Editorial

Kudos to NCPD for rethinking the use of force

Posted

The Nassau County Police Department’s recent revamping of its use-of-force policy is a proactive and welcome move by the county at a time of deep divisions between many police departments and the communities they serve. The changes include concrete policy measures that should more clearly guide officers through the situations they’re tasked with handling, and they represent a good-faith effort by our armed protectors to be transparent about one of the most potentially controversial aspects of their work.

James Carver, the president of the Nassau County Police Benevolent Association, described the changes as minor tweaks to existing guidelines, characterizing them as more of a public relations move than substantial policy revisions. But some of the changes get to the heart of what causes community mistrust of the police. The department’s Deadly Force Review Board expanded its scope from officer-involved shootings and uses of deadly force to all incidents in which force is used. Carver has publicly posed the question of what constitutes force, but ultimately it is better to make more incidents available to the board’s oversight. That avoids the possibility that an incident could go unnoticed because it didn’t meet the most extreme threshold.

Officers are now required to make written reports of all incidents in which force is used. That is about accountability — a word that gets thrown around a lot but means little unless public pressure accompanies it. That’s the nature of true accountability: We don’t leave the accounting solely in the hands of an individual.

The new rule also enables the department to more exhaustively track such incidents — where and how they happen, and what officers and civilians are involved. That’s accountability on an institutional scale. Disadvantaged communities have histories of grievances about disparities in their treatment compared with that of their more well-to-do neighbors. The department’s tracking should help it confirm or refute those claims.

The NCPD’s new guidelines focus on de-escalation: finding more ways to steer interactions away from physical confrontation, or using less severe means to control people who are noncompliant. This points the department in the right direction. As videos of people losing their lives in police encounters in questionable circumstances send convulsions of shock and grief across the nation, there is ongoing, and often heated, debate about the severity with which officers treat civilians.

We too often become mired in the back-and-forth about whether a person involved in an encounter with police was doing something wrong. That is ultimately a question for the courts, but they are of little help if the suspect doesn’t survive the encounter. Escalation of these situations increases the likelihood of disaster, and de-escalation decreases it. It’s a simple equation and a noble pursuit, befitting the value we place on life and liberty. We train our police to be effective in the use of deadly force when lives are at stake, but they must be equally effective at defusing tense situations.

The value of the NCPD’s effort shouldn’t be understated. Its willingness to examine the way it operates is meaningful amid protests across the country that reflect frustration and anger over a perception that police don’t care about the people they police as much as they should. The NCPD is showing that it cares enough to do something. It is getting out in front of the problem.

The Washington, D.C.-based Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit think tank that advised the NCPD on ethics reform as part of a three-year, $675,000 contract, credits the department with being one of the leaders in best practices in the country. That’s a distinction to be proud of, and the best way we can think of to avoid the pain and unrest we’ve seen in places like Ferguson, Mo., and Baton Rouge, La. Those cities’ dramas didn’t start with the videos of suspects dying. Those encounters were tragic points on a continuum of police/community relations — or lack of relations — that was investigated and condemned by the U.S. Department of Justice, in the case of Ferguson, and is being examined in Baton Rouge and other places.

That those kinds of events haven’t unfolded here is a testament to forward thinking that we see being turned into action by Nassau County police. We applaud the department’s leaders for their foresight, and we hope to see continued evolution as the nation grapples with so many harrowing domestic issues and the ongoing debate over how to police them.