The Black and the Blue

by Matthew Horace

  What police do not understand is that every issue is a police issue when you are living in certain communities. I don’t care if it’s the garbage not being picked up, or that they are able to call somebody back and solve a noise complaint. In those communities, there is not an issue that isn’t a police issue. That’s not true in wealthy communities, but police are the all-and-everything in those other communities. That’s part of the problem with law enforcement. That’s why the progress hasn’t been made [toward creating trust between police and minority communities]. Police are looking at themselves differently from the way the community is [looking at them].

  From a political point of view, every law enforcement agency will say they have defined goals and measurement of whether they are being successful. For law enforcement, we’re dealing with how many arrests we make; how much crime has decreased. That becomes your only metric of success. That’s your gold standard. Your measurement of success, however, may not be sufficient or accurate. The only thing [police] don’t put in the metric system is the police-community relationship, but it is the most important thing that they do. How do the police “know” the community, and how does the community “know” the police? While police look at their success as arrests and summonses, the community looks at their success as respect in their interactions. So, you have people arguing, because they have two different criteria of what makes a successful police department. The leaders in law enforcement need to understand that. That’s why they’ve had so much trouble bridging that gap. They’re talking about two different things.

  That’s how in the police department other things get covered up.

  If you don’t perform in football, they cut your ass. You’re out. If you don’t perform in the police department, they just shuffle you around to somewhere else. You’re still a problem, but in order for you to lose your spot in law enforcement, you have to do something over and beyond. You have to throw 440 interceptions instead of 2. You have to kill somebody. If you look at officers being terminated [versus those who are not], it is such a high, high threshold. Departments ignore the early signs [that an officer is a problem]. They ignore all the off-side penalties. The reason they do that is because customer service has never been part of the mission, never been part of the fabric of law enforcement. The criteria are to make arrests; it’s enforcement. If you have a business that’s a monopoly, you will probably be arrogant. That’s the police. Consequently, an officer who may not be suited to be in law enforcement will still be on the department because he is not violating the principles of law enforcement.

  When you have true customer satisfaction, you minimize crime and you are serving the customer, which is the community, but in [police leadership’s] minds, they can arrest their way to success. So, you have one police officer who sees three kids doing something wrong, and he locks them up. You could have another police officer who took the three kids home to mom and talked to everybody and said, “I don’t want to see this again.” The second officer may have stopped more crime in the future and saved those kids from becoming part of the criminal justice system. Right now, under the current metrics, the first guy is going to get the promotion, because he made an arrest. The other guy may get a reprimand, because arrests are a measure of productivity. So, the question is how do you keep the community safe versus just keeping crime down.

  Everybody in the community has a role to play when it comes to policing—citizens, other government agencies, churches, community organizations. The problem is most people don’t know what their role is or should be. Once that role is given to them, they can determine whether they are filling that role. Then and only then can they be a proper critic of the other side of that equation, which is law enforcement. In order to make a critique, you have to ask, “What did I do or didn’t do to make this better?” I’m not so sure that the fault [for the current friction between black and Hispanic communities and police] has not fallen too heavily on the law enforcement side. They deserve the brunt of it, but not all of it. Police have become the default of any problem. If society is lacking something, it falls to police to handle it. When those systems fail—housing, jobs, education—they affect poor people by and large. It’s a poverty issue more than anything else. But racism comes into play when the system is designed to keep certain people in poverty. When you have no hope, when you don’t feel there is hope, you just say, “Fuck it,” and then all those problems in some form or other lead people into the criminal justice system.

  Maybe it’s an unfair burden to place on police, but right now it’s the hand we’ve been dealt. The community has a responsibility, too. For instance, in the African-American community, I don’t think leaders have done enough to kill this “Snitches get stitches” code. They haven’t battled it enough and it’s hurting everybody. The bottom line is everybody has to be willing to expand their roles. If they aren’t, they should not expect police to do anything but strictly be hard-core and just fight crime. If you look at police departments, they are dealing with lots of things that are not their traditional role. They are not mental health workers. So, why are they responsible for dealing with the mentally ill people on the streets and in people’s homes? We’re the police. People call us. We are not juvenile counselors. So, why should we be responsible for having positive interactions with the youth? We are not medical workers, but we are being trained to offer medical treatment to bring people out of opioid overdoses. You can’t expect police to expand their roles and perform these jobs if you are not willing to expand outside of your core mind-set.

  For instance, churches, just like they have ministries for different things—finance, health, education—they should have a person who is a law enforcement liaison. It is his or her responsibility to learn as much as they can about policing. They need to learn about police procedures and who are the patrol officers for their neighborhood. The liaison should establish a relationship with their precinct. They should invite an officer to their church regularly. The officer can talk about crime patterns or any other issues in the neighborhood. The person should be talking to police about concerns that the church’s members have and they should be disseminating [to the congregation’s information about] what a police officer is supposed to do and what they are not supposed to do. For instance, if you explain that once a police officer writes a ticket on your car, by law, the officer cannot take it back. Your people would understand that it’s not personal. There is nothing the officer can do. The church needs to know the name of the police officer in the precinct who has the most complaints from the community. They need to make sure that they settle down on this guy.

