It’s almost like a regular police presence in the park might work. I know, crazy idea.

Community Relations Coordinator, this is an issue we’ve asked for help with for years, to no avail.

Skateboarding was legalized in downtown in 2022. However, it’s still against the law to ride on any publicly owned monument, sculpture, or other statuary.

This is not rocket science everything to enforce & prosecute these crimes is posted online.

You are absolutely right, Derek. And the soldier and sailor monument is posted with the no skateboard sign, on top of it. There are still sometimes a dozen people doing stunts on The Monuments slamming down skateboards from relatively high jumps over and over on historic marble. It's very damaging and when other skateboarders see that there is no consequence, they come there as well. Word has to get out that this is not allowed and that only happens with education and enforcement.

Thank you for using this application to report an issue to the City of Albany. For incidents of this nature, please dial (518) 438-4000 immediately when the issue is in progress. Choose South Station if you are closer to downtown, and choose Center Station if you are closer to uptown. This will allow the Albany Police Department to better serve you by dispatching officers to address the situation. If this is an emergency, please dial 9-1-1.

APD dispatch is hit or miss, depending on what’s burning down in the city. I called last week for a burglary in motion and couldn’t get officers to come due to bandwidth issues.

APD will not come for a non-violent / or non-drug-related offense in the park.

Shouldn’t this be assigned to the NEU officers running Beat 4 versus giving residents a generic response?

I haven’t called this in to APD in more than a year because the last few times I talked to officers about it they claimed to not know the law because the common council had changed it and they didn’t know anymore if it was illegal to skate on monuments. When I cited the law, they said because there was no stated penalty or citation they could give, they couldn’t do anything. I don’t think this is entirely true. I think it’s the result of the more hands-off approach they’re taking, at least to the sixth ward and its environs. I know they’re short staffed. But it’s also just a symptom of a different policing culture. Many officers are resentful of the defund the police movement and their take is “You don’t like how we do things? Then you’re getting no help from us.” I’m not guessing this is true. It IS true. So there’s a slew of factors at work here.

In the scope of things, skaters on the monument and other pieces of public decorative hard scape seems like a small issue. But for anyone who’s paying attention and isn’t an outright cynic, they know it’s destructive, dangerous, annoying, and allowing it means feeding toxic individualism of the few at expense of the rest of us. If the City enforced this small, sensible measure it’d go a long way toward building confidence in the place.

No one is watching comments once it’s closed as far as I can tell and they made it so we can’t reopen bec…well you know.