NJ cops support reform, but what
will it look like?

By: Steve Janoski
and Richard Cowen
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey

..... When Chief Steven Shallop took over the police force that patrols the busy highway and sprawling parkland along Bergen County's Hudson River coast a year ago, the department was reeling.
..... The county prosecutor had arrested the former chief of the Palisades Interstate Parkway Police on drug charges, and had seized control of the department after tow suspects died in high-speed chases. State officials were pushing to disband the squad of nearly three dozen officers entirely, after years of complaints about discrimination against minorities, gays, Hasidic Jews and others.
..... To right the ship, the bistate commission overseeing the force brought in Shallop, a retired lieutenant colonel with the New Jersey State Police. He reached out to community leaders to mend fences. And he pressed officers to show the public the same respect that cops demand, whether making a traffic stop or an arrest.
..... "It's the old cliche: You want to earn respect, you have to give it," Shallop said. "That all comes form how the officer handles any given situation.
..... It appears to be working: Citizen complaints dropped to 15 last year, [2019] down from 27 in 2018. Six months into 2020, there are only two.
..... Less than a moth after George Floyd died with his neck under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, cops throughout the nation are facing the same existential questions. National police reform - once considered unlikely - has become a kitchen-table topic as protesters march through American cities after the death of another unarmed Black man.
.... Within the ranks of North Jersey law enforcement, there's an understanding that things must change. In interviews over the last two weeks, police officers, local chiefs and retired cops said the profession needs to reassess how cops view their jobs - starting with fundamental changes in how the state trains new recruits.
..... Many also called for a return to community policing tactics that had fallen out of favor during an era of budget cuts and an increasingly militarized police force focused more on data-driven metrics than relationships on the streets.
..... "We need to switch from a 'warrior' mentality to a 'guardian' mentality," said William Peppard, a retired Bergen County officer and former police academy instructor. "We need to go back to the philosophy of the cop on the corner."
.... Several officers, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, said many of their colleagues have already made that mental shift - but many have not.

CULTURE THAT EATS POLICY:

..... In the weeks since Floyd's death, proposed changes that had languished for years are racing ahead. this week, [06/16/2020] state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal ordered New Jersey police forces to release long-secret data on disciplinary actions against cops. The state has promised a review of two-decade-old use-of-force rules and may order all towns to create civilian review boards.
..... But it's doubtful those efforts along will genuinely transform police culture, the set of social mores that informally govern the 36,000 officers working in more than 500 New Jersey departments. Those rules aren't set in Trenton. they're forged by local chiefs or sheriffs and enforced by police sergeants who drive out to calls and oversee patrol offers.
..... And that culture, in a phase oft-repeated by experts, eats policy for breakfast.
..... In an interview last week, [06/10/2020] Grewal said the state needs to start with "radical change" in how cops are recruited and taught.
.... "I can come up with all the policies in the world, but if the culture is not there to accept them, to internalize them, then we have the officer in Camden County who pepper-sprays tow young men just sitting on a stoop," Grewal said, referring to Woodlynee cop who allegedly sprayed a group without provocation earlier this month. [06/2020]
..... Grewal last December [2019] directed the state Police Training Commission, which oversees county police academies, to reimagine how New Jersey teachers law enforcement. He expects a report later this year. [2020]
..... "Whatever we've been doing for the 20, 40, 50 years ... it's not working," he said.

TRAINING REIMAGINED:

