suny Police Officers Union will Offer Plan to Centralize Police Departments at trustee hearing

Proposal Cuts Waste and Saves State Millions of Dollars Annually

Albany, NY – President of the New York State University Police Officers Union, James McCartney, today announced that his union will be giving testimony tomorrow to the SUNY Board of Trustees outlining a number of inefficiencies within the state university’s police department and providing solutions that will make the system more efficient and effective.

“The members of our union recognize the critical nature of our state’s fiscal crisis and we want to do our part during these tough budgetary times to make recommendations that we feel will make the state university’s police department more efficient and less expensive,” said President James McCartney. 

“We see a lot of waste inherent in the unusual structure of a highly decentralized university police department that employs sixty-five managers at a cost of $6.2 million for 400 officers.  Compare that with New York’s three other police agencies combined (State Police, Environment Conservation and Park Police) that manage nearly 4,500 officers with only twenty-four managers at a cost of $3.8 million.”

Several inefficiencies in the State University of New York’s Police Department will be outlined in Mr. McCartney’s testimony tomorrow with the structure of the department taking center stage.  McCartney’s testimony will illustrate that the current structure of decentralization is extremely inefficient and leads to inaccurate reporting of crime statistics, lack of uniform procedures for dealing with critical incidents, and millions of dollars in waste each year.

“During our analysis of the structure of SUNY’s police department, we were hard pressed to find any other police department or private entity, for that matter, organized in such an inefficient manner,” said McCartney.  “The problem is not just the sheer numbers of managers that the system employs, but the peculiar way in which the police department is structured.”

The current SUNY police department system comprises twenty-eight individual police departments that are technically not affiliated with the other departments.  Each campus has its own police chief and individual organizational structure and is not accountable to the SUNY’s Office of University Police.  This incongruous relationship is cause for alarm and lends itself to the current inefficient and extremely expensive system. 

“The current system would be like having a New York City Precinct Captain who does not have to report to the City’s Police Commissioner,” said McCartney.  “The structure of SUNY’s police department is outdated and state’s current fiscal crisis is an ideal time to fix it.”

Copies of the entire transcript will be available at the public hearing being held by the State University of New York Board of Trustees at 2:00 pm at the SUNY College of Optometry in Manhattan. 

#####