Minya Dejohnette, a City of Kingston police commissioner, announced during an online commissioners meeting she would be resigning, and then followed up in a Facebook post on Thursday, March 25, just days before Governor Cuomo’s executive order 203 police reform plan is due.
“I want to say that I really appreciate the opportunity I had to serve on the commission and as a liaison to the [Executive Order] 203 Task Force,” said Dejohnette in her post. “I am choosing not to share the specific reasons for stepping down as I do not see the benefit of doing so.”
Dejohnette was also the commission’s secretary and a member of the Re-envision Public Safety Task Force. Despite the ambiguity behind her resignation, she did make it clear that no one pressured her into making the decision.
“No one pressured me, coerced me or intimidated me into stepping down,” read her post. “Anyone who knows me knows me knows I would not put up with that for a single second. I developed a good working relationship with the mayor and the [police] chief even when we had our major differences.”
Dejohnette said that no police officers tried to intimidate her to step down either, and that “the majority of the interactions” she had with the Kingston Police Department were “friendly and very respectful.”
Also in her post, Dejohnette recognized the issues the city of Kingston is facing, naming “income inequality, lack of jobs, the housing crisis, rapid gentrification, systemic racism, Covid and lack of adequate youth programs.
“I do believe that the mayor and the [police] chief are headed in the right direction of trying to find the best way to solve this immediate crisis by trying to listen and involve the community every step of the way,” Dejohnette wrote in her post. “I don’t expect people from the outside to believe this, I wouldn’t believe these words either before I started working as a commissioner but after having to work weekly, daily and sometimes multiple times daily for the past nine months with the mayor [and] the [police] chief it’s clear to me that they are trying to learn from mistakes and do this the right way this time.”
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