  The same thing with education. One of the things is that if you develop a relationship between police and the kids and the schools, it creates a different dynamic. Every school should get a police officer to adopt their school. The officers come in once a month or twice a month. There’s a big assembly. The officer talks to the kids. They become more comfortable with police officers and the officers develop an affinity for the school and start seeing the kids differently. You also have to have the schools working with the police. When I was a commander, I had a problem with dismissal time. Because everybody got out of school at the same time, I didn’t have enough personnel to monitor all of them. If I could have coordinated a staggered dismissal schedule with the school system in advance, I could have had my people at all the dismissals. We also needed to coordinate with the school’s dismissal assistants and integrate them with our police officers. We needed to have this plan together in advance, because a lot of mischief turns into low-grade criminality.

  So, here’s another example of what I’m talking about. We had a bus route along a certain school that became a problem. Every time this particular bus came by the stop for the school after dismissal, it was already crowded because it had already picked up a bunch of students from other schools on the previous stops. So, every day after school, you’ve got this tension as five or six buses go by and every time one stops, s
tudents are pushing and shoving and shouting to get onto an already crowded bus. Now, the kids are on the bus, and they are packed in, they are noisy, hormones are raging, and if you’re adult on the bus, you think they’re wilding out. But they are not. They’re just kids. But a lady on the bus says, the police are not doing their job. It goes back to the default position that it’s a police problem. It’s really a transportation problem; it’s a school problem, but in the end, we become the be-all and end-all. So, what we did was coordinate with city services and have the transit authority provide three or four empty buses along that route and it eased the problem. It could have become a police problem if we hadn’t expanded our role to get those empty buses to make that work. That’s what I’m talking about.

  I think there is an intersection between communities and police that we need to reexamine. A lot of single parents have difficulty. It’s very difficult being a single parent, particularly if you are earning a low wage. You get to the point where you have given up and you see no hope. And then your kids start hitting the streets. If government and the police department are looked at as help, the person could also call the police department. As a single mom, you find your kid and they have drugs on them. What if they are hanging with gangs or the gangs are attacking them because they want them to join? Parents don’t know what to do. They don’t see how the police department can help. They think we are going to throw their kids in jail. Maybe we can’t resolve the issue, but we can be part of the solution.

  One of the challenges for police is that the people dealing with the public are often your most inexperienced workers, the people who have the least experience in policing. It’s the person with one, two years on the job who is dealing with the customer. One of the problems in New York City is we haven’t cultivated that training specifically for the patrol forces that are dealing with our customers every single day. The challenge for law enforcement is to take their young and inexperienced officers and be able to transform them into experienced officers quickly. Law enforcement has not done a good enough job of training. But it can’t stop there. After you provide training, what do you put in place to make sure the person got the training right? Right now, in most departments there are no measures or metrics about retention or compliance. So, we’ve trained the officer in something, but we don’t know how well the officer learned it or how well they are using it. So, when things are not working correctly, we can’t say, maybe it’s not training; maybe it’s not follow-up training. We don’t gauge compliance and retention, because if we do it and it’s not accurate, then we have to do something about it. We have to get them right. We have to identify that officer who may be lacking.

  13.

  AT THE END OF FAILING SYSTEMS

  The call came in at around 7 p.m. as a 10-96. That’s the universal cop code for a mentally ill person. I’d been on several such assignments in my early days as an officer with the Arlington, Virginia, police department. I remember it was a particularly humid, muggy, summer evening when my partner and I got one of those calls. It was 1986. We rushed to the corner of Glebe Road and Walter Reed Drive. The call to the station had apparently come from one of the neighboring houses. Mental health calls are always tricky. They can be unpredictable, dangerous affairs—for the victim and the cop. Other times, I’m almost ashamed to admit, they can be, sadly, humorous distractions from otherwise taxing work. This one, fortunately, was the latter.

  We found our suspect standing on the sidewalk, a man in his mid-50s, salt-and-pepper hair, unkempt, unshaven, and dressed only in a robe, socks, and slippers. On top of his head was a board, slightly larger than the mortarboards graduating students wear, that was covered with what appeared to be three or four layers of aluminum foil. Some of the foil covered his head and held the board in place. We would later learn that this was his version of a solar panel that he had designed to protect himself from the sun’s deadly rays. We stopped the car and headed over.

  “Good evening, sir,” I said. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “Solar eclipse, solar eclipse coming,” he responded hurriedly. “Got to get ready.”

