Joe Sanchez on Stop and Frisk Author of "True Blue: A Tale of the Enemy Within"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Sánchez
I was an NYPD policeman. I patrolled for eight years in Washington Heights while assigned to the 30 Precinct and 34 Precinct. I also worked the 90 Precinct in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, way before the hipster subculture arrived. I was also assigned to the 25 Precinct in Spanish Harlem and the 24 Precinct on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Things have changed a lot since I was a cop. Today, as many as a third of the New York City Police Department officers are Latino, and many are bosses in high ranks. It wasn't like that when I was working. Back in the '70s, the sight of a Latino sergeant was an occasion for shock and awe. When I applied for the City-Wide Anti-Crime Unit, I was told at my interview that both my combat and my Port Authority and NYPD work history made me eminently qualified... but the next day I was turned down. I wasn't alone. In those days, you saw teams of two to four plainclothes officers patrolling "undercover" in Spanish Harlem, Black Harlem, the South Bronx, Brooklyn...white officers. Sure, they fooled everybody. And sure, they met with a lot of co-operation from the community or goodwill when they had to arrest somebody.
It took a long time changing that. The Department was cliquish in those days. It wasn't just white officers only wanting to work with other white officers. Italians liked to work with Italians, Irish with Irish... the story we told in Red Herring about a German officer being paired with a Jewish one as a mean kind of joke by a superior is based on real life. They not only learned to work together, but became fast friends. Somehow, it took a lot of the rest of the force a lot longer.
Most cops are dedicated and caring. At the same time, it takes them a long time to become street wise, and they're best taught by somebody who knows the neighborhood they are patrolling. That doesn't require belonging to a specific ethnic group, but it does require knowing something about the culture, and I don't mean how they count their relatives or what they have for dinner. It means you have to have sense about things like facial expressions, body language, and what the French call argot - special language used by criminal gangs- and you have the other kind of sense, too: good sense. A bunch of young kids pitching pennies don't need police action beyond, "Quit blocking the sidewalk, Sonny". A bunch of young men blocking the sidewalk in front of an apartment building can be considerably more menacing, especially if you notice that women, kids, and old people are making a wide arc around them. You don't learn the ropes right away, and it's important for rookie cops, or those who transferred in from another jurisdiction, to learn from a good veteran who knows them.
One of the legal requirements for a stop and frisk has long been "reasonable articulable suspicion", and for an arrest, "probable cause". Probable cause is easier. Somebody screaming bloody murder while someone else runs, someone pointing out a suspect, the guy with kid's panties sticking out of his pocket, the guy with blood on his shirt or the visible outline of a gun under his clothes- we know the drill. It's the "reasonable articulable suspicion" that's tough. That's where knowing the people you're dealing with comes in, that, and what I used to call "The Feeling".
A cop who makes the wrong move can wind up dead. So can a cop who moves too slow. One who moves too fast can get somebody else killed: Or he can make an arrest of someone actually guilty...and it gets thrown out of court. One more thing. A cop who makes a mistake while patrolling a community like the one he comes from just brings down crap on himself. One who does it while patrolling a community of a minority he doesn't belong to can bring down wrath on the whole Department. And he is more likely to make that mistake if he doesn't know the kind of people who live and work on his beat.
I often wrote that too many exclusively white teams were patrolling minority communities, and that it would lead to an incident that would escalate. I also wrote that when the incident came, it would change the way things were done. One day, my prediction came true. Four white City-Wide Anti-Crime officers fired forty-one shots into Amadou Diallou, an unarmed young African immigrant who was reaching into his pocket for his ID. Probably, no one intended to shoot an unarmed man. Probably, one of the officers panicked and started shooting, triggering the others to do the same. But if they had been working with a veteran black officer, the chances are good that it wouldn't have happened. If it had, there was at least less chance it would have turned into a racial casus belli and food for warmongering pundits.
There is, then, good cause putting for minority officers on the force in proportion to the populations they're policing. It isn't "political correctness" or anything like that. It's the start of better policing. But it's only a start.
