Amityville Officials Host Community Discussion On Police Reform

AMITYVILLE, NY — The Village of Amityville held a meeting last week to begin discussions on reforms for the local police department and will be hosting a second this week.

Village officials hosted the first of the two virtual meetings last Tuesday in response to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s recent order requiring all local police to present a reform plan by April.

A second meeting will be held via Zoom on Tuesday starting at 7 p.m. Click here for meeting info.

According to the Amityville Village website, the plan will be created after a review of police force policies, procedures, and practices. Police will be making the plan after consulting with the community.

"The goal for this plan is to enable the Amityville Village Police Department to continue its community-oriented policing strategies while working towards further reducing racial disparities in policing," the message from police read.

Some of the policy changes posted to the Amityville website include:

• Use of force policy and the duty to intervene
• Updated Internal Affairs policy
• Updated hate crimes policy
• Ban on chokeholds
• New order for crowd control
• Increase use of body cameras
• New department goal to collect and post traffic stop data
• New trainings for bias, Principled Policing-Procedural Justice and de-escalation techniques

The full first draft of the police reform plan can be found here.