Training Day

Police in this country are under scrutiny. Can officers be trained out of trouble?

Emma Freer
Trumplandia Magazine

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Elliot Spector teaching a review training class at the Norwalk Police Department in Connecticut (Photo: Emma Freer)

The Norwalk, Connecticut, police headquarters is a fortress: a three-story brick building at the corner of Monroe and South Main Streets. Inside the main doors, the only ones open to the public, an officer sits behind a bulletproof divider and decides which visitors to let through.

Up one flight of stairs and around a few corners, sixteen officers sit in a classroom. It’s 8:00 a.m. on a rainy April day, and they are here for a mandatory training session.

There is one woman and two African Americans among the officers. Some are wearing uniforms, others khakis and polos or button-downs and fleece vests. Nearly everyone is wearing boots: combat, lace-up, men’s leather Uggs.

One officer in the back corner is spitting sunflower seed shells into a plastic cup.

The instructor, Elliot Spector, sits on a tall stool at the front of the room, feet planted on the ground, hands clasped in his lap. He’s wearing a blue checkered shirt, a navy tie, and dark trousers. His hair is gray and cut close. His eyes are gray-blue. He is obviously comfortable in a room full of cops.

Spector is teaching a Legal Update and Police Liability course, using court cases to explain new laws and statutes that affect police conduct. It will fulfill four of the sixty hours of review training officers in Connecticut must complete every three years, as mandated by the state. Other mandatory training sessions cover firearms, patrol procedure, how to respond to domestic violence, and how to police hate crimes. There are also elective and specialized courses, including Crowd Control and Management: Protecting First Amendment Rights, and Neurobiology of Trauma in Children.

Spector, who is 69, is the president of the Spector Criminal Justice Training Network, which offers review training across the state. He’s also an attorney for the law firm Hassett & George, where he represents law enforcement officers and municipalities, and a former cop.

“I hate to have to tell you about this,” Spector says, as he introduces one of a number of state statutes limiting the use of racial profiling by police, “because you’re not going to be able to do your jobs anymore.” But tell them he does. Spector describes a world of increased scrutiny for the police, one in which officers must tread carefully lest they be taken off the job.

Spector mentions the Justice Department investigation into the East Haven Police Department, which found patterns of discrimination against Latino residents and resulted in a federal consent decree in 2012. “They had an agenda,” he says of the investigators. “They wanted to make findings.”

Yet Spector believes that officers can still prevent themselves from anti-cop bias by knowing the law and staying within it. The point of this session is to go through the laws that have changed since these officers were last trained.

“Common Causes of Catastrophic Harm,” reads one of the early slides in Spector’s PowerPoint presentation. Speeding to the scene of an emergency and getting into an accident tops the list. “Don’t risk someone else’s life to get there thirty seconds earlier,” he says.

Next up: sexual misconduct. Spector tells the assembled officers of a 2015 case in which a Connecticut officer was convicted of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl involved in Explorer Scout, a department program for teens interested in law enforcement. “It doesn’t matter how gorgeous she is, how much she wants to have sex with you,” Spector says. “You’re not going to do it in any way.” (According to court records, the victim resisted the officer’s advances.)

Even at home, officers have to be vigilant. Just last month, Spector says, a Connecticut police officer was arrested after his girlfriend filed a complaint alleging that he had grabbed her. If she obtains a restraining order, that cop loses his gun — and with it, his job. “Because police officers are treated so much more harshly” by juries, he says, “police officers can’t go to trial.” So don’t put yourself in a position where you have to settle, is the implication.

Spector’s trainings are popular among police officers, who see in him a kindred spirit. “OK,” Spector says at one point, “we’re going to go around the class and talk about things we’ve done wrong on the job.” The room is silent. Spector lets the suspense build for a beat before laughing. “No, we’re not!” he says. “Are you kidding me?” The officers also laugh, relieved.

Toward the end of class, after discussing “qualified immunity” in use of force cases, Spector turns optimistic. Yes, police officers have faced unprecedented scrutiny the past eight years because of the Obama administration’s “agenda” to investigate and discipline police departments for civil rights violations. “It’s an industry,” he says of researchers who study racial profiling within police departments. But things are looking up.

