Want police accountability to work in New Paltz? Start with the org chart.

March 24, 2025.

The Entrepreneur.

New Paltz has something a lot of towns don’t: a civilian Police Commission.

This Commission was created to help ensure local law enforcement is transparent, community-oriented, and accountable — not just to Town Hall, but to the people.

The rules that govern this Commission are written in a local law called Chapter 34 of the Town Code. On paper, it gives the Commission power to review policies, oversee hiring, examine complaints, and help shape the culture of policing in New Paltz.

In practice? It’s complicated.

A Law Full of Loopholes

Over the past few weeks — at the March 3 Police Commission meeting and in Town Board sessions on March 6 and March 20 — questions started to pile up about how Chapter 34 actually works:

• Can Commissioners conduct interviews with police personnel?

• Are complaint investigations public or private?

• Can they independently recommend discipline — or just advise the Board?

• Who has final say if the Commission and the Chief disagree?

Even Commissioners didn’t seem sure. Town Board members raised concerns. And no one could point to a consistent process that the public could understand — let alone trust.

The result? A system meant to ensure accountability is now a source of confusion.

Confusion Breeds Inaction

Chapter 34 is trying to do something bold: put meaningful oversight in civilian hands. But it reads more like a tangle of administrative hedging. It creates roles without teeth, processes without clarity, and oversight mechanisms that rely on unwritten norms instead of enforceable structures.

As someone who builds businesses and platforms, I recognize this pattern: a system designed with good intentions but no user experience.

Time to Redesign

Let’s treat Chapter 34 like a startup prototype that needs iteration. If we want police oversight to function — to earn trust and actually improve outcomes — we need to rebuild the system from the ground up.

Here’s where I’d start:

1. Clarify Authority
   Spell out who does what — not just in ideal cases, but in conflicts. Is the Commission advisory? Decision-making? What’s binding?

2. Make the Complaint Process Transparent
   Allow public tracking of complaints, outcomes, and patterns over time. Provide reporting tools that the public can understand and access.

3. Add Structure to Evaluations
   When the Commission evaluates the Chief, what are the metrics? Who sees the results? How are they acted on?

4. Train the Commissioners
   Give them orientation, legal background, and mediation tools. Oversight isn’t intuitive — it’s learned.

5. Build a Civic Dashboard
   Just like we track road closures or budget lines, let’s track policy reviews, complaint trends, and reform outcomes in a visual, updatable system.

We Don’t Need More Meetings. We Need Better Design.

The most striking thing about this whole process? Everyone involved — from Commissioners to Councilmembers to residents — wants the same thing: a New Paltz that works (that’s why we’re called NewPaltz.works)

But that won’t happen if Chapter 34 stays as-is. Right now, it reads like a compromise between legal caution and idealistic ambition — which means it satisfies no one.

Let’s redesign it. With clarity. With accountability. And with the kind of systems thinking that turns passive governance into participatory democracy.

Because if we want New Paltz to lead on public trust, we can’t just write rules — we have to build a town that work.