A Reform in Police Culture

[Jiro]

Use of deadly force by police disappears on Richmond streets

RICHMOND -- Two cops sprinted up the stairs of a ramshackle downtown apartment building, then set eyes on two men at the end of a narrow hall.

Officer Matt Stonebraker rushed in first, scuffling briefly with one man while the other raised his hands in surrender. Moments later, after a whirlwind of thrashing limbs, the suspect was cuffed and choked up a golf ball-sized plastic bag of rock cocaine.

In this 2011 episode, the police officers never unholstered their guns.

A spate of high-profile police shootings nationwide, most notably the killing of a black teen in Ferguson, Missouri, has stoked intense scrutiny of deadly force by officers and driven a series of demonstrations across the nation and the Bay Area. But in Richmond, historically one of the most violent cities in the Bay Area, the Police Department has averaged fewer than one officer-involved shooting per year since 2008, and no one has been killed by a cop since 2007.

That track record stands in sharp contrast to many other law enforcement agencies in the region, according to a review of data compiled from individual departments.

Many observers and police officials attribute Richmond's relatively low rate of deadly force to reforms initiated under Chief Chris Magnus, who took over a troubled department in this city of 106,000 in 2006. Magnus implemented a variety of programs to reduce the use of lethal force, including special training courses, improved staffing deployments to crisis situations, thorough reviews of all uses of force and equipping officers with nonlethal weapons such as Tasers and pepper spray.

"Our officers are used to dealing with individuals who are dangerous and, often, armed," Magnus said. "It's not an aberration -- the scary and challenging is routine -- and I think that gives them the familiarity to know what level of force to apply."

In Oakland, population 400,000, 33 people were shot by police from 2008 to 2013, 20 of them fatally. In San Pablo, which borders Richmond but is less than one-third its size, four people were shot by police, two fatally.

In the jurisdiction of cities and unincorporated areas that hire the Contra Costa Sheriff's Office to patrol their streets, deputies shot and killed nine people and wounded six others during that period. Antioch had seven fatal shootings, and six people were wounded by officers. Concord police shot two people dead, and five total.

Perhaps most striking, while Richmond police have not killed anyone, other agencies have shot four suspects, killing two, while working special operations in the city since 2008. While anecdotes of suspects dying in a hail of police gunfire have been reported across the country -- the teen in Ferguson was struck six times -- the four people shot by Richmond police since 2008 were hit with a total of five bullets, and all survived.

"In training, we stress accuracy and accountability," said Lt. Louie Tirona, Richmond's lead firearms and tactics instructor. "We tell our cops from the get-go, 'Every bullet has your name on it.'"

Magnus emphasizes that policing walks a fine line between restraint and safety for the officers and the community.

"Some of this is a little bit of luck," Magnus said. "There are times when deadly force is the only choice."

More important than luck, said law enforcement expert Tom Nolan, is the culture within a department. If a chief has sent a clear message that instances of deadly force will be scrutinized, you can expect more officers to think twice before firing a weapon, or employ less-lethal means when apprehending a suspect, he said.

"The chief is key in setting policy and tone," said Nolan, who worked for 27 years as a cop in Boston and now directs graduate programs in criminology at Merrimack College in Massachusetts. "If they haven't had an officer-involved shooting that's resulted in death in a city like that, it's commendable."

Christopher Boyd, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, said a range of factors determines whether officers must use deadly force and that most of them lie with the behavior of the people being shot. But, Boyd said, the question of culture and leadership in a given department is an important one.

"Yes, department leadership culture plays a role in use of force," Boyd said. "It's a factor in setting policy, implementing cutting-edge training and establishing tone and culture. But I must be clear that just because a community has its share of officer-involved shootings does not mean there is poor leadership."

While police across jurisdictions have fairly uniform policies enabling them to use force when they deem there is a risk to themselves or the public, Tirona says the difference in Richmond includes the rigor of training, the emphasis on communication with armed suspects, the thorough review of all force used and the philosophy that force must only be a last resort.

