The Rochester City Council has quietly released the results of a community survey it conducted to gauge how effective city residents find the Police Accountability Board.
The results were overwhelmingly negative, with 80% of respondents answering that they had no confidence in the agency and 82% responding that they believed the board to be ineffective. The most common written responses called on the city to defund or disband the board. News reports rolled in Thursday, with some stations reporting the survey detailed most residents were opposed to the PAB.
But the City Council leaders who initiated the survey process acknowledged that it was flawed to the point that the results are meaningless.
“This was not scientific, and we note that in the survey,” said Council President Miguel Melendez, who called for the survey. “...We didn’t want to do a big press release and press conference, we just put it up on the website for the sake of transparency.”
The city presented the survey as a “non-scientific” process and at its outset promoted it through a press release, and at community forums and neighborhood meetings in places like PLEX and the 19th Ward. In all, 749 people responded to the survey, of which 115 were omitted because they reported that they lived outside of the city.
But the survey, according to Council, had no way of vetting whether a person lived in the city, given that the respondents self-reported their ZIP code. A quarter of all respondents reported living in 14609, a ZIP code in the city’s northeast that shares a substantial population with the town of Irondequoit.
The respondent demographics also do not remotely represent those of the city.
For example, census data shows that Rochester’s population is 38% Black and 45% white, but 64% of the survey respondents were white, and 15% were Black. Meanwhile, 63% of respondents held a bachelor's degree or higher, while in Rochester that figure is 29%. On top of that, 35% of respondents were over the age of 60, while the city’s population is only 12% over the age of 65.
Factoring in all metrics, the most common respondent to the survey would be a white, college-educated man over the age of 60.
The survey was rolled out in March at the behest of Melendez and Council Chief of Staff James Smith, after a year of turmoil within the PAB. Melendez said that the goal at the time was to simply get an idea on the community’s thoughts on the agency.
The PAB was created after a 2019 referendum where it received overwhelming support from city voters. However, it has been unable to achieve many of its promises its supporters and Council leaders made ahead of the referendum.
A court decision stripped the PAB of its power to discipline officers, which was to be one of its key functions. The city has appealed that ruling but the court has issued no decision.
But under the leadership of interim Executive Director Sherry Cowart-Walker, the PAB has introduced several proposals for reforming Rochester Police Department policies.
Melendez said he’s less interested in the data presented by the survey and is more interested in the individual written responses. He added that he views the document as a benchmark.
“I think this was a way for us to check in on people’s perceptions, and hopefully in a year, your perception is different,” he said.