“What do they say? We’ve got a new sheriff in town,” Spector says, meaning Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “And a new Supreme Court justice in town. And another Supreme Court justice” — assuming one of the Democratic appointees retires or dies — “on his way.”

Things aren’t so bad. He dismisses class seven minutes early.

Policing in America is a fundamentally conservative endeavor that has developed along regional lines. Officers’ main role is to preserve the status quo and enforce existing laws — even if they are unjust — which means they often end up on the wrong side of history.

Today, there are nearly 18,000 police departments with close to 765,000 sworn officers in the U.S. Each department operates under state, county, and municipal laws and is largely outside of federal jurisdiction. Across the country, individuals undergo basic training at a police academy, become certified as officers, and continue review training throughout their careers. At every level, however, the training process is decentralized and inconsistent.

Basic training requirements, for example, vary by state. In New York, police academy training is 1,095 hours; in New Jersey, it’s 960. Louisiana has one of the lowest requirements: 360 hours.

In Connecticut, police recruits are required to complete 871 hours of police academy training in addition to at least 400 hours of field and departmental training. Every three years, they must complete sixty hours of review training to maintain their certification.

(In order to obtain an acupuncturist license in Connecticut, one must complete 1,350 hours of training. A hairdresser license: 1,500 hours. A telecommunications infrastructure layout technician license: 4,000 hours.)

If this seems ad hoc, it is because the 10th Amendment reserves any power not delegated to the federal government to the states themselves, including police power. Over time, states developed forces aligned with their own agendas. In the nineteenth century, for example, patrols formed in Southern states to prevent slave revolts while on the western frontier vigilantes took it upon themselves to keep the peace. By the mid-twentieth century, the police had mostly professionalized, which made it possible for the federal government to have some influence in setting local agendas. The biggest of these was the War on Drugs, which, starting with Nixon, led police to prioritize drug crime. The high number of non-violent offenders arrested on such charges resulted in mass incarceration. By the 1990s, rising crime rates prompted certain urban departments­ — most famously New York City’s — to practice “broken windows” policing, an aggressive approach that was arguably effective but also produced horror stories of police brutality and overreach.

After 9/11, anti-terrorism efforts accelerated the militarization of police that began in the 1950s; even more money was allotted for weaponry and SWAT teams in anticipation of future attacks. Officers continued to receive extensive firearm training but hardly any in psychology, conflict resolution, implicit bias, or mental illness. By the time the smart phone — with its video and, eventually, live-streaming capabilities — came along, the police were thoroughly trained for battle, not peace.

In 2012, neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old, in Florida. When Zimmerman was acquitted the following year, #BlackLivesMatter began to trend on social media, and a movement sprung up to protest against police shootings of, far too often, young black men. In 2014, activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement protested the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City; both died at the hands of police officers. In 2015, similar demonstrations were organized around the country, including in Baltimore, where Freddie Gray died of spinal injuries sustained while he was in police custody, and St. Paul, Minnesota, where Philando Castile was shot seven times by an officer during a routine traffic stop. Castile’s death was streamed on Facebook Live by his girlfriend, who was in the car with him.

Police supporters immediately labeled Black Lives Matter a violent organization. BLM organizers made a point of stressing non-violence, but several shootings of police officers did take place in the wake of the protests. In the worst of these, a former army reservist named Micah Johnson came to a peaceful BLM protest in Dallas and open fired on police, killing five officers, before he was killed by a bomb disposal robot.

Partly in response to these events, the Obama administration led a concerted effort to reform police departments. There was a national push to hire more minority officers and to improve training in use of force and civil rights violations. The Justice Department also began investigating systemic problems within individual police departments and, contingent on findings of discrimination, establishing court-enforced consent decrees that mandated reform but skirted liability. Currently, twenty departments around the country, including those in Ferguson and Baltimore, are operating under such agreements or are under investigation.