Richmond officers undergo firearm training monthly and role-playing scenarios for disarming suspects four times a year, a higher average than many other departments, Nolan said. The role-playing exercises, in which officers bark commands while holding their guns and make split-second decisions when confronted by armed residents, began in 2008, the same time that officer-involved shootings in the department plummeted. Richmond cops shot five people, one fatally, in 2006-07.

Since then, violent crime in the city has plunged, no officers have been shot, and no suspects have been killed by officers' bullets.

Magnus has done something in Richmond that he believes is not done enough in other departments: He's been willing to second-guess the deadly force used by other cops.

"We use a case study approach to different incidents that happen in different places. When there is a questionable use-of-force incident somewhere else, we study it and have a lot of dialogue," Magnus said. "It's a model that is used in a range of other professions, but in some police circles, it's seen as judging in hindsight and frowned on. In my mind, that attitude is counterproductive."

Richmond's robust police force has also enabled Magnus to implement programs and training that are difficult, if not impossible, to replicate in departments that have been ravaged by budget cuts. In Antioch, roughly the same size as Richmond, the Police Department is down to 90 officers, less than half of Richmond's, from a high of 126 in 2007, said Capt. Leonard Orman. Use-of-force training was at the state minimum of once per year until recently, he said.

Still, Orman said there was no evidence that any of the seven fatal officer-involved shootings in the city since 2008 resulted from low staffing or less training. "They were all good shoots," Orman said.

In Concord, officers train on the use of force twice a year, and an in-house committee reviews all instances of force, including deadly force, said Sgt. John Nunes, who oversees the department's training courses. Nunes said no department is immune from potential deadly force scenarios.

"We give officers a spectrum of tools, but if it's going to happen, it's going to happen," Nunes said. "But nobody wants it to happen."

Richmond police Lt. Shawn Pickett says Magnus changed the department from one that focused on "impact teams" of officers who roamed rough neighborhoods looking to make arrests to one that required all officers to adopt a "community policing" model, which emphasizes relationship building.

"We had generations of families raised to hate and fear the Richmond police, and a lot of that was the result of our style of policing in the past," Pickett said. "It took us a long time to turn that around, and we're seeing the fruits of that now. There is a mutual respect now, and some mutual compassion."

 

[Jiro]

I know this post is long but this is very important to read in order to understand the deeper underlying issue of what's really going on within NYPD and the community.

to summarize - in the old days, NYC was considered as one of the most dangerous cities. Every trip to NYC was scary. I know because I've been going to NYC since 1980's. Everything about NYC was scary and it was exactly as what you saw in old movies - Harlem, crack addicts/dealers everywhere, muggings and rapes were rampant, police officers were corrupted and easily bribed, Times Square was not the Times Square you see now... it was a major area for prostitutions, drugs, and killings. Police did not respond to shooting until hours later. Most 911 calls were ignored because officers were afraid or didn't care. NYC was the lost cause.

To change everything, Mayor Rudy Giuliani came in and freed the city from organized crimes and cleaned up NYPD. Police Commissioner William Bratton instituted a "Broken Window Theory" policy - an aggressive police enforcement of low-level offenses. This policy was very controversial and it did work but it came with a heavy price... a deep distrust within low-income communities and minorities and police brutalities. The city got cleaned up and rid of garbages.

and then in 2000's came Mayor Bloomberg. Mayor Bloomberg made NYC wealthier and safer. Bratton continued his "Broken Window Theory" policy and instituted a new Stop-And-Frisk policy. The stories were becoming more and more common about police brutalities, people of colors being harassed on regular basis, and lack of leadership enforcement on curbing police officers' aggressive/bad behaviors.

what happened to Eric Garner was the tipping point. The public is screaming - "Enough is enough!". Everything has a time limit. Bratton's "Broken Window Theory" policy and "Stop and Frisk" policy have served their purposes and firm hand was needed to deal with a heavily crime-infested dangerous city. But now, the city is cleaned up and it's much safer than ever. A new policy is needed to keep the city that way. That is where Mayor de Blasio comes in. de Blasio Administration's main focus is people's Constitutional rights and civil rights.... those rights were frequently ignored and violated by previous mayors - Giuliani and Bloomberg.

