Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (51 page)

Bratton too had something to say on that day.

Making a “
solemn promise to every New Yorker regardless of where they were born . . . live, or . . . [what they] look like,” Bratton declared that NYPD officers would no longer “break the law to enforce the law.” “These values,” he added, “aren’t at odds with keeping New Yorkers safe, they are essential to long-term public safety, [and] we are committed to fulfilling our obligations under this agreement.”

**************

In July of 2014 Bill Bratton was forced to momentarily set aside his focus on stop-and-frisk when
broken-windows policing came under attack. Both Bratton and Kelly were strong proponents of the policy. But the death of Eric Garner over an insignificant broken-windows/quality-of-life crime—which, not incidentally, had been caused by a
choke hold banned by the NYPD since
1993
—had changed the dynamic.

In response to Garner’s death, Bratton ordered three days of retraining for all thirty-five thousand NYPD officers, focused on avoiding physical and verbal confrontations when making arrests. Bratton described the program as similar to the firearms retraining that all officers are required to periodically undergo. But he made no bones about where he was headed.

“
It was evident,” Bratton said at the time, “that there was the need for a fundamental shift in the culture of the department, from an overarching focus on police activity [i.e., stops and arrests], to an emphasis on collaborative problem-solving with the community.”

**************

December 1, 2014, was an all-good-news day for Bill Bratton, a stop-and-frisk announcement day. The groundwork for the stop-and-frisk news conference that he and Mayor de Blasio were holding had been laid that November, when they’d banned one of stop-and-frisk’s most notorious arrest subterfuges: ordering a person stopped by an officer to empty his pockets and, as previously pointed out, then arresting him for “
displaying”
marijuana in public. Following tough public criticism, Ray Kelly had ordered the practice ended in 2013, but Bratton and de Blasio had
codified
it, making possession of
less than twenty-five grams of marijuana (fifty to sixty joints) a simple violation punishable by a $100 fine. Period. No jail time or criminal record involved.

Today, however, they intended to announce something far bigger. In 2013 Ray Kelly had also reduced stop-and-frisks by one-third following the federal court’s damning stop-and-frisk ruling. And as they decreased, so did the city’s
homicides, which fell to 335, a new record low. That was good but tentative news for opponents of stop-and-frisk.

Facing reporters now, Bratton and de Blasio had far bigger news. Through December 1, 2014,
homicides in the city had dropped yet again to a new record low (that by year’s end would total 328).
Robberies, meanwhile, had fallen by 14 percent, and burglaries, rapes, and grand larcenies had declined as well—all good, solid numbers right in line with the similar decreases of recent years.

Viewed, however, as a gauge of just how important stop-and-frisk had been in suppressing crime, they were spectacular. As crime was decreasing,
stop-and-frisks had plunged
79 percent
in the first nine months of 2014.
By year’s end, Bratton predicted, the department would record fewer than 50,000 stops—a fraction of the more than 685,000 its officers had made in 2011.

For over a decade as commissioner, Ray Kelly had insisted that the
intense, targeted stopping-and-frisking of poor, young black and brown men was crucial to maintaining New York’s low crime rate and could be scaled back only at the city’s peril. The biggest beneficiaries of New York’s crime decline, Kelly had insisted, were the young black and brown men whose lives had been saved by the tactic—and some of them might well have been.

But the young men allegedly benefiting from Kelly’s brand of intense stop-and-frisk were also being crushed not just by harsh, stagnant economic truths and the dog-eat-dog violence of ghetto and barrio life but also by cops bent on stopping and busting them for whatever they could and saddling them with criminal records. Ray Kelly rarely mentioned that part of the equation. In 2014, Bill Bratton, the father of the modern use of stop-and-frisk, had the guts and fortitude to prove Ray Kelly and himself wrong—at least for 2014.

**************

As December was closing, other news also augured well for the city’s reform activists. A follow-up survey revealed that
two-thirds of New Yorkers believed that Daniel Pantaleo—the officer whose choke hold had killed Eric Garner—should have been indicted.

Bill de Blasio, meanwhile, was defending the protesters rallying against the killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. At one point he emotionally explained how he and his African-American wife—like so many parents of black and mixed-race boys—had had to engage their son, Dante, in “
painful conversations [about] taking special care” when dealing with the police.

At the same time, however, the pattern of largely nonviolent behavior by New York demonstrators and police, established that summer following Eric Garner’s death, would grow far more intense in late November and early December when the Brown grand jury in Ferguson and the Garner grand jury in Staten Island both announced their refusals to indict the officers responsible for the two men’s deaths.

During those demonstrations there were scuffles,
an officer had his nose broken,
Bratton had fake blood thrown on him as he monitored
a demonstration in Times Square, and some protesters vociferously cursed and taunted the city cops monitoring them.

What was important and often overlooked was that the NYPD’s actions during the demonstrations had not become the focus of the events, as they had in 2010 when officers angrily manhandled and
pepper-sprayed Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.

In the days that followed there were
protests in Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland, Seattle, San Francisco, and many other cities, and at colleges and universities.
Harvard and about forty other medical schools across America held demonstrations protesting Brown and Garner’s deaths, and NBA superstars
LeBron James and Kobe Bryant wore “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts as they warmed up for games.

The momentum, both in New York and nationwide, seemed to be with the reformers.

Until it wasn’t: until December 20, 2014, when a deranged black man named
Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot and killed NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in broad daylight as they sat unsuspecting in a patrol car in Brooklyn. Their murders, it turned out, would do more than end their lives. They would also radically change the conversation from de Blasio and Bratton’s apparent success in dramatically reducing stop-and-frisks while lowering the homicide rate to visceral, tribal outrage from the city’s cops and conservatives aimed not at the killer of the police officers but at both de Blasio personally and at the reforms he and Bratton had been initiating in general.