On the training front, there has also been a push to develop crisis intervention teams at police departments around the country that respond to calls involving “EDPs,” or emotionally disturbed persons. Because of deinstitutionalization — John F. Kennedy’s initiative to empty asylums and state psychiatric hospitals in favor of community care centers, which never actually materialized — and rising health care costs, police officers are often the first line of defense when it comes to serious mental illness. Today, prisons and jails house more than ten times the number of people with severe and persistent mental illness (meaning that an individual’s condition is disabling) than all the psychiatric hospitals in the country combined.

Around 500 police departments have such teams, including more than twenty in Connecticut. Concerned that most of those shot by police were not criminals but people with mental illness, Spector helped develop a crisis intervention training program that is now managed by the state’s Department of Mental Health & Addiction Services. He believes it is one of the most important programs on offer.

“They’re not brain surgeons,” he says of officers. “They’re regular people, and they have to know so much. And if they do something wrong, they’re going to be faulted for it.”

When the 2016 election arrived, law enforcement felt faulted, and minority communities felt unsafe. The argument over policing spilled over into the arena of national politics in a way it hadn’t really done since the 1960s. While Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton campaigned on comprehensive criminal justice reform, Donald Trump ran on a “law-and-order” platform, promising the police total support and loyalty. Once in office, he appointed Sessions, a long-time advocate of harsh policing who quickly ordered a review of all decrees initiated by the previous Justice Department and dismissed concerns of police brutality. The argument, though, continues, with the federal government now shifting to a different view of things.

“Policing is a fundamentally local matter,” says David Kennedy, director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, in terms of funding, training, culture, tactics, and officer selection. “But it’s also true that the federal government can influence all of those things.”

“The best police academy in America can try to prepare you for the emotional rollercoaster you’re going to be on,” says Dan Ticali, a police detective and secretary of Blue Lives Matter NYC. “But nothing’s going to prepare you. Even though you knew it was coming, it changes you.”

Ticali, who is 40, works out of a police training facility overlooking the East River, a shantytown of trailer classrooms outfitted with security systems and K-9 kennels. He is tall, with broad shoulders and a buzz cut. He has a soul patch and is wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. There is a flame tattoo and a white rubber bracelet reading “Blue Lives Matter” around his left wrist. His eyes are watery.

Ticali was three months into his police academy training when al Qaeda operatives flew two planes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. His first assignment was perimeter security at Ground Zero. Every day, Ticali and his unit made their way to the mass crime scene. The surrounding area had been evacuated, but after a day or two police officers began to escort people who lived nearby into what was called the “warm zone” so they could recover belongings from their apartments. Though most were friendly, Ticali found it jarring to hear them speak so casually of their lives outside of the zone, of where they were staying and who they were seeing. Meanwhile, ash was still falling; anyone within the outer perimeter was likely breathing in human remains. Vehicles drove around the area with recovered bodies in them. For a new cop, especially, the experience was surreal and depressing, and the unit’s morale was low. Eventually Ticali’s sergeant got them a transfer.

“They moved us up to, like, the twenties by 2nd or 3rd Avenue, near where the old academy for the New York City Police Department was,” Ticali says. All around the city, people were incredibly supportive of police officers and other first responders, many of whom died trying to rescue people from the World Trade Center. “People were walking down the street, like, ‘Thank you. We appreciate you. We love you.’ Hugging you. And then, two minutes later, someone walks up to us and says, ‘I think there’s a woman trying to commit suicide.’ And we roll over there.

“We’re trying to keep the crowd back. This woman’s out on a ledge on the twelfth floor. And it went from, ‘I love you. You guys are awesome,’ to, ‘You can’t stop me. I need to go down [the street]. You can’t tell me what to do.’ ‘Ma’am, if someone is really going to jump, they’re going to jump and kill themselves.’ ‘Well, that’s not my problem.’ And then this horrible thing happens. This woman jumps. She hits the ground. Panic.

“People running, screaming, crying. They didn’t know this woman. They were just telling me two minutes ago that they didn’t care, but now they’re crying. Because it’s a horrible thing to see, don’t get me wrong. And then it turns to, ‘You didn’t do anything to stop that.’

“That was very hard in the beginning stage of your career, to watch that whole circle happen and try to make sense of that. Then you start questioning yourself. ‘Did I do enough?’”