Every new reform is always met with resistance and this is what we're seeing now.

A Widening Rift Between de Blasio and the New York City Police Is Savagely Ripped Open

At the helm of a grieving New York, still raw from weeks of protests amid a national reckoning over law enforcement and race, Mr. de Blasio faces his biggest test yet.

The mayor, who does not attend church regularly, did not speak publicly on Sunday. His administration said he hoped to convey, in subdued terms, the need for unity in the city.

Yet on the heels of the police deaths, the long-simmering tensions between Mr. de Blasio and the department he has pledged to reshape have reached an extraordinary nadir. Officers, led by union leaders, turned their backs on the mayor and Commissioner William J. Bratton on Saturday night as the two walked through a hospital to address the public about the deaths.

Since Mr. de Blasio’s crusade on the campaign trail against what he viewed as overreaching by the police in the Bloomberg administration, those close to the mayor have professed that securing the trust of officers was an essential, complicated task.

And for much of the department, it seems, he has fallen far short.

“This is a nightmare of the highest magnitude for everyone,” said Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association. Leaders at City Hall, he added, “need to dig down deep in their souls and understand that campaigning to be a leader is easier than being a leader.”

Protesters have filled the streets nearly every night in the more than two weeks since a grand jury declined to bring criminal charges in the police chokehold case of Eric Garner. Many of them have chafed at the mayor’s defense of “broken windows” theory of policing, the aggressive enforcement of low-level offenses, which Mr. Bratton has championed. (Officers approached Mr. Garner in July over the sale of loose cigarettes.)

The protests, which have been predominantly peaceful but have overtaken bridges and city streets, inspired union accusations that Mr. de Blasio had placed too high a priority on protecting the rights of the demonstrators. (He met on Friday with one of the protest groups, Justice League NYC.)

“Our police are here to protect us, and we honor that,” the mayor said then, invoking his biracial son, Dante. “And at the same time, there’s a history we have to overcome, because for so many of our young people, there’s a fear.”

Allies heard a mayor making good on a central campaign pledge: to salve the wounds of residents who had come to distrust the police.

Many critics, though, trace the roots of department angst to the election last year. In an interview on ABC on Sunday, Mr. Bratton’s predecessor as commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, echoed a familiar refrain of the mayor’s skeptics: that he had run an “antipolice campaign.”

Mr. Bratton, in the interview on Friday, disputed this notion, arguing that Mr. de Blasio had in fact campaigned against the zealous use of stop-and-frisk tactics, not against those in the department.

“He didn’t run against the Police Department,” Mr. Bratton said. “He ran against practices of the Police Department.”

Once in office, during another year of decreased crime, Mr. de Blasio pushed for retraining programs for officers and a loosening of penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Even ostensibly minor issues, like the use of profanity by officers, have been broached.

At the same time, Mr. de Blasio said in an interview on Friday, he is mindful that keeping the peace in the city is his “foundational” obligation. After Mr. Garner’s death in July, the mayor had staff members research past episodes of police violence in the city, like the cases of Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo, to see how the city navigated the aftermath.

Mr. de Blasio has also examined the 1991 riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in internal discussions.

Yet in the interview on Friday, less than a day before the shootings, the mayor spoke hopefully of his efforts to win officers over, predicting that the “vast majority of officers” would eventually line up behind his proposed changes.

“The transitional process is always tense and difficult,” the mayor said. “But I think we’re going somewhere.”

 

[Jiro]

what a tragedy.... I'm sympathizing with them... looks like the real change is finally coming...

At Home and at Work, Black Police Officers Are on Defensive

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Dennis Shireff, a nearly 30-year police veteran, has never been shy about speaking out against what he saw as brutality and racism among his peers. While serving with the St. Louis police, he was even suspended for saying that the department recruited too many “Billy Bob, tobacco-chewing white police officers.”

