Xavier Brown:It is always beneficial to know your rights as a citizen. especially when new laws are introduced. Taking the time to understand them will be important.
Jabril Alston: Police especially now, they have a lot of power to decide what’s right from wrong.
Alston: The movement to defunding the police and a lot of people don’t see why that’s a good thing. But you know the police doesn’t need grenades and m-16’s to do their job, their job is to protect and serve so you know if we take a little bit of the money they have and put it into other things like education it would be better for the community.
Brown: what is the right to know law this law requires an officer to give his or her name, rank, and command at the onset of any questioning or any traffic stop. The officer must also give a reason for the stop the common council adopted the “right to know” legislation Tuesday, establishing stricter rules for how police interact with the public and requiring the department to report age, gender and race statistics on the people stopped and searched by officers.
Matthew Malinowski: Now we have to go through this next step of, you can tell me no and walk away Scott free. What person would say yes to a search knowing they have a gun or a drug on them
Malinowski: i don’t think we’re looking at the larger issue that are causing the problems to make people break the law in the first place and interact with us. so what’s in that law already basically formalizes the process to identify yourself or supply your information
Brown: Something they both agreed on, was there is still work to be done . this is a great start. The law goes into effect December 14th, 2020
SYRACUSE , NY (NCC News) : This past Tuesday mayor Ben Walsh said the right to know law will officially go into effect December, 14th 2020.The law was put into action to place more accountability on law enforcement.
Resident Jabril Alston, said he feels like this was a great thing to happen for the community, while it is only a start it is something that should have already been going on. Alston said people should know what the law can and cannot do but sometimes that isn’t always the case.
Alston also said at this time law enforcement has too much power, and that is leading to the disconnect between the police and the people who live in the city of Syracuse. He believes there should be some sort of check and balance system within the city to progress the force as well as community relations.
Sargent Matthew Malinowski the public information officer said the new law in place includes things that they have regularly done, with this new system it really formalizes all of the things that they were doing.
“There are a lot of times were investigating a crime or a vehicle at a traffic stop and we ask for consent, we search, and we find guns and drugs.” Malinowski said he believes their going to unfortunately miss some of the bad guys they would have caught due to the extra step added.
Malinowski also said restricting the police isn’t the best way to go about things. He said that will only be limiting the resources they have to stop the bad guys people in the city want off the streets.