Blue Lives Matter formed in 2014 after two NYPD officers “were ambushed and murdered by a fanatic who believed the lies of Black Lives Matter, the media, and politicians,” according to the national organization’s website.

(The killer had an extensive criminal record and shot his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore before traveling to Brooklyn, where he shot Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos before killing himself. Hours before the attack, he posted on social media about his plan to kill police officers, citing the recent deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.)

Last year, Ticali was asked to serve as secretary of the New York City chapter because of his penchant for note taking at meetings. For a burly cop, he’s a pretty sensitive guy. He signs his emails “Cordially, Dan,” and speaks openly about mental health issues on the force and Blue Lives Matter’s efforts to increase awareness and care options. He mentions that six officers in New York City committed suicide this year, meaning between January 1 and March 20. All were categorized as self-inflicted gunshot wounds, according to local press reports.

“As a cop, regardless of what your rank is, you’re basically going to spend your career at everybody else’s worst day. And you end up wanting to do something. You want to be a part of something that’s positive. And Blue Lives Matter is one of those things,” he says. “At the end of the day, I’m basically saying, I got involved because you get tired of feeling like you’re part of something negative. You want to feel like you’re part of something positive.”

Blue Lives Matter’s mission, Ticali says, is to provide support to officers and their families whenever it’s needed. When an officer dies in the line of fire, obviously. But also when a first responder is diagnosed with 9/11-related cancer, or is dealing with mental health issues, something about which Ticali is particularly passionate.

“It kind of takes a lot out of you when you’re watching a mother watch her child die,” he says.

Ticali meets me at the gate of his workplace and talks with me for an hour and a half. He then offers to drive me to my subway stop in an unmarked cop car. I think Blue Lives Matter is lucky to have such a nice guy talking to people about its cause, even as I wonder why the organization chose a name that seems to dismiss entirely the violence inflicted on minority communities by the state.

Ticali doesn’t see it that way. “We’ve been asked if [Blue Lives Matter] was in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, and the answer is no,” Ticali says. “Because black lives do matter. All lives matter. It’s not taking away from anyone else, but there’s a lot of push and there’s a lot of support for our American veterans, as there should be. There’s a lot of push and a lot of support when you see tragedies happen in underprivileged neighborhoods, and rightfully so. But we’re forgetting about that one part of our society who is dealing with that as well.”

On a drizzly morning in late April, around fifty police reform advocates gather on the front steps of New York City Hall for a press conference. The nearby Wall Street skyscrapers are clouded in fog, and the trees in City Hall Park have just blossomed.

Police reform advocates gather on the front steps of New York City Hall for a press conference (Photo: Emma Freer)

Their goal is radical reform of the NYPD, the country’s largest municipal police department, with more than 36,000 officers and an annual budget of $5.2 billion. They demand that city officials address the NYPD’s role in administering deportations and filling correctional facilities, that broken windows policing be stopped, and that the City Council pass the Right to Know Act, which would require officers to identify themselves and, if there is no legal basis for a search, to explain to those they are trying to search that they can refuse consent.

Since Trump’s inauguration, two major criminal justice reforms have been achieved in New York. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan to shut down the city’s main jail, Rikers Island, which is known for its rampant violence, abusive staff, and overreliance on solitary confinement. And Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a law diverting most cases involving 16- and 17-year-old defendants to Family Court. Previously, New York was one of only two states in the country that tried all 16- and 17-year-olds as adults.

“It’s not enough,” says Pedro Valdez Rivera, Jr., a member of the Justice Committee, a Latino-led organization focused on ending police violence in New York. He’s standing right outside the front doors of City Hall, holding up a large orange Justice Committee flag featuring a raised black fist, as a succession of speakers addresses the crowd.

Rivera, who is 25, grew up in the Eleanor Roosevelt Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant and joined the Justice Committee in high school. He is tall, wearing faded jeans, a baseball cap, and wireframe glasses.

He is optimistic about the recent reforms but worries about issues that remain unaddressed. The Right to Know Act needs to be passed, which is why he is here today. And the police need to reinforce community policing strategies and improve accountability within the department.