So after the high-profile killings of unarmed black men by white police officers in Ferguson, Mo.; New York; and elsewhere, Officer Shireff, who now works for a small department outside St. Louis, feels the tug of conflicting loyalties: to black people who feel unfairly targeted by the police, and to his fellow police officers, white and black, who routinely face dangerous situations requiring split-second life-or-death decisions.

Now, with the recent murders of two New York City police officers by a man who claimed to be taking vengeance for the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner on Staten Island, his allegiances feel more divided than ever.

“With us being black officers, we get a double punishment because we feel the brunt of what happens to a police officer,” Officer Shireff, 52, said. “At the same time, it’s equally hard for us when we see a young African-American is killed at the hands of a policeman.”

At times they find themselves defending police procedures to fellow blacks who see them as foot soldiers from an oppressive force. At other times, they find themselves serving as the voice of black people in their station houses, trying to explain to white colleagues the animosity many blacks feel toward law enforcement. Life for black officers, many say, has long been a delicate balancing act.

But in departments across the country, black officers say that act has become much harder after a season of intense protests against police shootings, followed by the killing of the New York officers. What are black officers who support the sentiments of antibrutality protests supposed to say to colleagues who blame the deaths of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in New York on those very same protests?

“Everyone’s almost pretty much walking on eggshells,” said Sgt. Darren R. Wilson, who is the president of a union that represents mostly black officers in St. Louis, and who shares the name of the white officer who shot Mr. Brown in Ferguson. “What’s going on in the community today? How are we going to act and respond to it? What’s proper? What’s improper?”

Nowhere is that tension more palpable for black officers than in New York. Detective Yuseff Hamm, who wanted to be a police officer since he was a child in Harlem, said he initially could sympathize with people protesting the killing of Mr. Garner, who died after an officer placed him in a chokehold in July.

But the ambush killing of the two officers on Saturday changed his view. “In the beginning you could understand it,” said the detective, who is also president of the Guardians, a fraternal organization of black New York City officers. “But now, actively threatening to hurt a law enforcement officer and actually carrying it out — we’re in a difficult time right now.”

Detective Hamm said the members of his group are often viewed as “troublemakers.” But since the killings, he said he has felt greater solidarity with fellow officers of all colors. “Every police officer looked at that and said, ‘That could have been me,’ ” he said.

And since Saturday, the protests against the police have taken on a more menacing cast in his mind. “Are they protesting for change, or is it just an opportunity to harm another police officer?” he said. “It’s really getting out of hand.”

Many police departments say their efforts to recruit black officers have been hampered by hostility toward law enforcement. The New York Police Department, for instance, despite being one of the most diverse in the world, has seen the proportion of black recruits in its police academy classes fall amid growing attention to aggressive tactics in minority neighborhoods: to 13 percent in July, from 18 percent in 2003.

In St. Louis, black officers have complained that they have not been afforded the same opportunities for promotion as their white counterparts, and six black sergeants filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Wednesday, saying the promotions test was unfair by relying mostly on subjective criteria.

Sgt. Harry Dilworth, one of just four black officers on the 53-member Ferguson force, said he has been surprised by the level of vitriol he has faced from black people after the shooting of Mr. Brown in August.

On one occasion, when one protester asked him, “Why are you killing us?” Sergeant Dilworth, 45, responded by listing three names. He asked the demonstrator if he knew those people. The protester did not. So Sergeant Dilworth explained that they were the names of black men who had recently been killed in St. Louis by other blacks.

“We’re not killing you; you’re killing yourselves,” Sergeant Dilworth said he told the man.

At the same time, being black has also helped him to command more respect among protesters than some of his white colleagues, Sergeant Dilworth said.

During one demonstration, protesters were upset that the officers were standing before them at an angle, as if they were preparing to draw their weapons. That was a stance that officers had been trained to take, Sergeant Dilworth said, but he told them not to do it because it seemed overly aggressive to the protesters.

Debates over the tensions often follow black officers home. One officer from Brooklyn said that talking about her job with her mother and sister had led to arguments. “They think they murdered him,” she said, speaking of the officers involved in the death of Mr. Garner. She has mostly stopped discussing her work with her family, she said.

