What Retraining? An Ethnography of the New York City Police Academy

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Abstract

In the aftermath of the 2014 death of Eric Garner and a Staten Island grand jury declining to indict a single NYPD officer, New York City Mayer Bill de Blasio and NYC Police Commissioner William J. Bratton announced a $35 million “retraining” program for all NYPD officers, including instructors at the NYC Police Academy. The retraining program would reeducate all NYPD officers on productive techniques for crisis intervention and de-escalation tactics and strategies. But in early 2016, Peter L. Zimroth, the federal court-appointed monitor of the NYPD issued a report indicating that police academy instructors were engaged in “poor teaching” and that many instructors were unable to “deliver quality instruction for officers in the increasingly complex and changing world of 21st century policing.” Several months after his report was filed I entered the police academy on behalf of the NAACP to help assess the effectiveness of the retraining program. My research indicates that the federal monitor’s report was generous in its assessment of instructors’ competency. Rather than merely typifying “poor teaching,” some instructors were proliferating racist stereotypes of Muslims and Arabs, promoting the use of banned chokeholds, and ignoring curriculum standards in describing civilians with mental health issues, among other problematic subjects.

Author

• Neil Schuldiner, City University of New York-Brooklyn