Most stunning was their use of Brinsley’s declared motive of revenge for Brown’s and Garner’s deaths to try to draw a causal link from de Blasio and the protesters to the officers’ murders.

“
A predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric by de Blasio and Attorney General Holder,” tweeted George Pataki, the Republican former governor of New York, after the officers’ killings.

On ABC News, meanwhile, Ray Kelly asserted that de Blasio had run on an “
anti-police campaign” in 2013, and that the mayor’s conversations with his son about taking care when dealing with the police had been what “
set off this [post-murder] firestorm.”

Pat Lynch, the head of the NYPD’s twenty-five-thousand-strong rank-and-file patrol officers’ union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), went even further, declaring that the dead officers’ blood “
starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.”

Earlier, at the hospital where the two officers had been taken,
well over a dozen cops in and out of uniform had turned their backs in unison in a show of disrespect as de Blasio and Bratton walked down the hallway. Thousands of police officers from around the country would attend the
funerals of Ramos and Liu, and would then join thousands more active and retired NYPD officers in full uniform in open disrespect as they too turned their backs to the mayor as he rose to speak.

**************

From the hindsight of 2015, it’s evident that Bill Bratton did an enormous amount of heavy lifting in the struggle to move American policing away from the repressive tactics he once championed and that the nation witnessed in Ferguson, Cleveland, and other cities in 2014.

Ever since the fugitive slave laws and Reconstruction, that kind of policing has had as one of its primary missions—in the North, the South, and the West—the suppression of black Americans and the maintenance of Jim Crow as an alternative to doing the hard work of truly dealing with America’s obscenely cruel racist legacy.

In February 2015 James B. Comey gave a speech remarkable for an FBI director, saying that “all of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo that was often brutally unfair to disadvantaged groups. . . . That experience should be part of every American’s consciousness, and law enforcement’s role in that experience, including in recent times, must be remembered. It is,” he summed up, “our cultural inheritance.”

**************

Meanwhile, the scenes from Ferguson reminded us that “recent times” means the last thirty years of America’s unprecedented, never-ending wars on drug crimes—which law professor Michelle Alexander, in exploring
the connections of those wars to past repression, quite rightly called “the New Jim Crow.”

And springing out of those wars has been the stunning militarization of American policing.

In the early seventies President Richard Nixon officially declared America’s drug policy a “war on drugs.” What we got was a war on us.
By the mid-1980s two to three thousand drug raids a year were taking place.
By 2010 the number had soared to seventy to eighty thousand per year. An ACLU study of SWAT teams in 2011 and 2012, reported in the
Los Angeles Times
, revealed that of the twenty police agencies examined, “eight to ten SWAT team deployments were to . . . serve search warrants primarily in drug cases,” and that “two-thirds of the deployments involved breaking down doors,” often using terrifying combat-style flash-bang grenades; were focused on small-time dealers or users; and were based on unsubstantiated tips from informants. Since 2000, at least fifty Americans have been “
seriously injured, maimed, or killed by such flash-bang [grenades].”

At the same time, civil asset forfeiture laws, originally aimed at organized crime and drug kingpins, were increasingly being used against ordinary citizens who had never been charged with a crime by police departments looking for extra money to supplement their budgets. The money, vehicles, and other goods seized by them would skyrocket from a value of $27 million in 1985 to almost $4.2
billion
in 2012. In the spring of 2014, in fact, the U.S. Justice Department, in a searing condemnation of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department, found that its officers had for years been singling out the city’s black motorists to disproportionately stop, ticket, arrest, and fine as a way to finance the police department and the criminal justice system.

Greatly accelerating the drug war’s militarization was
$4 billion in surplus military equipment donated by the U.S. Defense Department to police forces around the county since the mid-1990s and
$
34 billion
in “terrorism grants” made by the Department of Homeland Security since 9/11. By 2014 over one thousand such programs existed, giving away surplus military guns, uniforms, helicopters, and other combat gear and equipment to America’s police forces.

**************

As I write this, it’s far too early to know if America’s law enforcement establishment will take the lessons of 2014 to heart.

President Barack Obama has tried to drive home some of these messages. During his tenure, the number of police organizations placed under some form of
federal oversight has grown dramatically and now includes more than twenty cities, as diverse as Seattle, New Orleans, Oakland, Cincinnati, Cleveland, New York, Detroit, Albuquerque, and Newark. Following the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner,
Obama also created a “Task Force on 21st Century Policing” focused on the kind of community policing Bill Bratton has been spearheading in New York.

Both are steps in the right direction. But small steps. It’s a mistake to think the problem is simply limited to bad or indifferent police agencies. They have to be viewed against a backdrop of a much larger societal dysfunction indisputably—and historically—tied to inequities of race, class, income, and opportunity; the politics and the business of crime and guns; the politicized state of our courts; the cruel recklessness of our sentencing laws; and the disastrous state of our public schools. All these seemingly disparate forces together keep doing one thing well: feeding generation after generation of young American men into the world’s largest prison system, with no end in sight.

In 2014 both the American people and the American press started asking hard questions about the current state of American policing. Those questions need to continue even as others are asked. Such as, when will our police departments be relieved of many of the ancillary tasks they have been charged with carrying out over the last thirty years, like being responsible for the homeless and mentally ill—tasks to which, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, they are ill-suited by training, mission, and inclination to perform? And as we inch toward defining what a new paradigm for our police should be, we need to ask how we can begin shaping that goal in our violent, racist, gun-loving society. And when will we start recruiting and training police officers who are genuinely committed to community-building and service and don’t want to run around like gung-ho marines in our nation’s poorest neighborhoods?