Albany police officer, a Maginn grad, connects with social justice class

Sadaka Kitonyi grew up in Albany’s South End. He describes himself as not a bad kid, but someone who would often find himself getting into trouble. Like many of his peers, he didn’t like the police. He said he was targeted because of his skin color, whether it be in the park or walking back home from a restaurant. Sounds of guns being pulled and screams of “Get on the ground!” still echo in his memories.

As an alumnus of Bishop Maginn High School, Kitonyi — now an Albany police officer — presented his story to seniors during their social justice course last year. Sue Silverstein-Gilligan, Maginn’s director of Campus Ministry and Community Service, taught both Kitonyi and his older brother, Zinab, and contacted Kitonyi after reviewing her students’ answers to questions about their attitude toward the police. She hoped to shift the students’ overall outlook on law enforcement by hearing Kitonyi’s unique perspective. This year, Silverstein-Gilligan has facilitated lively discussions surrounding unequal health care, the presidential election, the gravity of the riots at the U.S. Capitol and unequal vaccine distributions. The class meets every day of the week and speaks to the need, Silverstein-Gilligan said, for the students to become informed on social-justice issues. 

This is the story about the day Kitonyi shared his experiences with the class.

A SON OF IMMIGRANTS
Kitonyi’s experience growing up in Albany mirrors the current situation of many Maginn students. He is the son of first-generation immigrants; his father coming from Kenya and his mother from the Philippines. While he didn’t wear new Air Jordan basketball shoes like his peers and spent his upbringing sharing a bedroom with his brother, he said it was more than his cousins had.

“They had nothing still. We had enough to get by, but we weren’t entitled. We didn’t have s many opportunities — the color of my skin goes a long way and plays a part in the story I’m telling you,” Kitonyi tells the students.

In high school, as Silverstein-Gilligan prefaced the discussion, he was “a good kid, but let’s just say he didn’t wear a halo.” Trying to follow in his brother’s footsteps — who was the captain of the football and basketball teams — Kitonyi grew tired of getting hit in the cold weather. He wanted to be an individual and that’s when he started messing up.

Sophomore year he quit playing sports and “wanted to hang with the Albany High cats.” He recalls experimenting with drugs and attending house parties. Junior year, he veered back into sports in hopes of getting a college scholarship. He said three of his white friends who applied to SUNY Oneonta just like him, got accepted while he was denied. Kitonyi’s father, Dr. Peter Kitonyi, attended that same university and was friends with the head of the university’s Equal Opportunities Program (EOP). This would be the way for Kitonyi to finally get away from Albany and start anew.
“If I stay here, I’m going to end up in prison like ...” Kitonyi pauses. “One of my boys just got out. He did 14 years; he got out two weeks ago.”
He was an accomplice to a robbery that went bad when the man getting robbed shot and killed his partner in Schenectady. Since Kitonyi's friend had been in and out of the system that year, according to Kitonyi, the judge saw it as a slap in the face. He knew if he continued on the same path, he would end up in prison, or worse, dead.

As he recounts this story, he makes it clear to the class: “Make mistakes, but not mistakes that will ruin your life.”

A CATALYST FOR CHANGE
Throughout every turbulent moment, Kitonyi tells the class that his mother always stood by his side. When he got kicked out of his dorm room freshman year, his father said he wasn’t going to fund his tuition anymore. His mother, however, agreed to pay for both his tuition and apartment, so long as the two split the loan.

“And when I went there, the only thing she said to me was: ‘Sadaka, I know you’ve been having a rough couple of years, just I ask you don’t get arrested,’ ” Kitonyi said.

The first day of class, however, he got arrested for fighting. He remembers everyone in the group participating, except everyone else was white while he was the only one who got arrested.

“I wasn’t doing much, you know how people talk, talk, talk,” Kitonyi said, “A cop came up right behind me and grabbed me, boom! Slammed me right on the cop car. I was scared to death.”

Then, during his first semester in Oneonta, he got a girl pregnant.

