Our police officers deserve better

GFPD works in a dungeon

I looked around during a recent visit to the Glens Falls police station — at the brick walls and the brownish linoleum tile floors, peeling in places. 

I glanced at a metal ring jutting from the wall in the corner, next to a fold-down metal seat. A pair of handcuffs for holding detainees dangled from the ring.

“It’s medieval in here,” I said.

One of the officers snorted.

“Yes it is.”

The city police headquarters has the advantage of appearing to be a prison, so people being arrested get a taste of what awaits them if they don’t straighten themselves up.

But what about the working environment for our officers? I spent about 35 years in newsrooms at small papers, which, as physical places, ranged from dirty and malodorous to chilly and soulless. But none was as uncomfortable and unwelcoming as the offices for the Glens Falls Police Department.

Describing it as a dungeon is accurate.

“Every person in Glens Falls should take a tour of this station,” I said to the officers, and they laughed in agreement.

The “offices” our detectives and patrol officers inhabit are small brick rooms, painted yellow, that open off a narrow hallway. The ugly old metal desks and desk chairs appear to have been shoved in haphazardly, two to a room, however they’ll fit.

The desktop computers look anachronistic in that setting. If you were making a  post-apocalyptic movie about officers huddled in the basement rooms of an old industrial building, making forays to the surface to battle mutant squids, this would be a good place to film it.

As a small city with a small tax base, Glens Falls has a to-do list many times longer than it can afford. As a Glens Falls taxpayer, I want the city to be frugal.

But City Hall — the whole building is decrepit — should be at the top of the list. How can we celebrate the state of our city when the state of City Hall is sad and rundown?

It’s easy to overlook the plight of city officers, since most of us have no reason to venture through the locked door below street level next to the City Hall parking lot.

But Glens Falls residents have made clear over the years that we want our own police force, and we want it located downtown. But this basement with paint on the walls isn’t good enough. 

Police officers are like doctors — you can go for decades without interacting with them in any serious way, but when you need them, you thank heaven they’re available.

Glens Falls is growing, and downtown is on the verge of a surge in population and prosperity. As apartments are built and businesses come in, the tax base will expand. A better police station should be at the top of our shopping list.

This is not a medieval dungeon, but the corner of one of the offices where Glens Falls Police officers work.

Confused

Drag queen story hours aren’t sexual, and they don’t sexualize kids. As part of the fight over allowing such events at the Rockwell Falls Library in Lake Luzerne, Josh Jacquard, a library trustee, said recently he was elected by the community to prevent the sexualization of children. What sexualization? Can Mr. Jacquard detail exactly what he is talking about?

I see sexualization of children all over the place — in kids’ beauty pageants, where little girls dress and dance in imitation of provocative performances by adults; in children’s clothes stamped with sexually suggestive words or phrases; and in their access to sexual material through phones.

I don’t see it in the reading of children’s stories about diversity and acceptance by a man dressed up as a woman.

What, exactly, is offensive about drag shows? For decades, they have been part of community entertainments. What has changed?