On May 25th of 2020, George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department, and on June 12th Governor Cuomo of New York signed Executive Order 203 which required all police departments in the state to reimagine their policing programs. These two scenarios catalyzed protests and opened institutional avenues for police reform at the city level. This dissertation focuses on these processes of activism and police reform in three small cities in upstate New York: Ithaca, Binghamton, and Poughkeepsie. Specifically, the focus is on group formation, tactical choice, and the policy process in each city. To investigate these processes, interviews were conducted with local activists and an event catalog of notable events was created. The results show that each of these processes are rather similar across these cities, with new groups forming around collective identities, tactical choices being determined by organizations and their ties to the political elite, and Executive Order 203 structuring the policy process in a manner that resulted in similar minute reforms in each city. Overall, the results point to common processes within police reform activism in New York during this time of heightened salience around racial injustice in policing.