Aliya Schneider is reporting for Columbia-Greene Media former Hudson police officer Shane C. Bower has been appointed police commissioner by Mayor Kamal Johnson. Bower replaces Peter Volkmann, who resigned September 19. Johnson said he has know Bower a long time. “[a]nd he was a trusted officer who always engaged the public and always ventured into areas and interacted with the people that most are not always likely to do.” Bower, 48, worked for the Ulster and Chatham police departments from 1990 until 2001, when he joined the Hudson Police Department. He retired as a patrol sergeant in November 2019. Bower said he is happy to be part of the department again. Bower comes to the role of commissioner with a five-goal plan for the department including finding ways to improve morale within the police department; working with the city to cut department costs; developing departmental training including defensive tactics, de-escalation techniques and revamping cultural diversity training; improving community relations; and community education about what the police do and the reasons they do it. Bower opposes any plan for the HPD that would include a reduction in personnel. He said he is currently reviewing the recently submitted "Hudson Breathe Act," now under consideration by the Hudson Common Council. He said Hudson lacks the problems the measure would address. “The problems that they are bringing here are not here,” Bower said. “...We are not Minnesota. We are not these agencies that have these problems. You look at the track record of the police department, these things don’t happen. Are there personal complaints? Absolutely. Not everybody’s going to approve of or get along with what an officer does. But we don’t have the type of, I guess, overall systematic issues that a lot of other departments have. We’re a small agency that most everybody polices each other.” Read the full story at HudsonValley360 [dot] com.