..... Rejecting the academies' existing structure - and the boot-camp atmosphere they rely upon - would be a good start, said Richard River, a former West New York cop who consults on internal-affairs procedures.
..... "Who gives a [expletive] if your shoes are shiny and you know how to march," Rivera said. "It should be an adult-learning model: collaborative, small groups, talk to each other. they'd be better educated, they'd be cool, calm and collected and they'd know how to verbally communicate with people."
..... Both Rivera and Peppard, the former instructor, said local departments must also invest heavily in their field training operations, which typically bring academy graduates onto the streets for the first time. That's where officers impress the department's culture on younger colleagues.
..... Despite its importance. Peppard said, the quality of in-house training varies greatly from force to force.
..... "I can't change a guy with 20 years on the job," he said. "But I can maintain what the academy teaches, reinforce it or hold it to an even higher standard through the training program."
..... Safeer Quraishi, a spokesman for the NAACP New Jersey State Conference, said the group supports changes to training and community policing. But it also wants stronger bright-line rules on police behavior and accountability, he said. That includes clearer limits on the use of force, transparency about disciplinary problems and training for veterans on implicit bias - the attitudes or stereotypes that may unconsciously affect how officers interact with the public.
..... At the parkway police, Shallop sought outside accreditation for the agency, a lengthy review and update of department standards, polices and procedures. But much of the work came down to rebuilding trust one encounter at a time, the chief said.
..... "People can walk away form a summons, a violation, even an arrest, and as long as you treated them with respect, they in turn will walk away and say, 'You know what? They weren't so bad."

'TRAUMA POLICING':

..... Cops in communities of color need to embrace "trauma-informed policing," said De Lacy Davis, a retired East Orange sergeant who founded Black Cops Against Police Brutality in 1991. Police need to recognize the daily stress of poverty, overcrowded housing and failing schools that for inner-city residents often add up to no hope, he said.
.... Davis advised the Paterson Police Department in 1995 after cops shot and killed an African American teenager, Lawrence Meyers, during a botched drug bust. The death sparked days of unrest and spurred an embrace of community policing. He favors more of a presence on the street - putting cops on the corner where drugs are being dealt, getting to know dealers and the people willing to work to de-escalate the potential for violence.
..... "Engage people from the perspective that they have been experiencing trauma," he aid. "As a police officer, you can't just come in, tell everybody to sit down, do this, do that, the whole militaristic thing we do," Davis said.
..... Yet community policing is no panacea, said Mark Denbeaux, a Seton Hall Law School professor who led a 2016 study of why police in Bloomfield disproportionately ticketed minority drivers.
..... Studies have found unclear benefits from community policing, Deneaux said, and he doubts that requiring more engagement with the public will make much difference.
..... "Police don't think of themselves as community policemen. They don't want to be community police," he said. "They want to be Wyatt Earp out there heroically fighting the bad guys to keep the regular people safe."
..... Instead, Denbeaux's research suggest a more fundamental change: drastically a more fundamental change: drastically reducing offers' contact with the population. Civilian forces should act more like military police, responding to calls of violent crime but pulling back form other tasks like traffic stops. Harassment during those encounters is often a source of smoldering rage among minority communities, he said.
..... "It's the most common interaction in which power is being demonstrated in a way that makes the driver feel totally, humiliatingly impotent," Denbeaux said.
..... Instead, he said, governments should rely on technology, ticketing via camera, as toll plazas do now, or mounting information-reading cameras on patrol cars.

DEFUNDING THE COPS:

..... The stance bring Denbeaux closer to the activists around the nation who have called for defunding, a somewhat hazy team that's nonetheless premised on the idea that new rules or tactics along won't solve the problem.
..... Zellie Thomas, an activist with Black Lives Matter in Patterson, believes that poverty is the root of crime, and any attempt at police reform that doesn't address the desperation of poor people is doomed to fail. "Defunding" doesn't mean shutting down the police department but reallocating big chunks of law enforcement budgets to social programs, said Thomas, who teaches in the city school district.
... "It's not good enough to say we are going to ban chokeholds or we're going to diversify the police department," he said. "A generation si saying, 'We don't care what color the hand is that is beating us, we want the beating to stop. We don't care if our deaths are captured on body camera footage, we want our deaths to stop. ' "
..... Davis, the retired East Orange officer, said cops have to be held more accountable when people die, breaking the "code of silence" that often stifles investigations. Ending qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that protects police from personal liability, would be a good start," he said.
..... The call for more fundamental change recognizes another hurdle for community policing: Reform can be expensive. Walking the streets limits officers' mobility, so more personnel might be needed to cover the gaps they leave. And some departments are too short-staffed even to consider sending cops to spend a few hours building relationships.
..... But doing nothing may have a higher cost, Grewal said.
..... "Police need to have the mindset that they're part of the community," he aid. "They're not there as an occupying force. They need to be able to connect to people."

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