Harriman’s Jillian Snider makes a name for herself

From her 15 years as a New York City police officer to her present role at a Washington think tank, Harriman resident Jillian Snider is an expert in the fields of law enforcement, criminal justice, and security.

As a police officer from 2006 to 2020, Snider worked in eastern New York’s 75th Precinct as well as the 41st Precinct in Hunts Point in the Bronx. There was never a dull moment.

“At times I was an undercover prostitute in Hunts Point as part of Operation Losing Proposition, which they no longer do,” she said. “We did it in Brooklyn, too, and the idea was to keep these women safe. Many are victims of all types of abuse. I had a case once where this woman was assaulted after engaging in a transaction with a John. He paid her, then broke her collarbone and shoulder and took back his money and left her for dead on a rooftop. I arrested that guy.”

When she wasn’t undercover, she took on assignments such as anti-crime as well as the security detail during the United Nations General Assembly.

Snider said policing is different than it was when she started nearly two decades ago.

“We are more cognizant of how the community perceives us,” she said. “Law enforcement and the community used to operate in silos. Now the expectation is that the police are going to work in collaboration with the community.”

Ironically, it was an interaction with a community member that caused her and her husband, Andrew, to move to Orange County.

“A guy I’d arrested for robbery a couple of years earlier when I was working in Brooklyn came up to me on the train one day and got in my face,” Snider said when asked what brought her from Queens to Monroe 13 years ago. “I didn’t recognize him at first. At that point, my husband and I figured it was time to move out of Astoria and buy a house.”

Initially looking at houses on Long Island, the couple ended up choosing Orange County due to the open space.

“My husband wanted a sizeable property, and our realtor told us that if we wanted land we had to go north,” Snider said. “We began looking in Putnam but even then, Orange offered more acreage. Monroe was close to the highway, had eateries, places to shop and nice parks and we found a house we fell in love with, and it worked out.”

After retiring from the force in 2020, Snider was hired as policy director of Criminal Justice and Civil Liberties at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank headquartered in Washington that engages in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government.

In that role, she often finds herself meeting with lobbyists and members of Congress on public policy issues related to policing, pretrial, juvenile justice, sentencing, incarceration, and reentry.

“If I am able to fix just a few of the issues in the criminal justice system, I am going to do it and I am going to love it,” said Snider, an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who also holds a master’s in criminology from the college. “It is invigorating for me to get in front of a congressperson and explain why my organization supports or doesn’t support something. If there is legislation we support, I stress to Republicans how the legislation will promote due process of law, fiscal conservatism, and effective government. While our friends on the left might support this solely from the position of racial and economic equity, we need to recognize that our society puts a lot of effort and money into arresting people and not why these people are getting involved with the criminal justice system in the first place. The majority of criminals are survival criminals who often live off taxpayers by sitting in a jail cell, getting free medical coverage, and so on. Let’s do what we can to reintroduce them into society successfully so they can get a job.”

Due to her line of work, Snider is often a guest in state and national media outlets.

“Because of my experience as a cop and because I write commentary pieces on important things, I will often get called on by the media,” she said. “A recent example is after the attempted assassination of President Trump, I got called by NBC, MNBC, FOX, NY1 and Spectrum News to give my expert opinion on where the deployment failures were or where the tactics seemingly did not go as planned.”

Two years ago, Snider and her husband sold their house in Monroe and moved to Harriman. Though she loves what she is doing now, once her husband retires from the force in a few months, Snider plans on moving to Florida. But not to retire.

“I plan to run for office of some sort once we are permanently settled in southwest Florida,” she said. “I have had a place there since 2013 near family and tons of golf courses for my husband. I will take the political landscape into consideration before I make that judgement call. I have contemplated running for a local position to get my feet wet first.”