PHOTO COURTESY THE CITY OF ROCHESTER Rochester Police Department officers don helmets and batons during the riots of 1964, the same year the Rochester Police Locust Club negotiated its first labor pact with the city. Around the time that a Rochester police officer pulled out her pepper spray to use on a 9-year-old-girl, Mike Mazzeo, the president of the Rochester Police Locust Club union, pulled out a pen to sign a lawsuit contesting recent appointments by the police chief to the Rochester Police Department’s top brass. Two days later, Mazzeo stood at a podium at the union’s headquarters on Lexington Avenue in blue jeans and a black sweater facing a firing squad of news reporters and stumbled through an explanation of the “psychological trauma” experienced by officers at the scene and blamed the girl’s mother for escalating th
Click the thumbs up >UK businesses are being presented with a wealth of data to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their fleet operations.
An acceleration in vehicle connectivity is opening access to information ranging from driver behaviour and vehicle performance, to pre-emptive maintenance, insurance and safety profiling. However, companies risk becoming overwhelmed if they fail to introduce the right processes and software.
“Whether you are looking at making changes, improvements or finding innovations, it all boils down to data,” says Denise Hawkins, fleet and insurance manager at ABM (
pictured above). “We have data coming in from everywhere: telematics, fuel usage, service history, mileage reports, tyre history and accident reports.
Banning the use of tear gas and “drastically expanding” funding for alternatives to police response are among the initiatives being called for by the Rochester Police Accountability Board in a wide-ranging policy document expected to help guide police reform. The document was drafted in response to questions on policing posed by a City Hall working group tasked with coming up with recommendations to reform policing. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has mandated that every municipality in the state arrive at a reform plan on April 1, or risk losing state police funding. The Police Accountability Board is the first of four organizations in the working group to devise recommendations to release its responses. The other organizations are expected to complete their responses in the coming weeks and for a reform plan to eventually be put to the City Council for a vote at some point in the future.