Will the cops also offer them a Klondike bar?
Via AP
Two New York City cops approach a gray sedan with a suspected drunken driver slumped over the wheel. They ask him to get out, and that’s when the trouble begins.
The suspect, dressed in a rumpled suit, curses and hollers at the officers because he doesn’t want to go to jail. He refuses to be handcuffed and backs away, yelling, “Can’t we work this out?”
But even as the man’s temper rises, the officers stay impassive and firm, explaining why they need to take him downtown. Eventually, the man calms down and gives up.
“I’ve realized,” Detective Leonardo Pino said, “that if I try to meet his tone with my tone, it doesn’t get better.”
The scenario was fake – the suspected drunken driver was a fellow officer and the street scene was a set built in a Hollywood-style sound stage. It’s all part of a massive, across-the-board retraining ordered for the nation’s largest police force in the wake of last year’s fatal arrest of Eric Garner.
The Associated Press got an exclusive look at the New York Police Department’s three-day course that’s aimed at discouraging verbal abuse and needless physical force. The message to every one of the department’s 35,000 officers is, quite simply, keep cool.
Cynicism, condescension and complacency are a formula for escalating emotions that can put civilians – and officers’ careers – in harm’s way. As one instructor put it in a recent classroom session, “Once you put your hands on someone, you can’t go back.”
The instructors that day didn’t mention Garner, the unarmed black man from Staten Island whose videotaped death in a chokehold – a tactic banned by the NYPD more than 20 years ago – fueled loud protests against police. But the case hangs heavy over the retraining, as do the ongoing protests in Baltimore, where a black suspect died of a spinal cord injury after his April 12 arrest.
“We want to talk people into their cuffs,” said Lt. Suzanne St. Jacques, NYPD commanding officer for physical training and tactics. “We want to talk them down into compliance, de-escalate the situation. … The emphasis right now is the talk down before the takedown.”
HT: Louisiana Mom