I probably made a lot of stops and the arrests they led to that would have been hard to base even on "reasonable articulable suspicion"... because sometimes you can't articulate it. It might be a furtive look, a gesture, a certain smile. It might be the way a couple, looking into a jewelry store window, suddenly turn and clinch in an ostentatious way when they see heat coming. It could be someone who doesn't look like any animal lover abruptly running around calling their chihuahua when boys or girls in blue approach. I was a cop who made a lot of arrests on hunches, and most of them stuck. If you're a good cop, you develop The Feeling. You do it by observing, by working with veteran cops who've worked the community. You do it by knowing the area you're patrolling. And you do it by observing human beings when you're not on patrol: rich ones, poor ones, black ones, white ones, Anglos, Hispanics. You do it by knowing people. And don't be afraid to be a tough cop, but be a fair one. No neighborhood deserves to be abandoned to crooks. The people on Mean Street deserve the same level of protection as the people on Park Avenue. Don't be afraid to give it to them. If you're that kind of cop, you'll be a good cop.
But then, there are the people who shouldn't be cops. In my bio and my novels, which were drawn in part on my experience, too, I've described some of them. The old fashioned crooked police captain- the kind that Michael Corleone shot, the kind that was still around in places when I was working- is probably an increasing rarity. Probably, too, that captain's subordinates are decreasing. Not that many officers, even if they might be subject to temptation, are such fixtures in a neighborhood that they turn into bagmen for graft or protect rackets. But there are the ones who are in it for the hours and the benefits and don't want to put themselves on the line. And, unfortunately, there are a few who are on a power trip and some of those who are sadists. If you run across those, you've got a problem. The Blue Wall still exists, and some of those people are vengeful. All I can say is: What you do about it is going to affect how you, and future cops, do in that community. The bad guys know who you are, especially if you're in uniform. The community knows who the bad guys are. And if you want to operate safely and effectively, you want the law-abiding members of that community...and even some of the shady ones...on your side. You can be tough, but if they know you're fair, they will be. One cop who is a bad guy can ruin it all.
No, it's not going to be easy. Money gets tight, people get desperate, big mouths spew hate out of the radio. There's a lot more tension out there than there used to be. But, as Sherlock Holmes said, observe, Watson. The more open-mindedly you observe, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better a cop you become. The better a cop you are, the better the community you serve will be, and that's what it's all about, in the end... and the beginning, and the middle, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Sánchez
I was an NYPD policeman. I patrolled for eight years in Washington Heights while assigned to the 30 Precinct and 34 Precinct. I also worked the 90 Precinct in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, way before the hipster subculture arrived. I was also assigned to the 25 Precinct in Spanish Harlem and the 24 Precinct on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Things have changed a lot since I was a cop. Today, as many as a third of the New York City Police Department officers are Latino, and many are bosses in high ranks. It wasn't like that when I was working. Back in the '70s, the sight of a Latino sergeant was an occasion for shock and awe. When I applied for the City-Wide Anti-Crime Unit, I was told at my interview that both my combat and my Port Authority and NYPD work history made me eminently qualified... but the next day I was turned down. I wasn't alone. In those days, you saw teams of two to four plainclothes officers patrolling "undercover" in Spanish Harlem, Black Harlem, the South Bronx, Brooklyn...white officers. Sure, they fooled everybody. And sure, they met with a lot of co-operation from the community or goodwill when they had to arrest somebody.
It took a long time changing that. The Department was cliquish in those days. It wasn't just white officers only wanting to work with other white officers. Italians liked to work with Italians, Irish with Irish... the story we told in Red Herring about a German officer being paired with a Jewish one as a mean kind of joke by a superior is based on real life. They not only learned to work together, but became fast friends. Somehow, it took a lot of the rest of the force a lot longer.
Most cops are dedicated and caring. At the same time, it takes them a long time to become street wise, and they're best taught by somebody who knows the neighborhood they are patrolling. That doesn't require belonging to a specific ethnic group, but it does require knowing something about the culture, and I don't mean how they count their relatives or what they have for dinner. It means you have to have sense about things like facial expressions, body language, and what the French call argot - special language used by criminal gangs- and you have the other kind of sense, too: good sense. A bunch of young kids pitching pennies don't need police action beyond, "Quit blocking the sidewalk, Sonny". A bunch of young men blocking the sidewalk in front of an apartment building can be considerably more menacing, especially if you notice that women, kids, and old people are making a wide arc around them. You don't learn the ropes right away, and it's important for rookie cops, or those who transferred in from another jurisdiction, to learn from a good veteran who knows them.
