N.Y.’s police reform results mixed

But the executive order is not without its critics.

Jillian Snider, a retired NYPD police officer who is an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College in the Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Department, said Cuomo’s executive order should have set minimum standards and was a reaction to do something after Floyd’s death.

“I don’t think that a policy should simply be based on tragedy, I think the foundation for it should be the betterment of society, recognizing that there were these injustices and there were these tragedies, but I feel this order was seeking to try and change the institution of policing…you’re trying to change hundreds of years of historic issues in this one executive order that lists all these things giving very vague terms of what the expectations is, but without clearly defining what some of these terms need to be because the way New York City Police Department looks at implicit bias training may be very different from what Albany PD does,” said Snider, who is also the policy director of Criminal Justice and Civil Liberties at R Street Institute, a Washington, D.C.- based think tank.

“I don’t see the executive order being a negative in any way,” she said. “I just see the way in which it doesn’t give clear guidance, which would mean different agencies will do different things to try and meet these goals,”

Despite the gains, Snider argued that polling nationwide still shows that the public’s perception of police remains low and that New York is still seeing low rates of cooperation with victims and witnesses and low case closure rates.

“We’re not going to see any type of results anytime soon because now it’s up to law enforcement agencies and their executives within to identify the best strategy for their particular agency of how to achieve goals set forth in this executive order,” Snider added.