A 39-year-old black officer who grew up in Harlem said his background helped him differentiate between criminal and noncriminal behavior in minority communities better than colleagues raised in white suburbs.

But his police work has also given him a perspective that is not necessarily popular among his black family and friends. For instance, he sides with the officers who were trying to arrest Mr. Garner when he died.

“Why don’t you just put your hands behind your back,” he said, referring to Mr. Garner. “You know the drill.” He added, “You get in fights with friends, for sure.”

Both New York officers requested anonymity to avoid possible repercussions, either at home or at work.

Over Thanksgiving, Sgt. Damon Hayes of the Kansas City Police Department said his mother became very emotional when the conversation turned to recent police killings. How could a police officer be scared of an 18-year-old, she asked?

“They’re all murderers,” she said, according to Sergeant Hayes, 50.

He tried to calm her down, explaining, “We don’t wake up in the morning hoping to murder somebody.” But, he added: “She was not hearing anything that I said. She was angry at that point.”

Yet he has also found himself looking for ways to help white officers understand the communities they patrol.

As demonstrations in Ferguson gave way to looting and rioting, one white colleague asked him what he thought about the violence.

“I think it’s really sad that business owners are losing their businesses and people feel so hopeless that they think the answer is to vent their anger, and it turns to wrath and they burn and steal,” Sergeant Hayes said he told the officer.

When the officer followed up by asking if all black people felt angry that a grand jury did not indict Darren Wilson, the white officer who killed Mr. Brown, Sergeant Hayes’s response surprised him.

“Well, the black part of me doesn’t,” Sergeant Hayes said he responded. He said he did not feel the evidence warranted an indictment.

Yet black officers say they are sometimes at a loss to navigate the racial divides inside their own station houses.

A few days after the announcement of the grand jury’s decision in the Brown case, Sergeant Darren R. Wilson said he was getting ready with other officers to begin their patrols in St. Louis when an unexpected visitor arrived.

It was Jeff Roorda, the head of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, a group that Sergeant Wilson has not always agreed with. Sergeant Wilson is the president of the Ethical Society of Police, a separate labor organization made up mostly of black officers.

Mr. Roorda told the group that the white Officer Wilson wanted to thank them for their support during the investigation of the Michael Brown shooting.

Sergeant Wilson stood silent and slack-jawed. Mr. Roorda spoke as if we were working for Officer Wilson, the sergeant said. “We were working to keep the community safe.”

Other black officers in the room had similar blank expressions, Sergeant Wilson recalled, and stared at him. He felt as though they were asking him, “How are you going to respond?” Sergeant Wilson said.

“Are you going to just let this character stand up and humiliate us like this?” he said. “I felt helpless.”

 

[Jiro]

Surprising Speech by F.B.I. Chief Focuses on Police and Race

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, on Thursday delivered an unusually frank speech about the relationship between the police and black people, saying that officers who work in neighborhoods where blacks commit crimes at higher rates develop a cynicism that shades their attitudes about race.

He said that officers — whether they are white or any other race — who are confronted with white men on one side of the street and black men on the other do not view them the same way. The officers develop a mental shortcut that “becomes almost irresistible and maybe even rational by some lights” because of the number of black suspects they have arrested.

“We need to come to grips with the fact that this behavior complicates the relationship between police and the communities they serve,” Mr. Comey said in the speech, at Georgetown University.

While officers should be closely scrutinized, he said, they are “not the root cause of problems in our hardest-hit neighborhoods,” where blacks grow up “in environments lacking role models, adequate education and decent employment.”

“They lack all sorts of opportunities that most of us take for granted,” Mr. Comey said.

Mr. Comey’s speech was unprecedented for an F.B.I. director. Previous directors have limited their public comments about race to civil rights investigations, like those of murders committed by the Ku Klux Klan and how the bureau wiretapped the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The surveillance of Dr. King is considered one of the F.B.I.’s greatest overreaches of power. Mr. Comey, who has led the F.B.I. for about 18 months, has said that as part of his job, he wants to foster a national debate about law enforcement issues that state and local authorities across the country are facing.

