How Would an Ethical Officer React?
A new class of Dallas recruits trains to step
into an uneasy moment in American policing.
'On July 7, 2016, just days after the deaths of two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, at the hands of police officers provoked national outrage, a 25-year-old African-American Army veteran named Micah Xavier Johnson trained his semiautomatic rifle on the police patrolling at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas. The officers were not carrying shields or wearing riot gear. By the end of the night, four police officers and one Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer were dead, and nine other officers and two civilians were wounded. Johnson holed up inside a community college, where he became the first person in the United States to be killed by a bomb-carrying police robot.
The violence was all the more devastating because over the previous four years, David Brown, then the Dallas chief of police, had revamped the department’s lethal-force policies. Brown had hard-won knowledge about police shootings — in 2010, mere months after he became chief, his mentally ill son was shot and killed by a policeman in the Dallas suburb of Lancaster after he killed an officer and a civilian. Brown’s officers were now required to take refresher courses on de-escalating conflict, and the department regularly shared all use-of-force data with the public. After these changes were made, the number of officer-involved shootings dropped from 23 in 2012 to 13 in 2016. (This year, there have been seven instances, two of them fatal.) Excessive-force complaints against the department fell 74 percent over the same time period.
At a news conference four days after the attack, Brown, who is black, addressed some of his remarks to protesters: They should come work for his department. “We’re hiring,” Brown said. “Get off that protest line and put an application in, and we’ll put you in your neighborhood, and we will help you resolve some of the problems you’re protesting about.” Applications to the department more than tripled in the two weeks after the attack.
The members of Dallas Police Academy Class 353, the first group of recruits after the events of July 7, were all already in the process of applying to the department when the ambush occurred. One recruit, Jay Kurzanski, a native of Buffalo, got a call on the morning of the shooting inviting him to Dallas for a second interview. He booked his plane ticket by that evening. “I was set on this path,” he said. The shooting “just consolidated and strengthened all of those feelings that I had originally had.” Justin Milton, 23, was recruited by the department during his final semester at Alcorn State University in Mississippi. “We always talk about how we want change, so I thought the best way to make a change was to join myself and show people that we can do this the right way,” said Milton, one of four black recruits in his class. “I feel like hashtags and protests are all good, but you have to do the work.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/magazine/how-would-an-ethical-officer-react.html?