on the Christian religiosity (one prayer, not three), with far more more community talking and more board listening. Gone was the meeting stopping before it got started to fill out a multi-page questionnaire, the Phil Donahue-style use of a wireless microphone (there was no mic at all), the force-feeding of heavily-scripted questions. CPPB Member Council Member Yadira Ramos-Herbert was actively taking notes throughout the meeting. Once the room of about 30 people got warmed up, the Q&A, led by CPPB employee Emma Silva-Rodriquez (as opposed to a CPPB member previously) flowed more naturally.
In short, the meeting was a significant improvement and suggests moving forward the CPPB may take a less top-down approach.
That said, there is plenty of room for improvement and time is running out if there is to be any hope for the CPPB.
While having a person from the organization hosting the event act as moderator, as was the case last night, is a good idea — it takes that role away from the CPPB so their members can be in full listening mode while offering attendees a familiar face they can trust — it is not enough. A host moderator may be ill-equipped to deal with “curveballs” from the audience or even CPPB members. Changing moderators at every meeting will mean the moderator will not develop the sort of institutional knowledge that will help the CPPB gather consistent data, across multiple-questions, from a variety of hyper-local communities within the City.
After two tour events, it is clear the City needs to provide the CPPB the financial resources to hire a professional facilitator to support a host moderator. And not some “Friend of Noam” or a City employee but a professional from outside the community who can bring a neutral point of view to facilitating the event.
Absent a professional facilitator, it fell last night to CPPB members to deal with various “curveballs” which both takes CPPB members out of listening mode and can result in precisely the sort of back and forth the CPPB said last night it wanted to avoid. CPPB members need to be freed of any responsibilities in the operation of the meeting (add note-taking to the list) so they can passively listen on their listening tour.
There were several moments during the meeting when CPPB members injected themselves into the “process” of the meeting, all involving two CPPB members: Police Commissioner Gazzola and Minister Mark McLean, President of the NAACP New Rochelle Branch.
It did not end well.
The problem is Gazzola, who appears ill-suited to the role of CPPB Co-Chair. The problem was compounded as Rev. David Holder arrived late to the meeting due to a prior and recurring commitment so he was not there to help (McLean sat next to Gazzola and was effectively acting as co-Chair).
This raises another issue.
Holder said he was late because he teaches on Wednesday evenings which suggests future CPPB meetings cannot be scheduled on Wednesdays. Tuesdays are difficult as they are often nights when the City Council meets (and the New Rochelle Board of Education and various municipal committees). Fridays are not appropriate for religious reasons. It would be helpful if the CPPB could settle on a time and day of the week for every meeting and stick to it — apparently it will have to be Mondays or Thursdays.
Last night’s meeting started at 8:15 p.m., an unusually late hour for a community meeting which all but rules out parents of young children attending.
The CPPB also needs to publish a complete tour calendar; as of this moment there are no announced future stops on the listening tour.
Inexplicably, the CPPB went out on a listening tour earlier this month without announcing a full slate of stops on the tour.
Last night, Angela Farrish, Executive Director of the New Rochelle Muncipal Housing Authority, touched on this by offering to organize turnout for tour stops at Heritage Homes and the Bracey Apartments which she characterized as home to people likely to have experience with negative interactions with the police. She later added the Lincoln Park neighborhood to her list. She made a similar offer at the Bethesda meeting where she is a congregant but still no dates have been set.
By this logic, the CPPB will need to schedule stops at New Rochelle High School, Albert Leonard Middle School, and Isaac E. Young Middle School,
Farrish’s point was brought into relief as the handful of people attending as West End Community members (in our estimation) were predominantly White homeowners who spoke almost exclusively about youth violence, and quality of life issues, mostly involving youngsters being in and about Feeney Park and Columbus School after hours and making noise or causing property damage. Their concern was about their property values. They were asking for more police enforcement, and from the sound of it, police enforcement against Hispanic families in the park and on the street in the evening.
The CPPB continues to fail to recognize the “meta issues” inherent in both the appointment of the CPPB and their functions within their own board and the “meta issues” within their listening tour meetings. This is where a professional facilitator would be especially useful.
The CPPB leadership still needs to learn how to deal with what can be expected to be recurring, disruptive, issues:
- People who want to reframe a question posed by the board to the community as a question from an individual to the CPPB or the police officers on the CPPB (where officers naturally defer to the New Rochelle Police Commissioner Robert Gazzola).
