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Credit: Michelle Gabel | Central Current

Another effort to reform Syracuse’s Citizen Review Board has been delayed. 

Common Council Public Safety Committee Chair Chol Majok withheld a vote to create a group that would be tasked with reviewing how the CRB works. 

Majok delayed the vote because of questions from other councilors, he said. 

He proposed the effort with input from community members to strengthen the review board, which has sometimes been accused of not having enough power. Majok, a 2025 mayoral hopeful, said that updates to the review board are overdue. 

“There’s a lot of need to strengthen the legislation, and the best way for us to go about it overall is to involve citizens that have experience, that have the technical know-how,” Majok said.

The aim of the committee was to strengthen the legislation while freeing up the board members to focus on processing complaints against Syracuse police officers, Majok said. 

If approved, the proposed temporary committee would research and review the Citizen Review Board’s legislation and draft updates to its language before submitting a recommendation to the council.

The CRB has recently struggled to make good on its responsibility to review allegations of misconduct against police. The board meets monthly. 

Throughout 2024, the city employees staffing the review board left their positions. Some accused former CRB Administrator Ranette Releford of creating a toxic work environment. 

Releford announced her own resignation at the end of September 2024, leaving the Citizen Review Board with no paid staffers and stretching thin the volunteer board members’ capacity to complete misconduct reviews.

In recent years, the review board has held few hearings. In 2023, it held just one, according to the board’s annual report. That’s fewer than are typically held, according to previous annual reports by the board. 

A report from the first quarter of 2024 lists one hearing as being held. None of the reports from the remaining three quarters of the year are listed on the CRB website.

Some of the board’s volunteers also began to leave the organization in 2024. Only two board members who were on the board in 2024 remain. Many of those volunteers hit the end of their terms in December. The eleven volunteers are selected by members of the Common Council and the mayor and serve three year terms. 

Bryn Lovejoy-Grinnell, who joined the board last January, will now serve as the board’s chair. Lovejoy-Grinnell declined to comment on the legislative advisory committee.

Majok hoped that the committee would meet for a “3 to 6 month period” between April and September, according to the council’s agenda. The committee, if approved, would recommend changes to the CRB legislation and then cease meeting.  

“It has nothing to do with looking over the board’s shoulder and what they are doing,” Majok said. “This is strictly a specific task: Research, review and drive a recommendation to the Council for an update of a legislation.”

The nine-member advisory committee is already selected. It would include:

  • The Syracuse police chief or their designee
  • Corporation Counsel or their designee
  • David Chaplin II
  • Vanessa Martel
  • David Lapierre
  • Mikiel Anderson
  • Douglas Bullock
  • Donald Johnson
  • Elizabeth Hradil

Since its inception in 1993, staffing and other issues have sometimes stymied the CRB. 

In 2011, then-councilor Pam Hunter, now a state assemblymember, led efforts to reform the Citizen Review Board and sponsored a similar legislative advisory committee. 

Since then, the council has not updated the CRB’s legislation, though community advocates have called for reform. 

Former CRB chair Peter McCarthy, who served from 2017 to 2020, said that Majok’s proposed committee in part stems from the council’s attempts to encroach on the CRB’s independence.

Last year, Majok and other councilors on the Public Safety Committee introduced legislation to alter the CRB’s ordinance and give the Common Council greater control over the board’s staffers. The council voted to approve an alteration to CRB law that would shift the power to fire the CRB administrator from the review board to the council, but Walsh vetoed the move.

In response, McCarthy and other concerned residents – including some who were involved with the 2011 committee – encouraged the council against infringing on the Citizen Review Board’s autonomy.

“We recommended to the council that, rather than enacting legislation that would make sort of piecemeal changes to the ordinance, that a legislative advisory committee be established,” McCarthy said.

For the Citizen Review Board to function as designed, McCarthy believes that the board must remain independent from City Hall.

McCarthy declined to specify the advocates’ recommendations to the council, but said they broadly suggest closer communication between the CRB and the Public Safety committee.

“The citizens of the city spent probably 30 years from the ‘60s until the ‘90s, demanding that the city government implement a citizen-led process for police oversight,” McCarthy said. “And the key is citizen-led – so the board is independent.”

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Patrick McCarthy is a staff reporter at Central Current covering government and politics. A graduate of Syracuse University’s Maxwell and Newhouse Schools, McCarthy was born and raised in Syracuse and...