Mayor Bill de Blasio released the second part of his administration’s plan for reforming the New York City Police Department on Friday, proposing additional measures in a non-binding report to decriminalize poverty and increase trust in the police force.

The effort, which has drawn on nearly 100 meetings with New York City residents in majority Black and Latino neighborhoods impacted by over-policing, was galvanized by George Floyd’s killing at the hands of police in Minneapolis last May. 

“This is one of the most extraordinary efforts to hear all stakeholders, and to hear the voices of the public, that I've ever seen,” de Blasio said at a Friday morning press conference. 

The report is the latest release in a series of announcements aimed at reforming the police, including an effort called the David Dinkins Plan, named for the former mayor, to strengthen the city’s independent police complaint oversight agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

The city has published a new “disciplinary matrix” determining punishments for specific violations of police rules, finalized a new memorandum of understanding between the NYPD and the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and released decades of police disciplinary records. 

The latest report, which includes 28 new proposals, comes after the de Blasio administration released 36 reform proposals last week. 

The new report covers a wide range of policies aimed at reducing poverty, eliminating the “pipeline” from underserved schools to prisons and strengthening punishments and oversight for police officers who abuse their authority. 

NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said the changes came out of meetings where city residents expressed frustration with over-policing and a lack of accountability for police officers.

“They know that police have a tough job. But when police make mistakes, there's absolutely a feeling, particularly in some neighborhoods, that police won't be held accountable,” he said. “You can’t ignore the emotions that are out there.”

The new report, as well as the first part released last week, has received strong criticism from some police reform advocates. 

In a statement, Communities United for Police Reform, a campaign against police discrimination, blasted the community meetings that preceded the reports as “NYPD propaganda session,” saying they did not include groups and individuals leading the police accountability movement in New York City. 

Loyda Colon, a spokesperson for the campaign, called the report released Friday “shameful” and “insulting to New Yorkers who have been demanding real change.”

“This isn’t a plan that will decrease police violence or increase accountability – it’s a plan that will expand the NYPD’s already bloated budget and outsized power in NYC,” Colon said. 

The heads of three major social services organizations that cooperated on the report, and who appeared in the Friday morning press conference, hailed it as a significant achievement in the city’s police reform movement. 

“There's still a lot of work to be done,” said Wes Moore, the chief executive of the Robin Hood Foundation, which focuses on anti-poverty initiatives. “But the movement that we've seen is important, and should be acknowledged.”

De Blasio highlighted proposals in the report that will extend the department’s “early intervention” efforts to identify officers who need to have their patrols suspended or be removed from the department entirely. 

Another proposal built on measures put forth in the report released last week to formalize the department’s promotion process, to make sure that histories of complaints and disciplinary records are “systematically incorporated into the decision-making process.”

“The vast majority of our officers do their jobs conscientiously and well,” de Blasio said. “But as in every field, every profession, there are some people who struggle or don't belong.”

The new report also includes an initiative called Ending the Poverty to Prison Pipeline, aimed at increasing social services support for people in the criminal justice system and their families, as well as a proposal to create new policies for combating sex work while focusing more on traffickers than trafficked sex workers. 

Among the more controversial proposals for opponents of increased police oversight include reducing or eliminating pensions for officers who have caused death or serious injury through misconduct, and making job applicants who are residents of the five boroughs more likely to be hired, to increase the number of officers who live in the city.

“Looks like Mayor de Blasio put on his union-busting hat to fashion his latest slate of police reform proposals,” Patrick Lynch, head of the police union, said in an emailed statement. “Our public sector union brothers and sisters should be very concerned about the Mayor’s plan to tamper with civil service laws that protect most city and state workers.”

Lynch said that the city should raise wages to increase the number of NYC residents on the force.

In a letter prefacing the new report, Fred Davie, the chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is tasked with investigating complaints against police officers, said he was confident the reforms would be put into action. 

“The era of those who see any oversight as detrimental to public safety is over,” Davie wrote. “There is more to do, and I am confident the reforms now proposed and underway will help make this a better and fairer city.”

In response to questions from reporters, de Blasio defended the timing of the reforms, coming in his final year in office, as being part of the natural progression of his administration’s earlier changes to police tactics while suggesting that they were galvanized by last summer’s protest movement against police brutality and systemic racism

De Blasio said he has come to understand the depth of the issues of racism in policing, and that by holding meetings with residents of heavily policed communities “more and more solutions have become clear.”

“This has been something we’ve learned year by year,” he said. 

De Blasio also said that the department was reconsidering its protest response tactics after being accused of human rights violations during the wave of protests that swept the city last summer and fall. De Blasio said that the department would no longer use “kettling,” a tactic in which police forces surround a group of protesters, preventing them from leaving as they make arrests. 

“That is not an acceptable approach,” de Blasio said. “It will not happen in the future.”