One of the challenges facing police reform activist groups, like the Justice Committee, is the scope of dysfunction and ineptitude, of structural violence and institutionalized racism, they have taken upon themselves to address. But police reform advocates believe comprehensive change is the only way to root out discriminatory policies. One-off victories, like the closing of Rikers or raising the age at which a defendant is tried as an adult, don’t reverse mass incarceration or neutralize the racial disparities in our criminal justice system.

In 2015, activists associated with Black Lives Matter launched the police reform-oriented Campaign Zero. “We can live in a world where the police don’t kill people,” reads its website’s homepage. The campaign presents ten “policy solutions” to make this a reality, including “End broken windows policing,” “Limit use of force,” “Demilitarization,” and “Body cams/Film the police.” Under “Training,” the organizers recommend that police receive instruction “on at least a quarterly basis” and that training topics include implicit bias; community interaction; crisis intervention and conflict resolution; and appropriate engagement with youth, LGBTQ individuals, non-English speakers, and people with disabilities. Campaign Zero also proposes that police officers be tested for racial bias and that an officer’s level of bias be considered during the hiring, training, review, and assignment processes.

Many of these reforms aspire to a community policing model that prioritizes residents’ concerns and participation. Kennedy, of the National Network for Safe Communities, agrees that training reform is required to achieve this. Coursework should also include fundamental ideas in criminology, why repeat victimization often leads to repeat offenses, effective deterrence strategies, why gangs form and how their members interact, and the nature of vulnerable communities, he says.

This is a lot for any officer to learn and may be simply unrealistic. Peyton Berry, a 21-year-old Fordham University student and project manager for the Police Reform Organizing Project, agrees that increased training would help reform the NYPD. But P.R.O.P., which aims to end “ineffective, unjust, discriminatory, and racially biased” NYPD practices, according to its website, is mainly focused on dismantling the quota system many believe the NYPD still enforces, despite a 2010 state ban on the practice. “The majority of cases you see in criminal court are crap cases,” Berry says, involving fare evasion or jaywalking.

To this end, P.R.O.P.’s Court Monitoring Project coordinates staff and volunteers to observe arraignment and summons court proceedings and report back with notes in order to identify patterns — who is being arrested and on what charges. Providing such oversight is logistically challenging and requires significant manpower, something a small organization like P.R.O.P. struggles to provide. But it is committed to the project. “We need to stop treating the NYPD like New York’s finest because they’re not right now, and they need to work toward that,” Berry says.

To fully address the shared concerns of Campaign Zero, the Justice Committee, Communities United for Police Reform, and P.R.O.P., however, will require eliminating the police altogether, Berry says. “That’s the eventual goal.”

Self-policing and community watch groups — not unlike during America’s earliest days, when colonists were expected to form criminal-catching posses and publically shame criminals — would have to suffice, at least until a new force unmarred by bureaucratic inefficiency or institutionalized racism could be built from scratch.

“Especially the way our police force works now,” Berry says, it’s the only way forward.

The city of Newark is trying another way.

Inside a small ochre church on a quiet street lined with warehouses and body shops, a group of rookie cops, their commanding officer, and local residents gather on a warm Monday evening.

Four long tables are set up in the nave; cops and civilians have self-segregated. Fairy lights hang from the ceiling, and fake flower arrangements fill the corners. “No weapon formed against us shall prosper. ISA 54:17,” reads a banner on the wall.

The officers have only been on the job for four months and have been instructed to wear plainclothes. One is wearing black jeans, a black t-shirt, and a butter yellow jean jacket. Another is wearing gray sweatpants and a gray Dallas Cowboys t-shirt. Some have their badges affixed to their belt loops, or tattoos on their arms, or gold chains around their necks.

Their commanding officer, a detective with twenty-three years of experience, is wearing wrinkle-resistant cargo pants and a blue polo inscribed with his rank and name. His hair is cut into a fade and styled on top. A gun rests in the holster at his waist.

They are a diverse group — black and white and Latino and Asian — but almost all men. The two women in this police class sit across from each other in the back corner of the room.