He said that he decided to give the speech because he felt that in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., the country had not “had a healthy dialogue,” and that he did not “want to see those important issues drift away.”

One remedy, Mr. Comey said, would be for the police to have more interactions with those they are charged to protect. “It’s hard to hate up close,” he said.

Mr. Comey said there was significant research that says all people have unconscious racial biases. Although people cannot help their instinctive reactions, law enforcement needs “to design systems and processes to overcome that very human part of us all,” he said.

“Although the research may be unsettling, what we do next is what matters most,” Mr. Comey said.

He said that law enforcement agencies across the country needed to be compelled to report shootings that involve police officers so there can be a baseline to measure the issue.

“It’s ridiculous that I can’t tell you how many people were shot by the police last week, last month, last year,” Mr. Comey said.

In addressing race relations, Mr. Comey was trying to do something that politicians and law enforcement leaders — including his boss, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. — have failed to do without creating significant backlash.

After the fatal shooting in Ferguson, Mr. Holder was widely criticized by police organizations and Republicans for a series of comments he made that were seen as unfairly critical of the police. Before the results of an investigation into the Ferguson Police Department were complete, Mr. Holder said that the department needed wholesale changes, that he stood with the people of Ferguson and that he had been profiled by the police.

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York faced a crisis with his police department for comments he made after a grand jury on Staten Island declined to indict a police officer whose chokehold led to the death of an unarmed black man. Officers also stopped enforcing low levels crimes.

Mr. de Blasio said that he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, had instructed their son, Dante, who is biracial, “on how to take special care” during his interactions with the police. The mayor said that he worried about whether his son was safe at night. The police responded by turning their backs on Mr. de Blasio at the memorial services for two police officers who were killed in December.

Mr. Comey has shown a willingness to weigh in aggressively on race issues as far back as college.

As a student at the College of William and Mary, Mr. Comey was a co-author of a 1980 editorial in the school’s newspaper that took the college to task for its lack of efforts to foster diversity. He said that the college had set aside millions of dollars to improve its athletics programs, but that it had not dedicated nearly as much money to its recruiting budget for members of minority groups.

“So, if the college wants to enroll more black students, what is the holdup?” the editorial said. “Is the college unable to provide the resources necessary for an effective recruiting program? Unable, no. Unwilling, yes.”

It added: “We think that a lack of commitment is the problem. The college, it seems, is only committed to staying out of the courtroom. We wish we attended a college committed to its social responsibilities.”

that's why I joked with my friends because his girlfriend and her family wanted to move to America from Venezuela due to many shootings by gangs and criminals. and now here in America.... people get killed by cops. truly sad.

 

[Frisky Feline]

True. My brother is a NYPD guy. He has been a cop for almost 20 years. I remember 20 years ago, it was AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL when I came into the penn station or outside of penn station, subway. Lots of wacko people are out on the street. Some of them grabbed my sisters jewery necklace when she was walking. TODAY it is MUCH MUCH MUCH better. Thanks to NYPD for making this NYC safe as much as possible they can. I thank so much to my brother and his collegues.

 

[Bebonang]

True. My brother is a NYPD guy. He has been a cop for almost 20 years. I remember 20 years ago, it was AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL when I came into the penn station or outside of penn station, subway. Lots of wacko people are out on the street. Some of them grabbed my sisters jewery necklace when she was walking. TODAY it is MUCH MUCH MUCH better. Thanks to NYPD for making this NYC safe as much as possible they can. I thank so much to my brother and his collegues.

Just be careful what you wish for. There are some good cops and bad cops. And you are right that things have calm down and less crime going on but just be careful.

 

[Frisky Feline]

Just be careful what you wish for. There are some good cops and bad cops. And you are right that things have calm down and less crime going on but just be careful.

There are still going on with bad cops around the world. We need to continue fighting to clear up the bad karmas.