Everybody Loves a Firefighter

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One highlight of my job as the spokesman and policy director of New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board was the NYPD’s Advancing Community Trust program. Twice a year, the entire graduating class of the police academy would attend a day-long session at the Apollo Theatre. It started with group of high-profile panelists (Al Sharpton, Herbert Daughtry, Calvin Butts–one year Wycleaf Jean came) talking about policing in minority neighborhoods. The rest of the day was a series of role-play exercises and lectures. I gave an hour-long presentation on the CCRB and accountability.

But giving my presentation was not what made the day so enlightening. Instead, it was the keynote speech at the end by Wilbur Chapman. After a career in the NYPD and a controversial stint running the Bridgeport PD, Chapman has been brought back as the Deputy Commissioner for Training. I don’t know that he had any responsibilities other than to give a speech at ACT twice a year. But what a speech it was.

Chapman’s speech, “Everyone Loves a Firefighter,” stoked the bunker mentality, comradery, and paranoia already common in of most patrol officers. Chapman pointed out that the outside world would never give them credit for what they did to protect it, and that if they had been looking for easy accolades, it wasn’t too late to withdraw and join the Fire Department. Firefighters, after all, sit around making dinner for each other for eighty percent of their lives—and when they get caught stealing jewelry from a burning home, or drivinh a ladder while high on cocaine, you don’t hear about it in the tabloids and you don’t see protests at City Hall. Sanitation workers, Corrections officers, teachers, EMTs, building inspectors – all of them, Chapman said, live in a bubble, free from the constant second-guessing and irrational criticism faced by cops. The only people who will ever support you, he made clear, are each other.

Chapman was boosting morale, putting a spring in the step of officers who had felt beaten down all day. You could see the officers who had slumped in their chairs sitting up and paying attention. Still, it was almost incendiary—it encouraged and promoted the blinders that stand in the way of reform, the belief that no one else can really understand, so you may as well turn your back on anyone asking questions. But from Chapman’s perspective, it had one additional benefit. It was—and remains—pretty much true.

The current crisis on policing has been pitched consistently in terms of race—white officers against black civilians. You wouldn’t guess, from reading most columnists, that in a very short period of time, the NYPD has made enormous gains in diversity, and as older (predominantly white) officers age out of the force, it is on track to match the city’s demographics. Meanwhile, the FDNY has long been a bastion of white privilege—while the NYPD, on its own initiative, has increased minority representation on its force to 46%, the FDNY remains, even after a seven-year lawsuit, nearly 90% white. Corrections officers are notoriously abusive—a series of articles in the New York Times last year received national attention, but has not coalesced into any noticeable activism. The transit workers union fought the De Blasio administration tooth and nail to keep its members from being subject to criminal penalties when they kill pedestrians by running stoplights, and the progressive Working Families Party took the TWU’s side. A beat cop would be right to wonder, where is the “Inmates Lives Matter” movement? Where are the “Jail Killer Bus Drivers” signs? What makes us such special and inviting targets?

It has been well-documented that violence against police or on-the-job-murders are not on the rise, but what most police officers are talking about when they say there is a “war on cops” is not an increase in physical attacks on police, but an increase in how quickly and how unfavorably police are judged. It takes three years for a Corrections officer is videotaped and admits that he "stomped on an inmate's head" to go through the disciplinary process and be fired. But editorials call for cops to be immediately fired, or even arrested days after an incident. No one is demanding the resignations of the teacher and the administrator in South Carolina—who after all called the officer to the classroom to remove a student, watched him do so, and stated afterwards that he had done precisely what they had asked.

Those of us who work for or seek police reform, I believe, have an obligation to acknowledge that the problems are complex, the people involved in creating them are numerous (and often include ourselves), and that sometimes, it is our statistics or narratives that need correction. When the claim that a black person is killed by the police every 28 hours is given four pinnochios by the Washington Post, and the creator of the statistic writes back to say that so long as people join the movement, truth is “not the point,” she is playing the same game as Donald Trump. When a dashcam video supports the police version of an incident, we should acknowledge it. Otherwise we risk being the boy who cried wolf, and giving the police unions and officers good reason to ignore us when we point out real abuses, unjust policies, and the need for reform.

Police silence is a problem. The bunker mentality is a real obstacle to truth. We will not break it down in a day. But we will never break it down if we fail to acknowledge its legitimate roots, and to hold ourselves to an even higher standard than those that we critique.

Broken Windows Policing Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

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If you have followed police issues at all over the past decade, you have probably heard the term “Broken Windows Policing.” You might think that it means something along the lines of what the New York Times said it means this January, a policing strategy premised on the belief that “summonses issued and arrests made for minor offenses preclude the eruption of major crimes.” If so, you are completely wrong. But don’t worry, you are not alone.

George Kelling and James Wilson unveiled Broken Windows in the Atlantic in 1982. Their article synthesized two entirely unrelated lines of research into a single theory on police, community involvement, and civic pride, a theory that essentially remains untested because it has been so misunderstood that it has not really been implemented anywhere. 

First, the “broken windows” part of the theory, which postulates that people who would ordinarily not engage in vandalism will do so if they see that their neighborhood permits it. The key study here involved leaving a car on the streets of Palo Alto – no one touched it until the researcher broke one window, at which point, everyone took their turn and reduced it to scraps. This conclusion makes basic sense to all of us – you would never think to mark up the bathroom wall at Le Bernadin, but if you’re in CBGBs, what’s the difference. 

Second, the “policing” side. For this prong, Kelling and Wilson looked to a study regarding increased use of foot patrols in Newark. Patrol officers would enforce a set of informal rules: drunks could sit on stoops, but could not lie down. Strangers to the neighborhood were “sent on their way” if they loitered. The foot patrols did not reduce crime—they only reduced people’s perception of crime. Residents surveyed reported that they felt safer, though evidence showed crime had not decreased.

Kelling and Wilson hypothesized that this feeling of greater security was the stirring of an actual greater security. The idea is that once the community feels safe, people will take control of their neighborhood. Combined with the lesson of the vandalized car, the Broken Windows Theory of Policing guesses that by enforcing a community’s standards of order, patrol officers will empower that community to drive away more serious crime. Reading the article, you get the sense of the police as a bunch of low-level scolds, riding the buses and subways and kicking off people who drink or smoke, but not actually arresting anyone. Kelling has recently stated that to this day he is “not long on arrests as an outcome.”

This is a very different image than one has of the NYPD during (with apologies to Howard Safir and Bernie Kerik) the Bratton-Kelly-Bratton era.  During that era, the NYPD has engaged in two often-conflated policing strategies that in fact are quite distinct. The first is to enforce traditionally “minor” crimes vigorously, with summonses and arrests. This is not Broken Windows (where there are community-specific standards for what is enforced and arrest is rarely part of the equation); it is “zero tolerance,” a strategy traditionally associated with summons and arrest quotas.

The second strategy is stop-and-frisk.  Stop-and-frisk as a policing strategy, rather than a patrol tactic, is now associated with Ray Kelly, whose theory was and remains that if violent criminals know that there is a high chance they will be frisked for guns while walking down the street, they will not walk down the street armed. The only way to make violent criminals think there is a high chance they will be frisked is to stop and frisk an enormous number of people. The consequences of this strategy have been dealt with at length elsewhere, including federal court, and I won’t get into them more here.

The origins of this theory, however, are perhaps less well understood. The stop-and-frisk theory’s origin was a simple change in policy that Bill Bratton instituted as head of the transit police in 1990: he aggressively pursued fare-beating.  The theory then was that anyone that commits a major crime in the subway probably got on the subway by jumping a turnstile.  Stop the turnstile beaters, and you cut down crime. The theory worked spectacularly, and Bratton deserves enormous credit for this simple change. The drop in crime on the subways had big implications for the city--safe subway commutes were a precondition for major changes seen in Brooklyn and Queens in the past twenty years. 

When Bratton first became commissioner of the NYPD, he applied what he had learned in the transit system to the streets.  If muggers can be stopped at the turnstile, then maybe they can be stopped at the door of their apartment as well. 

But subways are a closed system, and going in without paying is at least actually breaking the law. The streets of New York are an open system, and the only way to stop the gun-packers was to go and find them. Stops and frisks increased initially under Bratton in an acknowledged search for guns.  They increased much more under Kelly, and in Bratton’s second stint the practice was shut down. But it was Bratton’s brainchild, an outgrowth of his successful transit strategy.

And while Bratton has largely curtailed stop-and-frisk, he remains loyal to what he calls Broken Windows, but which is actually zero tolerance.  It is not Broken Windows because not only are the enforcement standards the same across the city, and not only does it rely on arrests rather than a nudge, but it is not Broken Windows because the windows aren’t getting fixed. For the theory to work, the physical disorder must also be cleared away.  But a kid who lives in the Walt Whitman houses, seeing that his apartment has mold and the buzzers on his doors don’t work, who knows he can get a summons for riding his bike on the sidewalk or arrested for a joint, does not think that the police are enforcing community standards.

There is a movement now to “end Broken Windows policing.”  It’s hard to know what to make of such a plea, in light of the facts on the ground in New York. Because despite the fact that police commissioners have been citing to the article for decades, in New York at least, Broken Windows policing can’t be ended—it was never actually begun.

Some Thoughts on the James Blake Incident

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James Blake was a joy to watch play tennis. His heart was in every stroke. He fought for every point. He played—and I mean this in the best of ways—madly beyond his talent. He had the massive forehand, sure, but the rest of it was pure will. And pure will is fun to watch. So if twenty years from now, all people remember is that he was a guy who got stopped by the cops, that itself would be its own disrespect. That being said, I think that the arrest last week—and the spin afterwards by the NYPD—is worth dissecting.

I spent nearly a decade of my life investigating police misconduct in New York, crafting policy recommendations based on our investigations, and pitching stories to the press about problematic police officers and problematic police policies. I left the job in 2008, so most of the work that I did was before anyone seemed to much care about it. But I know a fair amount about the NYPD, the regulations governing police conduct, and search and seizure law.

Here is what we know about the James Blake incident. Plainclothes officers assigned to a task force investigating credit card fraud (not Anti-Crime or SNEU guys doing stop-and-frisks) arrested someone involved in a scheme to steal credit card numbers. That person identified Mr. Blake, standing nearby, as involved in the scheme. A lot has been said about an Instagram photo of someone else who was also totally innocent, but whether that guy looked like Blake or not is beside the point--a witness on the scene pointed out Blake to the cops.

Witness misidentification happens more than you would guess. If you want to make it about race, you’re probably right. I investigated plenty of cases where a black man was identified by a white witness who “mistook” him for someone else. The police officer who stopped Skip Gates was responding to a call from a neighbor (who herself only called because someone else told her to). When the on-site witness tells a police officer, “that’s the guy,” it’s very hard for them to get introspective and question the inherent racial bias of the witness.

The police officer moved in and tackled Blake immediately. The Daily News called the tackle “brutal.” I know a fair number of Daily News police reporters, and can tell you that they have all seen takedowns that are far more brutal that were never on the front page of the paper. I have watched the video. It isn’t any fun to be taken down like that. But I'm willing to bet that if you live in New York, you have seen someone arrested in exactly that manner. Maybe for selling weed in the park. Maybe for jumping a turnstile. Look at the passers-by in the video. They don't look very surprised at what they are seeing.

This is what a felony arrest looks like. It’s true that credit card fraud is not an inherently violent crime. But it is a felony, and credit card fraud rings are sometimes backed by gangs. This was not a stop-and-frisk encounter where an officer must escalate through the De Bour steps before effecting an arrest. This was a takedown, and this kind of takedown happens every day in this city.

I’m not saying that it was right or fair or just for the officer to tackle Mr. Blake. I’m saying it was not unusual. When City Council members act appalled at the violence of the takedown, I have to think they haven’t seen many arrests. On police officer message boards, you will read officers who are astonished that anyone thinks the move was violent at all. It was just like they teach you at the academy. Get the arms out of the way. Take the body to the ground. Cuff him quickly. For your safety and for his.

As soon as the story hit the press, the NYPD told the New York Times that the officer had four prior CCRB complaints, and allowed reporters to contact the complainants. During the nine years that I spent at the CCRB--as an investigator, policy officer, and press officer--we consistently tried to get the NYPD to discipline officers whom we found had conducted unauthorized searches, had beaten up kids, or who had used racial slurs. The NYPD's usual strategy when an officer has, say, thirteen complaints in a year, is to promote the guy to the Academy to train others. When the Times feigns surprise that the officer in the Blake incident wasn't fired after getting four CCRB complaints for punching people, I have to laugh a little. For years we reported publicly that the NYPD had stopped punishing officers in CCRB cases. When we found that an officer tried to get someone to cough up a glassine envelope by beating him over the back with a nightstick long enough to rupture his spleen, the department agreed with our findings just enough to dock the officer ten whole vacation days. 

As the press officer, I was constantly reminded that there is a special provision in state law, Civil Rights Law Section 50-a, that prohibits revealing any information about police officer discipline investigations in the press.  It's a terrible law, as I've said publicly.  But the new and supposedly more civilian-friendly CCRB has not only relied on this law to conceal incidents when it found that officers lied under oath at a CCRB interview (a firing offense for which no officer has ever been fired) it fired its Executive Director for providing officer histories to criminal defendants and then boasted about it (even though criminal defendants have a constitutional right to know when the officers who testify against them have lied under oath before).

The NYPD has done a very good and deeply cynical job of convincing everyone that the problem is an out-of-control officer. Because if the department admitted that the detective was doing exactly what it had trained him to do, then we would have to have a conversation about police tactics, police training, and police policy. And the NYPD very much does not want to have that conversation. Better to throw one guy under the bus, and crush the morale of your line officers (many of whom now understand that the captain who atta-boy's you today will clip your badge for doing the same thing tomorrow if it's convenient) than to look at what you are doing honestly and why.

But wait, you note. The detective failed to void the arrest. He didn't identify himself when asked. He hid what he has done. That is true as well. And the NYPD couldn’t be happier. This way they will be able to fire or reassign the detective for a procedural violation without ever having to address the arrest and the takedown itself.  The department is not about to say that officers can no longer tackle felony suspects. But whatever the reason they ditch the detective, the tabloids will report that he is gone and no one will be the wiser. Blake will applaud the Commissioner, and the department will go on throwing kids up against the wall, each officer hoping that he isn’t the one to accidentally tag somebody famous.