Center for Law & Justice Pathway to Change: African Americans and Community Policing in Albany Alice P. Green, Ph.D. The Center for Law & Justice, Inc. “If there is no struggle, there is no progress” –Frederick Douglass Pathway to Change: African Americans and Community Policing in Albany Prepared by: Dr. Alice Green, Executive Director Center for Law & Justice, Inc. Albany, New York Contact Information: P: 518.427.8361 F: 518.427.8362 www.cflj.com
[email protected] Front Cover By: Mark Bob-Semple Back Cover By: Sara Morby September 2013 The Center for Law and Justice “Pathway to Change: African Americans and Community Policing in Albany” PATHWAY TO CHANGE: AFRICAN AMERICANS AND COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY At six o’clock in the evening on a sweltering Tuesday in July, nearly 150 people gathered at the public library for a “Forum on Community Policing” conducted by the Albany Community Policing Advisory Committee (ACPAC). Police Chief Steven Krokoff and about a dozen police officers (nearly all of them white), a dozen ACPAC members (a mix of white and black), and scores of community members (predominantly black) met to discuss police/community relations. Less than seventy-two hours before the meeting, a jury in Florida had pronounced George Zimmerman, a white man, “not guilty” of any crimes despite the fact that he had admittedly shot and killed an unarmed, seventeen-year-old African American boy, Trayvon Martin, as he walked home from 7Eleven. After the verdict was announced late Saturday night, disbelief and despair and anger gripped those who yearned to believe that the nation had entered a “post-racial” period with the election of the first African American president in 2008.