- People who come to “every” (most) of the meetings and use the meetings as a platform to air their (mostly) unrelated opinions and grievances and theories or otherwise engage in forms of self-promotion.
- People who want to talk about making the meetings “better” in various ways, mostly related to who some person thinks is not sufficiently represented at the meeting then designating themselves as those people’s advocate then expressing those people’s views for them (i.e.sock puppetry).
- On the previous point, under the heading of careful what you wish for, larger audiences may result in some agitators showing up at CPPB meetings to be deliberately disruptive and provocative; hopefully the CPPB has a clearly articulated (confidential) plan on how the Board wants the NRPD to respond. A confrontation turning into people being removed by police or even arrested would be a major problem for achieving the goals of the listening tour.
- Creating a common understanding of the mission of the CPPB (there was no preamble, no introductions of CPPB members like last time, just a cold open), the purpose of the meeting from the CPPB’s perspective and some ground rules that might preclude some of the curveballs.
Gazzola, in particular, demonstrated last night how he fails to appreciate the power dynamic involved when he flares up at a community member. At any point, he can end “debate” by deciding a person has crossed a line he sets and issue an order to physically remove — or even arrest — a speaker. It is worth noting, NRPD members attend these events in uniform while armed with their service weapon.
There was one sequence of events last night to this point. The sequence began with the first question to attendees from the moderator, “how do you define community policing?”. An older White man in a yellow jacket responded by saying he wanted the police officers in the room to answer that question first. As some attendees mumbled agreement, Gazzola (we think, appropriately) cut off the response by saying that the CPPB was there to listen not get into a back and forth with attendees. The sequence ended with the last question from a younger black woman in a red, yellow and green jacket who asked if a story she read was true, that the “Police Foundation” honored the police officer who killed Kamal Flowers.
The woman was asking about our story: New Rochelle Police Department Honors Alec McKenna (Kamal Flowers), Michael Vaccaro (Malik Fogg)
It was not the “Police Foundation”, a non-profit organization, but the New Rochelle Police Department, a government agency, that held their NRPD Memorial & Awards Ceremony on October 6. The awards and the event itself were pushed back due to COVID-19 and covered awards from both 2019 and 2020. McKenna received a 2020 Commendation Award, a 2019 Commendation Award, 2019 Class C Citation and, ironically, a 2019 Lifesaving Award. Detective Michael Vaccaro received a 2019 Four-Year Perfect Attendance Award and 2020 Five-Year Perfect Attendance Award, as well as two 2019 Unit Citation.
Gazzola was clearly agitated by the question and engaged in precisely the sort of “back and forth” he had minutes before said members of the CPPB should not engage.
He said that it was “the problem” with “these meetings” — people “co-opting” the meetings.
Then, while shaking his head as if to deny our story was accurate, Gazzola ran off a list of irrelevant objections: the awards covered 2019 and 2020, the “incident” that led to McKenna’s three awards was before McKenna shot and killed Flowers, McKenna was not present at the Awards ceremony, McKenna’s name was not mentioned at the Awards ceremony, it was not true that McKenna’s awards had anything to do with the officer-involved shooting of Flowers.
Gazzola danced around what our article actually said about McKenna: “New Police Officer Alec McKenna, holder of one of the worst disciplinary records in the department, who shot and killed Kamal Flowers, was honored by the New Rochelle Police Department.”
He was.
McKenna received three awards from New Rochelle Police Department, under Gazzola, regardless of whether he was physically present or his name was mentioned. Gazzola’s response actually confirms the woman’s point — she said giving McKenna awards was “another punch in the face” (to “the community”) — because Gazzola admitted McKenna was not only not present (perhaps under orders) but given the Voldemort treatment, he who shall not be named. He knew giving McKenna (and Vaccaro) was a problem so they tried to hide it.
The woman said apologetically that she did not mean to co-opt the meeting.
A clear angry Gazzola stared at the floor, loudly crushing and crinkling the Poland Springs water bottle in his hand then stripping the label off the bottle and repeatedly folded the label into smaller and smaller squares, all as McLean interrupted the heated exchange by saying that the woman was not co-opting the meeting (refuting Gazzola in the process), her comments were welcome (obviously they were not welcome by the CPPB Co-Chair) and that he (McLean) was present at the NRPD Awards ceremony and there was “no disrespect”.
The woman responded saying athletes have to return Olympic Medals for things they do and asked if McKenna should be asked to return the awards he received.
The meeting was soon after brought to a close.
