Syracuse lawmakers on Wednesday will hear opinions from legal experts advocating for the city to preserve its independent police accountability body, after a Rochester court ruled a similar review body could not investigate police misconduct complaints.
The Syracuse Common Council’s Public Safety committee will meet at 4 p.m. on Wednesday to update the public on the status of the Citizen Review Board, which has paused its own investigations but has so far continued to meet despite the Rochester ruling.
The committee meeting follows more than three months of upheaval and clashes between some Syracuse officials who are divided on what the precedent set in Rochester means for Syracuse’s Citizen Review Board. The Fourth Appellate Division, based in Rochester, in March ruled that the Rochester Police Accountability Board could not independently investigative officer misconduct complaints.
A month later, City of Syracuse lead counsel Susan Katzoff advised the city to pause the Citizen Review Board’s more than 70 ongoing investigations and pause acceptance of new reviews pending the outcome of an appeal of the Rochester decision. The Syracuse Police Department’s union requested the city review the Rochester ruling’s precedent on Syracuse’s review board, reported syracuse.com | The Post Standard.
Alan Rosenthal, a local lawyer who helped craft the legislation that spawned the CRB, and New York Civil Liberties Union assistant policy director Michael Sisitzky will present to councilors why they disagree with the city’s legal assessment. A representative from the Syracuse National Association for the Advancement of Colored People legal redress committee will also provide comments.
Councilor Donna Moore, who chairs the public safety committee and called Wednesday’s meeting, has helped lead efforts to keep the Citizen Review Board operational in Syracuse.
“I think it’s important to have that oversight, and I think that people need to have a place to voice their concerns,” Moore said. “That’s obviously the most important part about the CRB, and I don’t want to see that go away.”
Moore, NYCLU Central New York Organizer Lizmarie Montemayor Robles and a professor of criminology have written letters to the editor of syracuse.com | The Post Standard imploring Mayor Sharon Owens and the city to allow the CRB to continue conducting independent investigations into police misconduct complaints. The Post Standard’s Editorial Board itself has called on the Syracuse city government to fight for the CRB’s survival.
The proponents for the Citizen Review Board argue that the Rochester ruling does not apply to Syracuse’s oversight body because of fundamental differences between the two entities. The Rochester board, created in 2019, was tasked with both reviewing reports of police misconduct, and also with imposing discipline on officers independent of the Rochester Police Department.
Created in 1993 through a local law, the Syracuse Citizen Review Board similarly reviews complaints of police misconduct, but does not claim any disciplinary powers.
Moore has been outspoken on the issue and believes the CRB has a strong legal argument to challenge Mayor Sharon Owens’ suspension of CRB investigations, but her peers on the Common Council are divided.
The CRB has a decades-long history in the city, but has endured turmoil and upheaval throughout that tenure. In recent years, the police oversight body struggled to perform its oversight duties.
Rosenthal and community activists in 2024 rebuked Common Councilor Chol Majok’s attempts to amend the CRB’s legislation and bring the body under the council’s purview. The letter writers, including former CRB Chair Peter McCarthy, agreed with city officials that the CRB could use fixing, but perceived the council’s proposed solution to be a power grab that undermined the independent review board’s independence.
Majok’s proposed amendments to the CRB’s legislation — which would have granted the council the authority to hire and fire the CRB administrator — were approved by the Common Council but ultimately vetoed by former mayor Ben Walsh.
Majok, who formerly chaired the council’s public safety committee, worked throughout 2025 to jumpstart the Citizen Review Board’s work by pushing his colleagues to fill all appointments on the board, and for the hiring of a new administrator.
Since then, Moore said, the board hit the ground running, working through a backlog of old complaints to be reviewed. Moore said it would be “a shame” to stop the CRB’s work after so much effort was expended to make the oversight board viable again.
“The timing of this ruling in Rochester really hurt us because I think the board was finally up and functioning to its full capacity, and I think that is thanks to Councilor Majok doing the work he did last year,” Moore said. “I just think that it’s important that we keep going because I think we finally got to a good place.”
Central Current contacted CRB Chairman Don Johnson several times for comment, but did not receive a reply at the time of publication.
Read more of Central Current’s coverage
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