American communities and police departments are contending with truly horrific events, including the questionable and, in some cases utterly unjustifiable, deaths of Black men at the hands of police, and the deaths of police at hands of disturbed assailants who claim to be exacting revenge for police killings. Is this war? I don’t believe so and I certainly hope not.
I echo President Obama’s admonition that it is incumbent on all of us, whether advocates protesting police actions or police chiefs and officers themselves, to scale back the rhetoric and weigh our words in these volatile times.
It is clear to me that officer-involved shootings, as emotionally charged as these events can be, are not the sole reason that American Blacks, and especially Black youths, are angry and aggrieved with police. Other less lethal events are also at the heart of the problem. Many Blacks believe that they are routinely stereotyped and disrespected in their encounters with police, and these indignities add up to a sense that police officers simply don’t respect them or value their lives.
On the other side of the divide, cops feel labeled and disrespected, too. Here are hardworking professionals, many of whom have served for years with skill and compassion in minority neighborhoods, contending with problems, working with victims, and—it is no exaggeration—saving lives, including many Black lives. They resent the assumption that police, as a class, are racist and abusive. Their question is: “Who is stereotyping whom?”
What can be done about this disconnect and this divide? I think there are three primary fronts where communities and police departments can move forward and make significant progress. Since Mayor de Blasio came to office in 2014, the NYPD has been concentrating its efforts in all three areas.
First, we must do everything possible to minimize, whenever practical, police use of force. The NYPD has cut police shootings by more than 90 percent in the past 45 years. Our officers became increasingly restrained in the use of firearms because they had clear policies and rules, they operated under vigorous oversight and they trained throughout their careers. But as good as the firearms policies have been, the NYPD had not developed comparable policies for other uses of force until recently.
Now we have. Our new use-of-force policy clearly defines the types and levels of force and requires full reporting, internal review and oversight at each level and in each case. There will be recurring annual training in managing and defusing confrontations, just as there is recurring training in firearms. As it did with firearms, this combination of policy, oversight and training should do much to reduce the misuse of force in police ranks.
The changes in use-of-force policy dovetail with a comprehensive remaking of the entire training regime in the NYPD. In past years, we had been
sending rookie police officers out to work in high-crime “impact zones,” without field training and without any introduction to the community and the neighborhood they were joining. They were alienated from the community right from the start. As for our veteran officers, they were given virtually no recurring training on how to manage, and when possible, deescalate confrontations on the street.
Today, new officers do six months of field training and work with more than 800 community partners who introduce them to neighborhood residents and sensitize them, as does the field training itself, to dealing with people in a way that recognizes and honors their humanity. Likewise, training for veteran officers now includes three full days of instruction in deescalating confrontations and treating people, including criminals, with respect and fairness. We are engraining the best habits in our new officers, refreshing the skills of our veteran cops and working to change whatever bad practices some may have developed in dealing with the public.
The last leg of the stool requires changing the police patrol model. A dramatic paradigm shift is necessary because officers are shaped not only by how they are trained, but also by what they do each day. Since the advent of the radio car and the 911 system, police departments have been sending most of their officers from service call to service call, without the time or the opportunity to work more closely with neighborhood residents. Much that has gone wrong with urban policing has gone wrong because of this model. The public is alienated from the cops and vice versa.
The NYPD’s Neighborhood Policing Model, now in 31 commands throughout the city, seeks to set things right. We are anchoring police officers in specific sectors, instead of sending them ping-ponging to answer calls across entire precincts. We have staffed the model with enough officers to provide “off-radio” time for the sector cops, so they can meet community members and work systematically at local problem solving.
Together with this round-the-clock team of sector officers, we have also established the post of Neighborhood Coordination Officer, assigning two NCOs to each sector within each precinct to work even more intensively with neighborhood residents on local crime and disorder problems. It’s a model for continuous police and community interaction, cooperation and communication. The neighborhood policing model has been in place in 32nd Precinct in central Harlem since September and was implemented in the 23rd Precinct along the East River in June.
Police and neighborhoods should be natural allies. We have the same fundamental interests and the same fundamental goals. By localizing police service, we can break down the barriers that have sometimes kept us at odds and move forward in truly productive partnerships, solving local problems with local residents. We can find common ground on local ground.