Creating Commons for the Rochester Police Department: A Conversation
Guest post from Greater Rochester Chamber member Measures for Justice
Dr. Candice Lucas is the Senior Vice President for Equity and Advocacy with the Urban League of Rochester. Sammie Drayton, Jr. is a Deputy Chief (DC) at the Rochester Police Department (RPD).
In 2024, DC Drayton and Dr. Lucas joined forces with other community leaders and the RPD to pursue a project that would offer the Rochester community a new level of transparency from the police. The result is Commons for the Rochester Police Department, developed by Measures for Justice, a free and public data platform that answers questions about how the RPD handles cases and that features a policy goal developed by the RPD and community leaders together. The starter goal is to reduce the time it takes RPD to respond to calls for service.
What follows is an inside look at the conversations that took place, how Dr. Lucas and Deputy Chief Drayton ended up at the same table to begin with, and what the Rochester community can expect as a result of their collective efforts.
DC Drayton: Hi there. To start, I want to say that sitting down with community leaders to talk about policing in Rochester, I expected it was going to be one of those situations where the police are bad and everything we do is wrong.
Dr. Lucas: I understand you thinking we were just going to beat up on the police, because in 2020 it felt as though that’s what was going on. Every time you saw a news story, it was like: the police are horrible, and you’re killing Black people, and there really was this friction. And it was legitimate. We watched George Floyd be murdered by a police officer, that is real. But by the same token, we all know police officers that are our neighbors and our friends and part of our families. So we also know that all police aren’t bad. But when people speak in generalizations, it tends to divide people, like it’s either Black Lives Matter or it's the police, right? But there really shouldn’t be a divide because both things are true. I know in Rochester, people value the police. We want good police officers, not the bad ones.
DC Drayton: It was great to work side by side and to get a better handle on what divides us. I mean, we think like police, we speak like police, and we found out pretty quickly that there’s a communication gap between us all. Even the terminology we’re using—the civilian population, for lack of a better word, doesn’t understand what we’re talking about. So that gave us an aha moment where we go, Wait a minute, we’re putting information out, but the public has no idea what it means.
Dr. Lucas: Like “critical” and “priority.”
DC Drayton: Right. For us, a priority job doesn’t mean it’s a critical incident. But you can see how if you think those words mean the same thing, you’ll have a different opinion about how we respond.
Dr. Lucas: Sammie, I think “use of force,” was another one. What that means to the police versus what that means to most people.
DC Drayton: Exactly. In our policy, if we touch anyone other than handcuffing or escorting, it’s “use of force.” But that could be just turning someone away. So when the data came out for “use of force” incidents, everyone was like: You guys got a high level of use of force. Stop beating people up, right? So I had to clarify. And everyone went, Oh, okay, got it, that’s the RPD policy. I mean, we want to know when our officers are touching some person in an other than a normal way, we need to know that. That’s part of accountability. But we also want everyone to be on the same page about what we’re looking at.
Dr. Lucas: You don’t know that you don’t know, right? Because what words mean to us, to community members, is what we think they mean to everyone. “Use of force” was a big one, because in community language, if you hear “use of force,” that’s police brutality, right? But that’s not necessarily the truth. So the question is how do we communicate this and educate our community? I think that was an important conversation to have.
DC Drayton: Once the conversation got going, it was kind of hard to stop. Everybody had the same mindset that we had to collaborate to make this work. We all got a better understanding of what the police can do, and a better understanding of what the community and community stakeholders want, instead of what we thought they wanted. This is why we took on this project to start with—because we wanted to make sure that we’re as transparent with the community as possible. We believe that transparency with the community is one of the things that will build those bridges and keep us in communication.
Dr. Lucas: I’m also not surprised that when you came in, you felt the support of the community, because genuinely, that’s what it is, right? How do we work better together? How do we hold each other accountable?
DC Drayton: Let’s talk more about this project we worked on together that sparked these conversations to begin with—Commons. We should explain what it is.
Dr. Lucas: Right.
