The other Ferguson effect: Long Island cops training police at center of racial maelstrom

Ferguson, Mo. — The fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014 sparked the Black Lives Matter movement and began an ongoing revelation of endemic problems in American policing. Last month, a team of New York cops spent three days in the basement of the Ferguson Police Department to teach an “implicit bias” training program they developed, and which the Department of Justice deemed one of the best of its kind in the country.

As they prepared to leave their hotel on the first morning, the four trainers, all white, were nervous. They’d be teaching about bias to a mostly Black group of officers.

They were surprised to find that the group engaged the material more than their mostly white students at the Suffolk County Police Department’s academy. Several Ferguson officers noted that a local colloquialism for ordering from a popular Asian food spot — “going to the Chinaman” — was probably offensive. The restaurant’s owners aren’t even Chinese.

Bias training often gets eye-rolls from officers, but this program tends to elicit authentic conversation and self-reflection, say the cops who developed it. That’s because it approaches the emotionally charged subject of racial bias from an understanding of brain science, according to Suffolk Deputy Police Commissioner Risco Mention-Lewis.

“Once you get me to stop defending myself, then I can listen, and I think that’s what our training does,” she said.

The brain makes shortcuts, the trainers explained. This is why you’re able to sitll raed tihs wouthit a porbelm — our brains use the first and last letters to recognize the words despite the jumble in-between.

Cops draw inferences about situations faster and with higher accuracy than most people, the trainers continued. But no person gets it right every time. When cops get it wrong, people can die.

Those instances are known as fast or slow traps. A fast trap is a split-second decision based on an assumption. An officer might arrive at a domestic call and focus on a male subject, assuming him to be the aggressor — but Ferguson has higher rates of female aggressors in domestic calls, said Chief Jason Armstrong. That misplaced attention can threaten everyone.

Slow traps happen gradually. The trainers played a dashcam video of the traffic stop that resulted in Sandra Bland’s death. The officer was about to let Bland off with a warning, but escalated the situation when she questioned his actions, eventually threatening Bland with a Taser and arresting her. The slow trap was his apparent perception that her attitude equated to non-compliance. Bland died in custody three days later, by suicide, according to police.

That resonated with several Black female officers. They described their own experiences being seen as “the angry Black woman.”

Ferguson’s force was mostly white when Brown was killed. It is now 60% officers of color. Reforms are mandated by the city’s consent decree with DOJ, which requires training on bias-free policing. The Suffolk group went to Missouri after being recommended by DOJ.

The training concluded with a presentation to several community leaders, including City Council Member Fran Griffin. She’d heard that officers fall asleep during these classes, she said, and wanted to know what they actually learned.

A senior officer replied that trainers have to buy into what they’re teaching, which happened for him. A young patrol officer said she usually races from call to call, but she’ll slow down between calls to clear her head.

Mention-Lewis told Griffin that the training fits into a larger philosophy of procedural justice reform.

“Departments are only legitimate when they earn their communities’ trust, and they earn it by being procedurally just,” she said.

This first training by the SCPD isn’t meant to move the needle on racial bias in policing, Mention-Lewis said. It teaches there is a needle. Departments are being asked to navigate communities of color in new ways. They can’t do that until they recognize how differently they’ve been navigating them, compared to other settings the officers may be more familiar with.

The training avoids teaching bias as a Black and white issue, to avoid making people feel defensive or guilty about who they are. It uses the science of the mind to slow-walk its audience to an understanding of race. Prior to the 1960s, racism was acceptable, Mention-Lewis said. After the Civil Rights era, mainstream society decided that to be a good person, you had to be colorblind. Now, she said, we’re trying to take off the colorblind glasses, see the unconscious biases we’ve learned, and stop the harm they cause.

People with power over others need to check their biases the most. It takes courage to look at yourself through the eyes and experiences of others, Mention-Lewis said. And teaching it requires compassion.

“Officers want to be heroes and save people and do a good job, and it’s hurtful to not be seen that way,” she said. “No different than people who think they’re colorblind, and have to acknowledge that they might have biases.”

Danney is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn.