Hello friends, there is another City Council vote to ratify hiring 6 new police officers. More on that below. Don’t miss this press conference with The People’s Council of Troy, 12pm Thursday at 55 State St. More info on @reimaginetroy Instagram.

At the April 22nd Finance Meeting Troy City Council voted 5-2 to allocate more budget to cover hiring 6 new cops. I saw this tweet about it and thought “this cannot be true!”

But it turns out she’s right, you can read the emailed comments in the meeting minutes. A whole lot of people turned out in the written comments to City Council expressing their support for hiring 6 new cops. You wouldn’t know it from listening to the spoken public comments, which were overwhelmingly against putting more budget into Troy PD.

A lot of downtown business owners wrote emails, some of them are quite disappointing to read. I find these emails to be fearful, simplistic, and unconvincing. They read as if the writer is composing an email from that week when downtown was all boarded up with plywood before the Rally for Black Lives.

Consider this public comment from the President of the Cookie Factory. It’s not doing a whole lot of work, and this isn’t even the shortest one.

Maybe this approach is worth trying: instead of coming up with just the right thing to say, you might instead put as little effort as possible to get the basic idea across. You could write an email in two minutes. Do it right now!

This won’t be the right approach for everyone, but it might address a misperception on the City Council that the only folks who actually care about expanding the police budget are those of us who can set aside time to call into the Zoom meeting.

Find some way to show up, even if it’s a hastily written email. Let them know we do care about reimagining public safety in our city!

Dan Phiffer