DC Drayton: Commons is a data platform with a lot of information about how the RPD handles calls for service and how we run in general. We developed it with an advisory board of community leaders like you and the nonprofit Measures for Justice. Right now, we have a similar sort of system in place, but Commons is a lot better because it explains more. You can look up definitions, you can compare data month to month or to last year, and just get a real, almost live view of what’s going on. I think the public is going to really appreciate the platform and I’m excited about it because when I get on there, I can stay there for a long time exploring trends and patterns. There’s a lot to learn and understand.
Dr. Lucas: Agreed. I got involved with the project because it seemed like a good opportunity to continue the work we all started after George Floyd was murdered and to influence things from the community side. Back in 2020, Governor Cuomo put out this call for cities to review their policing and reform it. I forget the exact name of it, Sammie. Do you remember?
DC Drayton: New York State Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative.
Dr. Lucas: So after that order, the scope broadened and we all started looking at our entire community and all the various things that intersect with policing—policing and housing; policing and health care; policing and business development. When the chance to work on Commons came up, it just felt like an extension of this work. I think Rochester is a pretty collaborative space. A lot of us are ready to engage deeply with the RPD to make change.
Still, as a leader at the Urban League, I recognize that we’re in a sensitive situation, because there is one element of the community that does harbor very negative feelings due to the engagements they’ve had with the police. We’re the civil rights organization for the community, making sure that we are engaging with community members, hearing their concerns, understanding their lived experience, and advocating for them to make sure that their human rights are being upheld while partnering with the police and trying to make sure that we are working together for the betterment of our community. This is why data is so important alongside general knowledge of how the RPD works. With information in hand, we can engage in calm conversations that are not in the heat of the moment.
DC Drayton: Absolutely. And I do recognize that it’s very rare for a police department to partner up with the Urban League. It’s a big deal. So we’re really trying to get it right. Commons is collecting our data and being handled by an independent entity from the police. So no one can say we’re skewing anything. We’re just putting the data out there so we can talk about it and use it as the basis for the trust and relationships we’ve already started building through this process.
Dr. Lucas: What people really want to know is, if something happens, how is it being handled? If things are quiet and all is well, then folks are happy, but when there’s an incident, they start looking and digging and trying to figure things out. They will have questions. I think Commons is one step in the process. I don’t think it’s the end all, be all. People will look at it, they’ll get some information, and then they can go to the chief and say, This is what I saw. This is how I understand this information. And then the chief, the deputy chiefs, commanders, and so forth will then have the job of translating that data so that the community understands what the data means and then they can share any more information that the community needs. So I just see it as being the first step that the community can take to start that investigation.
DC Drayton: I agree. It’s a place for people to go if they want an answer right then, because most of the time, if they don’t have something like Commons to go to, they’re going to make up their own narrative.
Dr. Lucas: Yeah, it can be a game of telephone. One person says something, and then the story may change over time. And, you know, by the time you get to the chief, the story is maybe nowhere near what actually happened, right, or what the body cam footage shows, or whatever the case may be. So if we’re at least looking at the same data, then before a rumor snowballs on the street, we’ll have context.
DC Drayton: Right.
Dr. Lucas: Facts and truth matter. But to be clear, I wouldn’t say that Commons is giving us the facts, it’s giving us the data. Data is just numbers until you actually know how to interpret those numbers—then you get facts. It’s a process.
DC Drayton: I will add that for police departments to do this work, there needs to be some humility and willingness to show your vulnerability. We don’t do everything right. So we have to take the time to be patient and listen to what your community stakeholders, your faith groups, other clergy have to say. There’s going to be some hard conversations—we had our twists and turns–but if you go in there like that, not point the fingers at each other, then it should be successful, like our collaboration was here.
Dr. Lucas: That is true. And on a final note, if other communities want this work, they need to make sure they have the full buy-in of the police, that is the only way Commons makes sense. It’s not PR, it’s not surface, it’s real.
Explore Commons for the Rochester Police Department for yourself, here.
Watch this video to hear more about what the Rochester Community is saying about Commons.