Community members packed a Kingston Police Forum at New Progressive Baptist Church in Kingston. While the church has had numerous forums before, this meeting drew more interest due to recent complaints, including an incident where a man was seen in a video that went viral being put in a choke-hold by a Kingston Police Officer. Candace Dunkley has more. 

KINGSTON, N.Y. --  On Monday New Progressive Baptist church was packed with people who said they want to see changes to the way police officers address the community.

At the meeting both Kingston Police Chief Egidio Tinti and Mayor Steve Noble spoke to the audience about changes being made within the department.

“We created a bilingual police officer police officer position. It’s in our 2018 budget,” said Noble.

“We’ve always had bias awareness and cultural diversity as a part of the recruit level training, but now we are doing it in service wise as well so that seasoned officers are also getting that information,” said Tinti.

But the sentiment expressed by many people in the room was that more needs to be done.

This comes after a video recently went viral of former Kingston resident, Fabian Marshall, who was put in a choke-hold by a Kingston Police officer.

“I want to know what you are going to do moving forward to avoid situations like this,” said Marshall’s mother Liz Baker.  

The commission looked at the complaint for the first time last week.  The mayor added that he is working to get police commission members to hold a special meeting to discuss this and other complaints earlier than the scheduled December 20 meeting.

People also called for a number of changes to be made to the city’s police commission -- including the time it takes to review the complaints and limit discussions held in executive session.

And for many the question of the night was whether city representatives and Kingston residents were on the same page. 

“As things currently stand, how do you feel about that? Because if I know that you also agree that what’s currently happening is wrong, then I know you have the impetus for change,” said Kingston Resident Micah Blumenthal.

“If the community feels there’s something wrong then there’s clearly something that we got to talk about,” said Noble.