Maybe two dozen residents — mostly women, mostly middle-aged, mostly African-American — sit together. They are educators and domestic violence counselors, a pastor and health care workers. There’s also a small group of high school students who are involved with SHE Wins, a local non-profit that teaches leadership skills to young women impacted by violence. One is wearing a crop top and light wash jeans, and she wraps her arms around her waist when she introduces herself to the group. Another says she is here to learn how to help friends who have experienced trauma but won’t speak to an adult about the experience.

Everyone is gathered for the first of three four-hour training sessions offered by the Trauma Advocacy Initiative, a pilot program of the Brooklyn-based nonprofit Equal Justice USA, which has spent the last twenty-five years working to repeal the death penalty and is now trying to help reform the criminal justice system. Since the program launched last year, more than 150 officers have completed the training.

The Initiative is based in Newark for a couple of reasons: Equal Justice successfully campaigned to repeal the death penalty in New Jersey a decade ago, and the state is certainly open to continued reform. Newark, in particular, is, too.

In March of 2016, after a Justice Department investigation of the Newark Police Department found a pattern of unconstitutional stops and arrests disproportionately affecting African-Americans, along with a whole host of other violations of proper police procedure, the city agreed to a consent decree. The seventy-seven-page document is enforceable by a federal court and requires reforms in officer training, improvement to the department’s disciplinary processes, and the creation of a civilian oversight group.

After operating under this decree for nine months, the Newark Police Department recorded the lowest crime rate in fifty years. But Newark’s murder rate is still nine times higher than New York City’s, and in March, three people in the city were fatally shot over the course of six days.

“These streets in Newark are dirty, dirty streets,” a community member at today’s training session says to the group. She calls herself a first responder; though she is not paid for this work, she arrives at crime scenes and hospitals when a shooting takes place, often, she says, before the police do.

After everyone introduces themselves, Monique Swift, the facilitator of today’s session, gets started. She is wearing a billowy denim outfit, like scrubs almost. “Trauma,” she says, “is everywhere.”

She runs through a working definition of trauma and then explains the different types, asking the group to brainstorm examples of each.

There’s acute trauma, like a shooting, that leaves the victim and any witnesses reeling. “That’s no longer out of the ordinary in Newark,” the first responder says. “We see one every day.”

There’s chronic trauma, like childhood abuse or domestic violence. One of the high schoolers is writing examples of each type of trauma on a set of poster boards hanging on the wall. “Trump,” a community member tells her to add to the “Chronic” board. The civilians nod their heads in agreement.

And there’s historical trauma, like slavery or the Holocaust, which, Swift says, is passed from generation to generation.

Brainstorming examples of traumatic experiences (Photo: Emma Freer)

Though police officers and other first responders experience trauma on the job all the time, many of the officers in the church remain quiet during this brainstorming session. They were only sworn in four months ago, so they don’t have a lot of experience to draw on. But their commanding officer, standing in the back of the room, directly across from Swift, addresses the group. He probably qualifies for a PTSD diagnosis, he says, though at this point in his career he believes he can turn it on and off.

But sometimes he still sees the 16-year-old gunshot victim on whom he performed CPR early in his career. It doesn’t matter if he’s with his own kids — the boy’s face flashes before his eyes. Sometimes, after a traumatic event at work, he yells at his wife when he gets home.

“I was trained differently,” he says, referring to the new officers. “And I’ll admit I was trained the wrong way.” There needs to be more attention paid to the trauma officers experience at work, he says, but the resources are scarce.

At the front of the room, Swift announces that the group is going to watch a short video. She turns off the lights, and a narrator explains how slavery was not abolished in this country so much as it evolved, first into chain gangs and indentured servitude, then Jim Crow laws, and now mass incarceration, as an artist’s hand paints scenes of slave auctions, Martin Luther King, Jr., and prison cells.

Swift asks the group to respond to the video using one word. “Tension,” one community member says. “Hopelessness,” says another. “Understanding,” says a white cop.

An African-American cop who patrols a public housing complex says that she tries to communicate to residents that they don’t have to be a product of their environment, that they can forgive and forget and move on.

A community member responds: “No child who’s living in subsidized housing is responsible for that.”

The cop: “You choose public housing. Public housing doesn’t choose you.”

