New York Police Department To Announce New Use-Of-Force Rules

“No amount of new training or additional paperwork will make necessary force that is lawful and properly used by police officers acceptable to those who want to return to the hands-off, reactive policing strategies that sent crime soaring in the past”, PBA President Patrick Lynch said in a statement. And while the NYPD has “meticulously studied” every single bullet fired by its officers for decades, they will now also study “far more routine episodes of force – baton blows, physical altercations, mace spraying, takedowns – that erupt in an instant on the street”.

The new policies-including revisions to the NYPD Patrol Guide and the creation of a single use of force incident report-will be laid out Thursday afternoon by Police Commissioner William Bratton.

Uses of force and investigations will be compiled in an annual report to allow officials to spot patterns and trends.

When asked about Inspector General Philip Eure’s comment that the “NYPD was living a bit in the Dark Ages”, Bratton became furious.

For example, 35 percent of cases where the IG found an officer used excessive force were resolved without any penalty for the officers involved. He added that the report only took into consideration 179 cases filed with the Civilian Complaint and Review Board, the independent agency that investigates police misconduct, and that most of those cases took place before he assumed office.

“We are now applying the same policy, oversight and training principles to all uses of force, not just firearms”, he said. Sometimes, officers are doing the opposite-in 14.5 percent of the 179 CCRB cases it studied, the office involved “actually escalated the situation at hand”.

The examination of the NYPD’s record on force comes in the wake of the police chokehold death of Eric Garner in 2014 and a rough takedown and handcuffing of former professional tennis star James Blake after officers mistook him for a criminal suspect in September.

The expanded data, including information about race, will be analyzed for a better understanding of ways to de-escalate encounters whenever possible, he said. “This is not just one policy and procedure”. Officers will now be limited to pulling out their guns only when “an officer has to have an articulable belief there is a potential for serious physical injury”.

Councilman Rory Lancman, who chairs the committee that sponsored the bill, called the NYPD policy change an “important recognition that police use of force must be monitored and publicly reported if it is going to be exercised appropriately and not excessively”. It is a call for police officers to disengage themselves from the very proactive policing that brought this city from the brink of disaster in the 1990s.

Of course, as the paper notes, “How accurately officers will fill out the new forms is an open question”.

“The sanctity of human life has to be something that we consistently seek to respect”, Bratton said at a news conference at police headquarters. “I think one of the most powerful forces affecting New York City and its police department is this growing awareness in the rest of America – it’s the policing equivalent of the Confederate flag”.