“So, I was 20, changing diapers before I could get into a bar,” Kitonyi said.

His daughter served as a catalyst for change. He dropped out of college, needed money and he needed to get it in a way that wouldn’t jeopardize his life and his daughter’s future.

When Kitonyi’s brother, a veteran of the Iraq War and an Albany police officer, suggested he apply to the force, he was more than reluctant. Kitonyi retells getting put down at gunpoint by officers while he was walking to a bar with his friend one night. He followed their instructions and got handcuffed. Later those officers would discover who Kitonyi’s brother was, resulting in his supervisor taking care of the mix up. The situation only heightened Kitonyi’s resentment of the police. Besides his own experiences with cops, Kitonyi thought the risk wasn’t worth the reward. It was a dangerous job.

About a year later, he relented and applied. To his surprise, he passed each interview. In 2005, he became a police officer, something he says felt undeserved.

PEACE AND PROGRESS
Today, Kitonyi says he takes on the approach of community policing using his self-made “PEACE” theory, which stands for: Protection, Equal Assistance, using Compassion and Empathy.

“That’s basically a way of policing saying we’ve gotten so far away from being servants that now cops show up and think they’re in charge,” Kitonyi said. “(By) saying, ‘I’m in charge, you’re going to do what I say, and if you don’t I’m going to make you do what I say’ ...  that’s how cops are accidentally shooting people, that’s how they’re brutalizing people, because they take their pride into this job. And this is not a job to take your pride into.”

Last year, an external audit of the Albany Police Department, in compliance with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s executive order mandating police department reviews, found Black residents are much more likely to be arrested than white residents. Though less than a third of Albany residents are Black, they comprised 64 percent of all arrests from 2015-19.

As Kitonyi begins to wrap up his story, he asks the class their opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement. As a few students begin to chime in, the classroom soon erupts into a sea of voices. Many say they believe the movement may have cultural significance but has yielded little policy reform. Many see it as a false sense of progress.

“I get the frustration and anything that has built this country, has been built on violence.” said Kitonyi, who during the unrest last summer penned an emotional Facebook post about his life as an officer of color.  “But we’re not in a country that’s being developed anymore.”

Many nodded their heads in agreement. Condemning racist practices is easy; thinking how to solve them through policy changes is hard. Like many, Kitonyi knows there needs to be a plan of action to make the leap from protests to policy reform.

“Now if you gave me a plan, and said abolish the police and we’re going to do this, this, a,b, and c, and you convinced me — I’d be like, ‘There you go, that’s a good idea’ — because I’m here to do what the people need,” Kitonyi said.

Kitonyi believes focusing on police officers’ mental health could be one solution. If something makes you angry before you get to school, you might stay angry throughout the day, Kitonyi told the students. The same thing applies to police officers when dealing with the public. Mandated 16-hour shifts should be replaced with officers getting more time off, Kitonyi said, as well as better pay to compensate for the risk they take when on the job.

“How effective of an employee can you be when someone else is stressed and you’re messed up in your head?” Kitonyi asked.

He also firmly believes training should be at least four years long.

“We respond to mental health crises, we respond to someone who has a broken pipe, we respond to a dead raccoon, we respond to a homicide, we respond to a domestic call,” Kitonyi said.

Nearing the end of his talk, when he looks at the students, he explains that their generation will be the vehicle for change. He initially uses his friend from Albany High School who became a nuclear physicist as an example, then talks about his father.

“All it takes is one generation. Be that person that breaks the chain,” Kitonyi said. “My father left Kenya during a civil war, and walked right into a civil rights movement here. He got his doctorate in education. He became a doctor (but started) writing his name in dirt with his finger, naked. So, if it wasn’t for him, I’d be running around naked in Kenya too probably.

“I try to use my unique perspective to do this job a unique way. So, step out of your comfort level no matter what you do in life, I’m telling you you’re going to be very successful. Anybody successful has always steered way out of their comfort zone to get to where they’re at.”