  We looked at each other and then back at him.

  “One came yesterday,” he said. “Were you ready?”

  Maybe the man was off his medication. Maybe he was having a psychotic episode. We were police officers. We weren’t trained for this. As per procedure, we talked to him a little more and observed his behavior. He showed us his identification. He had a residence. He didn’t appear violent or suicidal. So, we thanked him and left. If he had badly injured himself, we could have taken him to a hospital. If he had committed a crime, we could have taken him to jail, but we could not take him to a psychiatric facility, even if we believed his mental illness was the reason for the crime. Since the man had done neither, we bid him good evening and got back in our cruiser. There’s no law against being mentally ill.

  Since my days as a young cop, the issues of the homeless and the mentally ill have graduated from occasional oddities to harsh fixtures on the nation’s streets. In Los Angeles, the homeless population occupies 50 downtown city blocks. The homeless population in New York City is larger than the overall population in 95 percent of America’s municipalities. Our nation’s capital has more homeless people per capita than any city in America. Overall, nearly 200 of every 100,000 Americans are homeless. A vast number of them are also mentally ill.

  Technically, being homeless and/or mentally ill are not crimes. But in the real world, it is law enforcement—police officers, sheriff’s deputies, and state troopers—who have become the default responders to calls for people in mental distress or in need of housing. When families call for help for a relative in the home who is having a psychotic episode or residents report homeless people in their communities, the 911 operators don’t dispatch mental health professionals or homeless assistance experts. They send men and women with guns, handcuffs, and batons.

  Newport, Rhode Island, is a striking example of the nation’s use of police as surrogates for mental health professionals. In the shadow of enormous wealth, a place where tourists flock to view the outsized yachts and iconic mansions, about 40 percent of all calls to police are for people who are mentally ill or have behavioral problems. In one case, police responded to the home of a 57-year-old woman 61 times in 17 months, and, with each call, the only culprits were the demons inside the woman’s mind.

  Meanwhile, hospitals dump homeless patients on the street for police to deal with because they are not adequately reimbursed for treating the uninsured homeless. In addition, these people often come with mental health issues hospital officials are not prepared to address. The accusations of so-called “patient dumping” had been around for years, but weren’t confirmed until 2007 when officials at Kaiser Permanente Hospital were caught on video dumping 63-year-old Carol Ann Reyes on the street. She was homeless, suffering from dementia and wearing only a hospital gown and a diaper. After failing to give her medication to treat her severe high blood pressure, the hospital had arranged for her to be driven nearly 20 miles from its facility in Bellflower, California. She was dumped in Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, where police were left to deal with her.

  Other similar cases were reported in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C. The most recent incident occurred in early 2018 when the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore dumped a mentally ill woman on the street, dressed only in a hospital gown and underwear in 37-degree temperatures. A passerby, a psychotherapist, videoed the incident and called 911 for help. Dispatchers sent the police.

  Because law enforcement is designated to respond to these incidents, America’s jails have become holding tanks for large populations of the mentally ill and homeless.

  Cook County Jail in Chicago is the most glaring example. It is the nation’s largest jail. Thirty percent of its inmates are certified by doctors as severely mentally ill. Consequently, Cook County Jail is the largest supplier of mental health services in the United States. No,
not just for incarcerated people, but for all of America. As jail officials deliver daily rations of food and health care, they also hand out thousands of daily doses of anti-anxiety medication, antidepressants, and antipsychotics. Doctors are on staff to provide consultation and treatment. If you are poor, and you need mental health services in Chicago, you need to get locked up, the police chief told me, because, like other cities and states, Chicago has closed many of its mental health facilities.

  And because America has failed to adequately provide care for the homeless and the mentally ill, every day the police find themselves on a collision course with people they are not trained to engage, often with disastrous results. Police are not health care professionals. Even with 40 hours of crisis intervention training—offered by only a few of the nation’s police departments—they cannot differentiate between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

  We’re not trained to deal with patients who are in distress. Most cops don’t understand what it truly means when mentally ill people say, “Don’t touch me.” Unfortunately, the police response, in most cases, is to touch them, because in cop world, if people don’t respond to our verbal commands, we’re trained to apply limited force. But how can these people follow commands when their minds don’t allow them to even adequately process the conversations and exchanges?

  In too many of these encounters, the result is death. Sometimes it is the cop who is killed or injured. In most cases, it is the citizen. Here’s a scary number that should give our nation pause: While black people are three times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police, the mentally ill are 16 times more likely to be killed by police. Almost half of the people who die at the hands of police annually have a disability, from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to Down syndrome, according to a widely reported study published by the Ruderman Family Foundation, a disability advocacy organization. Officers respond to emergencies with lethal force where urgent care may be more appropriate, the report said. The result? We are unnecessarily killing mentally ill people and using cops to do it.