Because of my interest in the intersection of policing and race, especially in the wake of high-profile deaths like Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, I spent several months reporting on how the New York Police Department is working to change its culture, especially since Mr. Garner’s death in 2014 from a police chokehold on Staten Island. Due to my desire to get below the surface on these issues, I was able to convince the NYPD to give me wide access inside One Police Plaza, to a number of deputy commissioners as well as an interview with Commissioner William Bratton. I also went out on patrol twice with officers in East Flatbush in Brooklyn, attending a Smart Policing training at the new academy and sat in on a Compstat meeting.

Independently of the NYPD, I found and interviewed a number of police officers of color, current and past, about their experiences on the police force. To a person, they had complicated views of the NYPD, both loving the job while being honest about the drawback for an officer of color, as well as how they watched some white officers behave in poor communities. I had rich, frank conversations with those officers, which helped form the narrative arc of my stories, which benefitted from unusual access to officers who were wiling to speak on the record using their names.

I published the first of the reported narratives in early June 2015, Inside William  Bratton’s NYPD: Broken Windows Policing Is Here to Stay and then the second two days later, Life As A Black Cop. I had a tremendous response to both stories, and some drama as one of Bratton’s quotes to me was lifted completely out of context without my knowledge or consent and went viral, giving a misleading impression (that he was saying that the pool of black candidates for the NYPD is smaller due to stop-and-frisk misdemeanors rather than because of felony convictions). Fortunately, the context was clear in my original story about black cops, which is still bringing me powerful feedback.

I am working on additional stories related to these issues. I will post links when others publish.

Walking into the new NYPD Police Academy at 6:15 a.m. on May 15, 2015, is the closest I’ll ever get to visiting Starfleet Academy. As I look for the classroom to sit in on the department’s new “Smart Policing” training, I wander down a mammoth hallway that I literally could have driven a Mack truck down. Recruits walk swiftly in their black and gray uniforms, carrying duffles with a nightstick strapped to the top. As I pass the muster field—back on East 20th, it was a muster deck—cadets are lined up in formation; goslings splash around in a pond that reminds me of a moat.

At the end of the hall, I see a young, black, female recruit stop and salute stand-up posters of Officer Brian Moore, whose funeral I’d attended a week before, and Officers Rafael Ramons and Wenjian Liu, who were killed in Brooklyn’s 84th on Dec. 20, 2014, by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, supposedly as retaliation for the deaths of Garner and other unarmed black men, before running into the subway and committing suicide. Those executions came soon after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict officers in the Garner death, leading police union President Patrick J. Lynch said there was “blood on many hands,” including that of Mayor de Blasio and on the steps of City Hall.

[Read more…]

Note: If you’re offended by curse words, do not read this blog post.

“I used to be the professor of F-ology,” Ricky Taggert says to snickers. Now that he teaches at the NYPD police academy, the 30-year NYPD veteran says he knows that “if I do it, the recruits do it.”

Taggert is one of four Smart Policing trainers leading one of the new segments of training that NYPD officers have to go through, a plan that was underway for over a year but expedited by the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island in July 2014.

Cursing is a New York tradition and one that police officers in the city often partake in, including against citizens and the accused. A training slide shows that common community complaints about cursing include officers’ favorite phrases (using only the “F” in the slide): “Shut the F up”; “What the F?”; “Move your F-ing car.”

The trainer uses an example to convince the officers why calling people “scumbags” or using other expletives is bad public service—”and we’re in a service industry, believe it or not. You may not like it, but it is what it is.”

He tells them to imagine that a waiter walks up to you table and asks, “What the fuck do you want?” Or, at the end of the meal, “Give me the goddamn check already, mother fucker.”

[Read more…]