May 7, 2015
Current Events
In a program community leaders hope will become popular nationwide, members of the NYPD just completed an inaugural 3-day course aimed at discouraging verbal abuse and needless physical force. The course delivered a strict but simple message to each of the department’s 35,000 officers: keep cool!
During a mock traffic stop exercise, 2 New York City cops approached a gray sedan with a suspected drunken driver slumped over the wheel. They asked him to get out of the car, but the suspect cursed and screamed at the officers and refused to cooperate or be handcuffed. However, even as the man’s temper rose, the officers kept in complete control, explaining why they needed to take him downtown. Eventually, the man calmed down and gave up.
Of course the scenario was fake. The suspected drunken driver was a fellow officer and the street scene was a set built in a Hollywood-style sound stage. It was all part of massive, across-the-board retraining ordered for the nation’s largest police force following last year’s death of Eric Garner at the hands of police.
The course, which will be ongoing, proved that cynicism, condescension and complacency are a formula for escalating emotions that can put both civilians and officers at risk. As one instructor put it during a classroom session, “Once you put your hands on someone, you can’t go back.”
“I’ve realized that if I try to meet his tone with my tone, it doesn’t get better,” Detective Leonardo Pino said after completing the course.
Current Events
“We want to talk people into their cuffs,” said Lt. Suzanne St. Jacques, NYPD commanding officer for physical training and tactics. “We want to talk them down into compliance, de-escalate the situation. … The emphasis right now is the talk down before the takedown.”
“People will goad you. People will say things to you,” added First Deputy Police Commissioner Benjamin B. Tucker, who oversees the police academy. “Face it — not everybody loves a cop. But even when they don’t like you, you have a responsibility to respect them and leave them with their dignity even as you do your job.”
Over the initial 3 days at the department’s new $750 million police academy, officers started in the classroom with instruction on verbal techniques for calming down a combative suspect. The course emphasized the human side of the job, reminding officers that policing is about helping people. An entire day was then spent in a gymnasium where instructors taught the latest tactics for taking down uncooperative suspects without putting pressure on the neck or chest. Soon, the academy will be able to introduce more role-playing exercises, like the one with the drunken driver, by utilizing elaborate sets made to look like a grocery store, a subway station or a street scene.
“A lot of times officers can forget why they came on the job, what brought them to this profession to begin with,” said academy commander, Lt. Bobby Lorne Sheppard. “It’s a very noble profession.”
The training program is part of a concerted effort by Police Commissioner William Bratton to mend the NYPD’s relationship with minority communities frayed by recent events as well as the previous administration’s widespread use of street stops — mainly of young men of color — as a tool to deter crime. Stay tuned to see if the program actually changes the mentality of some police officers and creates a real difference within the community.
