Police training program in Adirondack region makes gains after four years

Adirondack Diversity Initiative director evaluates impacts of community policing project

By David Escobar

The morning of June 29, 2022, two Saranac Lake police officers pulled their vehicle into a Stewart’s Shops parking lot. The call turned out to be fatal.

The suspect, 33-year-old Saranac Lake resident Joshua De’Miguel Kavota, had reportedly stabbed a man on Bloomingdale Avenue before fleeing to a nearby Stewart’s gas station.

When approached by police, Kavota, who was wielding a knife, lunged at one of the officers before he was shot by her partner. Kavota later died from the gunshot wounds.

The incident drew regional attention and was later investigated by the state Attorney General’s office.

In Saranac Lake, the shooting sparked a painful conversation. Kavota, who was Black, had been killed by a white police officer, leading some community members to question whether the shooting was racially motivated.

Bodycam footage of the shooting showed officers attempting to de-escalate Kavota, and investigators ultimately ruled that the use of lethal force was justified. The Adirondack Diversity Initiative (ADI) concurred with the finding, but Tiffany Rea-Fisher said some community members called on her organization with a list of requests for local policing.

“We need training, we need help, we need cultural competency, understanding and training, and we need someone to fill this kind of gap,” said Rea-Fisher.

At the time, ADI was developing a community policing initiative to enhance relationships between law enforcement agencies and the Adirondack communities they serve. The program was launched in July 2021 in part to supply training resources for Adirondack police agencies to comply with state Executive Order 203. The mandate, issued weeks after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, requires local governments to adopt policing reform plans to address racial bias and disproportionate policing of communities of color.

To date, over 160 officers and DEC rangers have participated in the training program, which is now in its fourth year.

The Explorer sat down with Rea-Fisher to learn more about the police training program and the findings of a recent evaluation.

The interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Q: How does this training work in practice, and who are the people doing these trainings?

We work with Dr. Lorenzo Boyd, who is a former police officer. One of the things that is really helpful is that the person who is doing the actual facilitation really understands the stress and what the day-to-day is for these officers, which I think is a really key component of the success of the program.

We’ve had DEC Forest Rangers, we’ve had state troopers, we’ve had detectives, campus police, correctional officers. We really have run the gamut of the types of law enforcement that have been involved in our trainings, and it’s all voluntary. We’ve had a really wonderful response. Some of the feedback that I thought was interesting is that a lot of times, police don’t get to interact with each other. So we’re creating a space in which all the information that they’re learning is the same. But how they’re able to implement it and use it is very different.

When an officer is called to the scene, you are probably meeting this person on the worst day—you’re not calling 9-1-1 on a good day. How you interact with that person makes a big difference.

We were talking with rookie police—first years—who were talking about taking someone’s stories. And the detectives were able to say, “If you all don’t do your job well, by the time they get to us, they’re not going to say anything.” And there was like an “a-ha” moment, because we were talking about first points of connection and how crucial that is. There is a symbiotic relationship between the people who are calling the police and the police trying to get information out so that they can actually move forward and reach a place of resolve for themselves and for whatever the situation is.

Q: What other aspects of policing—doing the work of a police officer—are brought up in these training sessions?

We have a session on trauma that used to be the second section, and now it’s the first section, and we start with talking about trauma, not from the victim’s perspective, but from the police perspective.

Sometimes, when you’re in a situation and you just don’t even realize how stressful it is, because that’s just the air you’re breathing, when we switched that component and started with the trauma, it allowed them to just take a beat for us to be like, “We see you.”

We also understand that one bad apple spoils the bunch, and that there’s been a bad rap, and you are feeling that you’re having to make up the difference for someone who did something in one of the Carolinas that has nothing to do with you, has nothing to do with the region, but you’re getting the splash back.

So I think just coming from that perspective was really helpful, and we lock into that, and what those signs are to also just keep our officers safe. That if you’re seeing this within your colleagues, giving outlets and kind of getting rid of the tough person persona, because at a certain point it’s going to break, and that’s not helpful. We do, in our society, need these positions to be filled. We need them to be filled with healthy people that are physically and mentally healthy.

And the second section, which I think is one of my favorites, talks about the history of policing, and it talks about the history of protests, and what the job of the officer is within that. And in that session, I feel like there’s a bunch of a-ha moments.

We can have these dialogues and these conversations that a lot of people, I think, are so afraid of saying the wrong thing. Just fear across the board, however you want to define it, that we don’t have these conversations, and we don’t. We’re not able to just speak freely, and we’re not able to learn the lesson. If we’re out here trying to learn, not every time are you going to get 100% of the learning, but if you get 60%, it’s 60% more than what you had before.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about some of the feedback you’ve heard from officers?

The biggest feedback that we’ve received is officers saying, “I wish I had this in the academy. I wish I’d gotten this sooner.”

That’s our next big step: to see if we can do that. We have people that have been on the force for 20 years, and this is the first time that they’re having any of this information. But there’s something about uniform knowledge in the sense that if everyone is getting this coming out of the academy—and even if we’re not able to get it in the academy— if everyone outside of year one is able to get this training, what we’ve heard in how it alters behavior in a positive way, that goes both ways.

Because I think the thing that people forget a lot of the time is that our law enforcement members are part of our community. They’re not other. If they go into a bar and just want to be a regular person but still have their uniform on, we’ve heard they feel how people feel about them, and it never is a neutral thing. That doesn’t feel good to have diametrically opposed views when you’re just trying to sit down and have a beer at the end of the day.

And what’s really wonderful about this year, this is its fourth year, is that now we’ve been able to survey officers and their higher ups about the behavioral change of those who have gone through the program and how they feel it is affecting their day-to-day. To hear it from them and to hear it from their chief, it really was like, “Okay, this is actually moving the needle.”

So for us, we really do want to scale this up to make sure that there is a good percentage, that 50% of all law enforcement in our 14 counties have gone through that. That’s enough to really tip by a lot.

Q: Now that you have this evaluation report, what do you hope the future of this initiative looks like?

I would love deep participation in all 14 counties, because I’ve seen the success of it. I would love to hit as many different areas of law enforcement as possible, because at some point, whether it is obvious or not, they are all working together, whether it’s invisible or highly-visible. I think being able to create an actual sense of trust and safety between the community and the officers, and vice versa, is crucial. Our part is trying to build that bridge.

David Escobar is a Report For America Corps Member. He reports on diversity issues in the Adirondacks through a partnership between North Country Public Radio and Adirondack Explorer.