An Opportunity For Healing Despite Pain On Both Sides

At a time when Rafael Ramos and Wenijian Liu should be prepar­ing to cel­e­brate the hol­i­day sea­son with their fam­i­lies and friends the two New York Police Department cops are dead at the hands of Ismaaiyl Brinsley who assas­si­nat­ed both offi­cers as they sat in their patrol cars in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn.
This is a tragedy both for the depart­ment they served and their fam­i­lies. One can only imag­ine the pain the fam­i­lies are feel­ing at this sud­den and trag­ic loss of their loved ones. I can relate to that pain both as a father who lost my 20-year-old son less than a year ago and as a for­mer police offi­cer who have lost many of my col­leagues at the hands of criminals.
This is a sober­ing moment for the New York Police Department, the city of New York and indeed the nation.
In the end we are peo­ple , we all bleed, we are all God’s children.When we give life-sav­ing blood all that mat­ters is the type of the blood not the col­or of the skin of the giver.

This is an oppor­tu­ni­ty for those who demand jus­tice for their loved ones killed at the hands of police and police to come togeth­er to forge a way for­ward. Listening to the same old dividers like Rudolph Giuliani, Howard Safir , the felon Bernard Kerik and oth­ers will not cre­ate the atmos­phere for that dia­logue to happen.
Talking down to sec­tions of the black com­mu­ni­ty like Giuliani and Safir did does noth­ing but cre­ate more resent­ment. For too long poli­cies employed by the divi­sive Giuliani imple­ment­ed by Bratton , Safir, Kerik, and Kelly have alien­at­ed huge chunks of new York City’s black and Hispanic com­mu­ni­ties, and result­ed in nee­dles deaths and mis­trust on both sides.

Blaming Mayor deBlasio who cam­paigned on police reform for the killing of the two offi­cers is disin­gen­u­ous, self-serv­ing, dis­hon­est and dan­ger­ous. The NYPD must change to the demands of the peo­ple it serves, the peo­ple have no oblig­a­tion to change to suit the Police which works for them. The dis­re­spect­ful approach of Giuliani which has been con­tin­ued by Michael Bloomberg dic­tates that it knows best whats good for the black com­mu­ni­ty must end. You can­not adopt a pos­ture that peo­ple you believe beneath you should shut up as you know what’s best for them. You can­not legit­i­mate­ly tell a com­mu­ni­ty who should

rep­re­sent them, or refuse to meet with that com­mu­ni­ty’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives because you have pet­ty jeal­ousies and dis­likes. That was the kind of New York Giuliani cre­at­ed. These events are the consequences.

The so-called bro­ken win­dows pol­i­cy insti­tut­ed by the NYPD has been a cause of con­cern for many in the black and lati­no com­mu­ni­ties who com­plain police tar­get them for stop and frisk which results in abuse of their per­sons and their con­sti­tu­tion­al rights.

The Police depart­ment main­tains if they are able to main­tain stop and frisk poli­cies peo­ple who are like­ly to com­mit vio­lent crimes will think twice about tak­ing a gun onto the streets. No gun , no shooting.
Both sides are correct.
If the num­bers indi­cate that the peo­ple who large­ly com­mit vio­lent gun crimes in the city are Blacks and Hispanics then nat­u­ral­ly those are

the demo­graph­ics which will invari­ably bear the brunt of the stops. There are parts of any strat­e­gy which will invari­ably not be pop­u­lar with cer­tain inter­est groups. What the Police depart­ment can ill afford is to employ a top down approach that does not include the input and par­tic­i­pa­tion of all stake-holders. 
Whether it is a func­tion of dis­re­spect or a fail­ure to com­mu­ni­cate may be open to who you talk to. What is clear is that large sec­tions of the city’s res­i­dents believe the police do not respect them, this is untenable.
In offer­ing his cri­tique of events for­mer Giuliani Commissioner Howard Safir claim he has spo­ken to many stake­hold­ers with­in the black com­mu­ni­ty and like every­one else these peo­ple want the same things every­one else wants. Well what do you know, I won­der how long it took Safir to fig­ure this out?
Safir’s com­ments ranked up there with right-wing talk­er Bill Reilly who was fas­ci­nat­ed when he went to the famous Sylvia’s restau­rant in Harlem and no one was behav­ing bad­ly or yelling and scream­ing curse words.
The police depart­ment failed dis­mal­ly to engage the com­mu­ni­ties who would be affect­ed most­ly by it’s stop and frisk pol­i­cy on the front end, but which may have ben­e­fit­ed also in the long run from reduced vio­lent crimes.
That is not the fault of the communities. 
That is not the fault of com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers who march and demand jus­tice for res­i­dents who are abused by police.