After the meeting, as McLean and Gazzola faced away from the crowd, McLean put his arm around Gazzola and appeared to be consoling Gazzola as the pair spoke.
Other than this one woman, no other speakers specifically addressed topics that related to the basis on which the CPPB was formed — as an extension of the euphemistic “community” concern, meaning the Black community, in the wake of not just the murder of George Floyd but the officer-involved shooting death of Kamal Flowers two-weeks later. One person complained about the lack of communication on the CPPB mailing list about Kamal Flowers.
Mostly the meeting amounted to less than 30 people including 12 CPPB members, 4 NRBGC employees, 5 NewROAR activists and 2 government officials, leaving just 4 “true” civilians to speak and fill out the CPPB questionnaire.
Several speakers, including Angela Farrish, William Ianuzzi of the New Rochelle Board of Education and a BGC administrator, Council Member Martha Lopez and a woman from NewROAR, critiqued the outreach efforts by the CPPB and offered their ideas on how to get a larger turnout. Some expressed the view that precisely the people who needed to be heard from the most, those that often interact with the police from Black neighborhoods, were not attending the meetings and so not heard by the CPPB. Mark McLean endorses the idea of CPPB knocking on doors to solicit input on board questions. Why police officers going through minority neighborhoods knocking on doors seemed like a good way to get feedback for a community policing initiative was not made clear nor was who would pay the overtime to do that.
The West End locals spoke about their desire for more policing to deal with quality of life issues to protect their property values.
The man in the yellow coat wanted more non-service call police interaction with the public (walking a beat).
Two people launched into full-on speeches: the man in the yellow coat and NewROAR founder David Peters. Both prompted the sort of back and forth the CPPB had apparently committed to avoid: the man in the yellow coat with Gazzola; Peters with McLean.
There was some discussion about the 32 question, multi-page survey, including McLean explaining why there was not an on-line version — ostensibly to prevent a flood of non-residents filling out the form (as if NRPD only interacts with New Rochelle residents).
The only direct comment on the NRPD as a whole came, ironically, from a NewROAR member who did not give her name (almost no one did).
The NewROAR activist said “the police department is wonderful”.
If even the most vocal anti-racism activists in the City are singing the praises of the NRPD at a listening tour event of the New Rochelle Community-Police Partnership Board it is hard to imagine why anyone saw the need for the CPPB or a CPPB listening tour or has the fanciful dream of a New Rochelle Civilian Complaint Review Board. Apparently, none of the proponents of the CPPB or a CCRB have any actual experience with the New Rochelle Police Department, its officers, senior command, the MOP or Rules & Regulations, a CO1 or CO1A or CO2, the Internal Affairs process or pretty much anything.
It is amazing to witness people pontificate on the need for police reform with the NRPD, speaking with such definitive opinions on something they apparently know nothing about and have never experienced.
No one spoke about their own, direct negative experience with any New Rochelle police officers: no one said they were ever detained or taken into custody or arrested by the New Rochelle police (or even pulled over for a moving violation), no one said they ever filed a civilian complaint with Internal Affairs (or even thought about doing so), no one ever attended a police disciplinary hearing, no one had attempted to obtain a police officer’s disciplinary record.
And herein lies the biggest problem with the CPPB and its so-called listening tour: it is filled with cops (and city officials) who do not want to listen to why NRPD needs reform, hearing from a bunch of people who do not know why NRPD needs reform. The only meaningful complaint was against Gazzola for honoring McKenna and even that was based solely on our reporting on the award ceremony. And Gazzola stomped all over the woman for doing so at a meeting where some speculated on why people with negative experiences with NRPD do not attend the meetings. Is the answer not obvious?
Unless CPPB members immediately sort a way to shut the hell up themselves (especially Gazzola and McLean), start using these listening tour events to elicit meaningful input from people with actual negative interactions with members of the New Rochelle Police Department, and closing the floor to the agenda-driven ideologues, snake-oil salesman, shameless self-promoters, kumbaya fantasists and (largely White) quality-of-life obsessed homeowners, you may as well end the kabuki theater now and write your damn report without community input and be done with it.
Underneath all of this there is a bizarre notion at play that by stroking and coddling NRPD senior command they will go along with having a New Rochelle CCRB and somehow real police reform will happen because the same people doing all the stroking and coddling will be on the New Rochelle CCRB.
It is called magical thinking — the belief that hopes and desires can have an effect on reality.
Good luck with that.