An NYPD family (photo: @NYPDnews)

As we continue to dissect the election that just occurred and look ahead to the Trump presidency, there is also business close to home to consider for 2017. New Yorkers must contemplate the grotesque failures of leadership exposed by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, while the Brennan Center for Justice has repeatedly told us that New York’s in the most dysfunctional state government in the nation.

Still, there are substantive matters that deserve our attention, and we must push state lawmakers, including Governor Andrew Cuomo, to move ahead on important reforms in a variety of issue areas. Since law enforcement and criminal justice is my area of expertise, that is where I focus my attention.

As we head toward the new legislative year, here are three public safety objectives for 2017.

First, as the crisis in police-community relations continues, the Legislature should create a new program to address it head on. New York needs a bill that would appropriate funding to the Government Law Center at Albany Law School to bring together community activists, law enforcement executives, and academics from across the state to develop a unified and coherent agenda of criminal justice reform to bring to the state's Executive and Legislature. It's high time we invited the community into the discussion and hosted real dialogue with a shared goal of agreeing upon concrete policy plans.

This agenda will promote community policing and confront the crisis in police-community relations head-on. The bill will also give the Division of Criminal Justice Services responsibility for managing a new local assistance program offering technical assistance and small grants to support the creation of community councils dedicated to creating a relationship of partnership between community stakeholders and law enforcement agencies. We have a groundbreaking model that has been developed in Albany in recent years that offers a way forward to all municipalities.

The kind of nominees President-elect Donald Trump is offering or floating for top public safety posts in his administration are unlikely to be sympathetic to our cause. If Governor Cuomo and his allies in the Legislature are sincere in their commitment to keeping New York a bastion of progressive public safety policy, they should back this proposal.

Second, we succeeded this year in having legislation introduced that will create a center for the study of transnational organized crime at SUNY. The Centennial of the New York State Police will be marked in 2017 -- in 1957, that agency made history with the exposure of the existence of the mafia, leading to decades of engagement by law enforcement agencies all over the nation in the face of the growing threat of organized crime.

In 1985, under the leadership of the late Tom Constantine, the New York State Police initiated an investigation that, six years later, saw the exposure of the operations of Colombia's Cali Cartel in our state, bringing to light the fact that we had been invaded and occupied by a powerful, wealthy, well-armed, ruthless foreign criminal power with tentacles throughout New York.

Constantine took over the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1994 and oversaw the defeat and dismantling of the cartel, the largest and most powerful criminal conspiracy in history. Organized crime gets little press today, preoccupied as we are with the war on terror. But terrorist organizations have symbiotic relationships with criminal enterprises in many nations. Long after the political, ethnic, and religious impetuses for the terror movements we know today dissipate, organized crime will still be with us.

The 2017 centennial of the state police and the respect and affection that many prominent law enforcement leaders around the world still hold for Constantine provide an auspicious moment and opportunity for launching a new institute that, in years to come, will organize and host annual conferences in Albany bringing together the best minds to develop advice to the world's governments on how to face down the threat of global organized crime. Our bill designates this institute The Thomas A. Constantine Institute for the Study of Transnational Organized Crime.

Third, New York and the entire nation have been going through an historic sea change in attitudes toward drug addiction as the result of the heroin/opioid epidemic. The past two years have seen positive results in New York. There is, however, an important gap in our panoply of prevention programs that we must urgently address.

There has been no generally accepted prevention program that targets the key demographic of high school-aged kids. It is in high school that most kids are first exposed to the opportunity to obtain and experiment with drugs. It is in high school that kids often stop listening to adults and become more receptive to the opinions of their peers for good or ill. A peer-to-peer approach is the sound approach.

In recent years, I was introduced to Mentor International, an internationally respected youth drug abuse prevention program founded by Queen Silvia of Sweden in 1994. We debuted Mentor in Columbia County last year. I have been working with Gunilla Girardo, CEO of Mentor Foundation USA, the U.S. affiliate set up in 2010, to introduce the program to policymakers at the state level. Mentor has made New York a priority.

Successful introduction of the program here will have national influence. It is supported by the private sector and recruits community leaders in business, government, and the nonprofit sectors to serve as mentors to youth and to create mentoring opportunities for kids in a variety of workplaces. The hallmark of the program is its reliance on the peer-to-peer approach in getting kids to take up the cause of influencing their friends to make positive and healthy choices in life.

There is, of course, a role that the Legislature and the Governor can, and should, play in promoting Mentor.

The crisis in police-community relations, the challenge of global organized crime, and the heroin/opioid epidemic are national problems that were little discussed in the recent election. They require urgent, but thoughtful responses. The program outlined here offers a dynamic response to all three. As the political dust settles and we move forward, let's join together to assert New York's historic leadership in confronting the true issues of the day.

***
Terry O'Neill is Director of the Constantine Institute in Albany, an organization that promotes constitutional, legal and ethical standards in law enforcement and advises state and local governments on police issues. He is a lawyer and served as a criminal justice adviser to the administration of Governor Mario Cuomo from 1988 to 1994.