That is not the fault of a Mayor who seek to repair those breaches.
That must be placed square­ly at the feet of the Police department .
Try engag­ing the com­mu­ni­ty in a respect­ful man­ner and explain the num­bers. Explain that young black and brown men are com­mit­ting the most vio­lent crimes in the city and as such they of course will be stopped and frisked more than oth­er groups.Try explain­ing that it is not racism why they are tar­get­ed, just what the crime stats show.
Try explain­ing to the peo­ple you stop that you are not being mali­cious just doing what you must to keep the city and them safe. Try being less abra­sive. Try being less abu­sive when you stop peo­ple who are offend­ed by being restrained from free move­ment by your stops. Try a less con­fronta­tion­al approach and see if many of the peo­ple who you actu­al­ly stop and frisk will not be far less hos­tile to being approached.
Stop and frisk as it was con­sti­tut­ed cre­at­ed a lot of ani­mus between com­mu­ni­ties and the police, this occurred because the police failed at it’s imple­men­ta­tion and it’s exe­cu­tion. Police offi­cers are not sup­posed to esca­late sit­u­a­tions so they may make arrests. The duty of cops is to main­tain peace and good order . Prevent crimes from being com­mit­ted and inves­ti­gate where crimes have been committed.

In new York City blacks arrest­ed for low lev­el drug offences like mar­i­jua­na pos­ses­sion are far more like­ly to be slapped with resist­ing arrest charges which is a class A mis­de­meanor and car­ries a stiffer penal­ty than the ini­tial offense. City-wide data shows that blacks are twice more like­ly to be charged with resist­ing arrest than their white coun­ter­parts for the same low lev­el drug offence. On Staten Island,blacks are almost two-and-a-half times more like­ly to be accused of resist­ing arrest.

Whats even more trou­bling is the fact that most of those charges can­not be sub­stan­ti­at­ed in a court of law and are even­tu­al­ly thrown out of court. Which sup­ports the the­o­ry they were unfair­ly trumped up for per­son­al reasons.

Looking for scape­goats to blame as many sup­port­ers and the depart­ment has, will not fix things. Turning their backs on the Chief exec­u­tive Officer as some of them has done, only solid­i­fy what many already know, that there are sys­tem­at­ic prob­lems of account­abil­i­ty and respect with­ing the department.
The NYPDPBA and the SBA through their respec­tive lead­ers Patrick Lynch and Ed Mullins have demon­stra­bly shown that rela­tions between the depart­ment and mem­bers of the pub­lic as well as that of the depart­ment and City Hall will not be fixed any time soon. 

Ed Mullins dis­re­spect­ful­ly ref­er­eed to the Mayor as a “Nincompoop”. Lynch the loud-mouth rab­ble-rouser encour­aged rank and file cops to sign a peti­tion ban­ning the Mayor from their funer­als should they die in the line of duty. The NYPD may con­tin­ue to bury it’s head in the sand and lis­ten only to it’s chief boot-lick­ers, con­tin­u­ing the per­cep­tion it is a law-less agency or it may look to change and be respect­ed once again. Those are the choic­es which the depart­ment faces.
Mayor deBlasio is try­ing to undo two decades of testos­terone-based polic­ing which has caused the un-nec­es­sary loss of numer­ous lives, and hefty finan­cial payouts.
Bloomberg News report­ed that in 2011, Los Angeles paid out $54 mil­lion, while New York paid out a whop­ping $735 mil­lion, although those fig­ures include neg­li­gence and oth­er claims unre­lat­ed to police abuse. Oakland Police Beat report­ed in April that the city had paid out $74 mil­lion to set­tle 417 law­suits since 1990. That’s a lit­tle more than $3 mil­lion per year. The Denver Post report­ed in August that the Mile High City paid $13 mil­lion over 10 years. The Dallas Morning News report­ed in May that the city has forked over $6 mil­lion since 2011. And last month, Minneapolis Public Radio put that city’s pay­out at $21 mil­lion since 2003.
In many cas­es pay­out could have been much high­er were there not caps in place which pre­vent larg­er payouts.
Clearly the prob­lem of police abuse of cit­i­zens is not con­fined to New York City, Ferguson Missouri , or Cleveland Ohio. Citizens are made to pay for these pay­outs even as schools are starved of cash to edu­cate chil­dren. This cre­ates a dan­ger­ous cycle which requires more law-enforce­ment, more abuse alle­ga­tions and more payouts.
Cops them­selves are pre­clud­ed from hav­ing to pay when a judge­ment is made against them under the doc­trine qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty. States would much rather cap abuse pay­out than force­ful­ly deal with abuse by police of cit­i­zens. Some inter­est groups have sug­gest­ed mak­ing indi­vid­ual offi­cers who breach their oath to serve and pro­tect assume some of the pay­ments . In oth­er cas­es some even sug­gest­ed those pay­outs should come from police pen­sion funds as a deterrent.
Democratic and Republican Legislatures and Governors are too tight­ly woven into the hero wor­ship of law-enforce­ment to untan­gle this sor­did mess. In the mean­time the ani­mos­i­ty which killed Eric Garner. Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Rafael Ramos, Wenijian Liu and count­less oth­ers will con­tin­ue with no end in sight.