This post is part of a three part-series based on Salzburg Global’s “Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety, and Justice Program.”Part One. Part Two.
In modern American society, police officers are tasked—often by default—with problem-solving for myriad social issues that lead to or come from public disorder. Most often, the underlying issues stem from problems far removed from the criminal law or any particular behavior that prompted police intervention, but the general deficiencies of American public policy come into acute focus in the interactions between police and the public. The public wants and expects police officers to “do the right thing,” but there are ingrained reasons why that is far easier said than done.
As individuals, police officers—particularly patrol officers—act as triage in situations of acute stress. Like an emergency room doctor, they aren’t equipped to properly treat chronic conditions or long-term ailments; they can treat immediate problems and suggest ways to avoid the problem in the future and or recommendations to follow-up with general practitioners or specialists. Cops aren’t capable of providing long-term solutions to people in need; they are usually called to restore order or a sense of safety. Some activists and others may quibble with police capacity to do even that much, but generally speaking, people call police because a situation has escalated beyond the capability or willingness of individuals to handle it themselves. And this is what police are trained to do: respond to emergent situations and take control to reduce the possibility of imminent violence. How they go about that will differ widely between and even within police organizations, with differing degrees of success.
Because of this triage role—one of several police officers play, but most pertinent for this piece—they neither have the information or tools necessary to bring long-term stability to any given situation. As resources have become more widely available in recent years—be it drug or relationship counseling, shelters for individuals escaping violent relationships, or intensive mental health treatment—officers in some locales have been able to draw on systems outside of law enforcement and adjudication to get people the longer-term help that they need, just as an ER doctor may refer a patient to a specialist. But a problem remains that personnel armed with firearms and other weapons become the entry point for so many Americans’ access to the help they need.
There are some officers, however, whose careers bring them to longer-term thinking, particularly as they rise through the ranks and become more attuned to the broader needs of a given community. Salzburg Fellow and now-retired NYPD Captain Derby St. Fort told me about his evolution as a police officer and the problems he faced as he tried to make a difference for the communities he served.
When St. Fort started out as a patrol officer, NYPD was near the height of its now-notorious ‘stop and frisk’ era—or Stop, Question, and Frisk (SQF), as the NYPD prefers —which resulted in millions of Black and Latino New Yorkers being harassed by police officers trying to make their numbers. Despite his Afro-Caribbean heritage, St. Fort recalled the power of conformity that kept him and his colleagues from ever strongly questioning the wisdom or effectiveness of SQF.
St. Fort likened police institutions to old church hierarchies: they demand belief; they are strict and dogmatic in internal rulemaking; and they are constitutionally anti-heretical. There is also factionalism, as different parts of the force have different ranks, unions, and cultural identities produce institutional worldviews that come into conflict. As a result, any individual or group of people within large organizations who suggest change from within will face several layers of resistance before one even considers the politics of reform discussed in and by the general public. While direct retribution is illegal, the structure of police organizations provide plenty of opportunity for informal sanctions through bad assignments and ostracization.
Police officers as individuals can also be inflexible and resistant to change. Years ago, a reform-friendly police executive told me the two things that officers hate most: 1) doing the same old thing and 2) change of any kind. It is a joke, of course, but the uncomfortable underlying truth makes it funny. Regimented bureaucratic systems tend to be stifling, and thus adapt slowly and often painfully to new rules, behaviors, and realities. Patrol cops bear the brunt of these changes when they have to go into their service areas and feel they have neither the support nor guidance for how to change what they’ve been doing since they started.
St. Fort confirmed what the executive joked about, noting police officers are particularly sensitive to criticism. This makes sense, as officers day-to-day experiences with the public expose them to verbal abuse, trauma, even violence. But St. Fort also noted that police don’t often think about how they come across to others while on the job. They resent being policed internally yet do not consider how the people they interact with perceive them, which can hinder their effectiveness to reach people who need it.
Over time, the unintentional damage that SQF and other harsh policing policies became clear to St. Fort, and he wanted to do better as he came up in the ranks. “My shift in perspective on policing didn’t come from a training or policy change,” St. Fort said, “It came from taking a hard look at the harm I had witnessed and the harm I had been part of, and choosing not to ignore it.”
One might assume that the longer someone is on the Force, the easier it would be to speak one’s mind, but St. Fort told a different story. He said that, “The higher [rank] you get, the more you lose yourself” in the system. The power to conform that he felt early in his career intensified as he moved up in leadership.
Nevertheless, St. Fort worked to innovate and collaborate with the people he swore to protect and serve. Over the course of his career, he saw the NYPD change in many positive ways, even though it could still be a toxic environment too.
St. Fort explained to me how the personal and racial politics of the Movement for Black Lives—more familiarly “Black Lives Matter”—exposed the personal and racial politics of his colleagues. He was disturbed hearing others call BLM “the enemy,” and explained that the department had not been prepared when such politics started to cause divisions within the ranks. Unquestionably, these tensions remain present in many police departments around the country.
Given the myriad tensions at play in his job, St. Fort took retirement after 20 years. He is proud of his time in NYPD and what he was able to accomplish, but has since moved on and works with artists and creatives in New York. He also published a children’s book based on real experiences he had as a cop.
I asked him to look back on his time and whether the police were the hardest audience to convince that reform was both necessary and possible. He surprised me when he said “no” and that, for better and worse, “police reflect who we are as a society.”