Swift intervenes. “It’s almost by design,” she says, that people end up in public housing. And she adds that the history of policing in this country is rooted in slave-catching. “We know no one here was party to that,” she says, but she’s made her point.

The cop softens. Her parents died when she was young, she says, which proved to be a motivating factor in her own life. “I wanted to show myself that I could be more than statistics said I could be.”

Fatimah Muhammad, the director of the Trauma Advocacy Initiative, has been in the room the whole time. She now joins Swift at the front to help manage the growing tensions. “Thank you for sharing your trauma with us,” she says.

A second cop defends his colleague. “As officers of your city, I can assure you what you see here is a new wave of Newark police,” he says.

And he’s right. Since the city agreed to a consent decree last year, the Newark Police Department has buckled down, hiring more officers and committing to a community policing model. In addition to these training sessions, the department has bolstered its partnership with local religious leaders and instituted block watches in an effort to cultivate the community’s trust. So far, citizen complaints are down thirty-five percent compared to this time last year, Anthony Ambrose, the city’s director of public safety, told NPR last month.

But a community member points out that only rookie cops are in the room. Where’s the chief? Where are the veteran officers?

Not here. (Earlier training sessions have been full of mostly veteran officers, Muhammad says, and diversity of age, precinct, race, and gender is a priority of the program.)

Officers are specifically asked to wear plainclothes to the first two training sessions. But they are allowed to wear their uniforms to the last one.

On a Tuesday morning, a different cohort gathers in the same church for their third session. These officers were sworn in the day before and had attended the previous two sessions while still enrolled at the police academy. It’s their first day on the job.

Their blues are spiffy, their hair shorn. Guns rest in woven leather holsters. Handcuffs dangle from belt loops. Their unblemished shoes have thick rubber soles.

This time, the officers and community members sit together, assigned to small groups and tasked with creating poster boards they will present to the class. In magic marker, they write out recommendations for how different institutions — the police department, of course, but also social services and public schools and local leadership — can implement trauma-informed policies and practices.

“Tell us who you are and where you’re coming from,” Muhammad, who’s facilitating this session, says to one of the groups as it assembles in front of the class, ready to present.

“We’re Group Two. We’re from back there,” one cop says, pointing to the far table. Everyone laughs.

During each presentation, there’s a kind of dance. Everyone is polite, respectful, and deferential. “Oh, that was your idea,” they say again and again, assigning credit and passing the invisible talking stick.

Sometimes a group member shares a personal anecdote. One man, a community member, speaks about his sister, who has schizoaffective disorder. While dealing with police on her behalf, which happens often, he makes a point to explain her diagnosis. The police respond differently when he does this, he says, driving her to the hospital instead of treating her like a dangerous criminal.

In a different group, a woman suggests that officers not take it personally when someone refuses their help. It doesn’t make them an enabler if someone who is unsafe or unwell refuses their offer of assistance, even though they may feel frustrated or rejected.

“That’s not really a trauma-informed response,” Muhammad says, reminding the class of their previous lessons. Someone who is traumatized very often becomes withdrawn. “One of the biggest things I hope you take out of this training is not to give up on people, even when they tell you they won’t accept your help,” she says.

After the presentations, the group watches a Frontline segment called “Policing the Police.” It is about police abuses and civil rights violations. There is palpable tension in the room. One cop, preemptively, says of one of the police officers interviewed on camera, “That’s not a Newark cop.

The segment was filmed in Newark.

During the discussion afterward, an educator at a local school admits that when the officers showed up for class that morning, wearing their new uniforms for the first time, he felt a little unsafe. “I had to fight through congratulations,” he says. But he also acknowledges that his opinion of the police has changed over the course of the training, as he got to know “these gentlemen.”

An attorney who works with domestic violence survivors speaks next. After thanking the officers for attending the training, she says she is shocked by how many wives of police officers end up in her office. Self-care is critical for cops, she reminds them, and they thank her.

And then the session ends. Some of the officers and community members stay and chat. Most people filter out, first into the small vestibule where a picked-over breakfast buffet takes up most of the space, and then into the parking lot adjacent the church.

It’s noon on a sunny day, and everyone is eager to get to work.

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