One of the legal requirements for a stop and frisk has long been "reasonable articulable suspicion", and for an arrest, "probable cause". Probable cause is easier. Somebody screaming bloody murder while someone else runs, someone pointing out a suspect, the guy with kid's panties sticking out of his pocket, the guy with blood on his shirt or the visible outline of a gun under his clothes- we know the drill. It's the "reasonable articulable suspicion" that's tough. That's where knowing the people you're dealing with comes in, that, and what I used to call "The Feeling".
A cop who makes the wrong move can wind up dead. So can a cop who moves too slow. One who moves too fast can get somebody else killed: Or he can make an arrest of someone actually guilty...and it gets thrown out of court. One more thing. A cop who makes a mistake while patrolling a community like the one he comes from just brings down crap on himself. One who does it while patrolling a community of a minority he doesn't belong to can bring down wrath on the whole Department. And he is more likely to make that mistake if he doesn't know the kind of people who live and work on his beat.
I often wrote that too many exclusively white teams were patrolling minority communities, and that it would lead to an incident that would escalate. I also wrote that when the incident came, it would change the way things were done. One day, my prediction came true. Four white City-Wide Anti-Crime officers fired forty-one shots into Amadou Diallou, an unarmed young African immigrant who was reaching into his pocket for his ID. Probably, no one intended to shoot an unarmed man. Probably, one of the officers panicked and started shooting, triggering the others to do the same. But if they had been working with a veteran black officer, the chances are good that it wouldn't have happened. If it had, there was at least less chance it would have turned into a racial casus belli and food for warmongering pundits.
There is, then, good cause putting for minority officers on the force in proportion to the populations they're policing. It isn't "political correctness" or anything like that. It's the start of better policing. But it's only a start.
I probably made a lot of stops and the arrests they led to that would have been hard to base even on "reasonable articulable suspicion"... because sometimes you can't articulate it. It might be a furtive look, a gesture, a certain smile. It might be the way a couple, looking into a jewelry store window, suddenly turn and clinch in an ostentatious way when they see heat coming. It could be someone who doesn't look like any animal lover abruptly running around calling their chihuahua when boys or girls in blue approach. I was a cop who made a lot of arrests on hunches, and most of them stuck. If you're a good cop, you develop The Feeling. You do it by observing, by working with veteran cops who've worked the community. You do it by knowing the area you're patrolling. And you do it by observing human beings when you're not on patrol: rich ones, poor ones, black ones, white ones, Anglos, Hispanics. You do it by knowing people. And don't be afraid to be a tough cop, but be a fair one. No neighborhood deserves to be abandoned to crooks. The people on Mean Street deserve the same level of protection as the people on Park Avenue. Don't be afraid to give it to them. If you're that kind of cop, you'll be a good cop.
But then, there are the people who shouldn't be cops. In my bio and my novels, which were drawn in part on my experience, too, I've described some of them. The old fashioned crooked police captain- the kind that Michael Corleone shot, the kind that was still around in places when I was working- is probably an increasing rarity. Probably, too, that captain's subordinates are decreasing. Not that many officers, even if they might be subject to temptation, are such fixtures in a neighborhood that they turn into bagmen for graft or protect rackets. But there are the ones who are in it for the hours and the benefits and don't want to put themselves on the line. And, unfortunately, there are a few who are on a power trip and some of those who are sadists. If you run across those, you've got a problem. The Blue Wall still exists, and some of those people are vengeful. All I can say is: What you do about it is going to affect how you, and future cops, do in that community. The bad guys know who you are, especially if you're in uniform. The community knows who the bad guys are. And if you want to operate safely and effectively, you want the law-abiding members of that community...and even some of the shady ones...on your side. You can be tough, but if they know you're fair, they will be. One cop who is a bad guy can ruin it all.
No, it's not going to be easy. Money gets tight, people get desperate, big mouths spew hate out of the radio. There's a lot more tension out there than there used to be. But, as Sherlock Holmes said, observe, Watson. The more open-mindedly you observe, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better a cop you become. The better a cop you are, the better the community you serve will be, and that's what it's all about, in the end... and the beginning, and the middle, too.
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