The city’s top cop wants rank-and-file officers to ask themselves what the public would think before using force, police sources said Sunday.
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton asked his higher-ups to read several news articles before they attend a seminar Monday on the department’s new use-of-force guidelines.
The articles assigned to the brass include a piece from the Web site governing.com about a report from the Police Executive Research Forum outlining 30 guiding principles on use of force that departments can voluntarily adopt.
The report calls for cops to weigh whether the general public would view their use of force as proportional to the threat posed.
One of the tips advises threatened officers to “pull back.”
“When engaging a person with an edged weapon, officers should sometimes pull back to keep a safe distance,” the article states, pointing out that, instead, “many academies teach cadets to hold their ground and open fire out of self-defense.”
The national law-enforcement group also advises cops to “first weigh the severity of the response (firing a gun) against the severity of the threat posed by the person.”
One source ripped that advice.
“That’s ridiculous,” the police source said. “The public is not the expert. We’re the experts.”
The attendees of the seminar — which will include chiefs, assistant chiefs and other officials and which will be held at the Wave Hill House in the Riverdale section of The Bronx — were also told to read an article from a Denver TV news show’s interview with that city’s top cop.
That article reveals that a contingent of officers traveled to Scotland in 2015 to study how officers in that country train.
The vast majority of police in Scotland are unarmed.
Such suggestions of European-style tactics are not likely to sit well with NYPD police officers, according to one source — who called the tactics proposed in the articles suggested by Bratton “knee jerk s–t.”
“If I get into a fight with a guy who’s bigger than me and I have an opportunity to get him in a chokehold so he doesn’t take me down, I’ll do it,” the source said. “And almost every cop would.
Your intent is to tip the tables in your favor.”
The NYPD guidelines were announced in October in the wake of high-profile police confrontations, including the police takedown of innocent tennis player James Blake, the deadly arrest of Eric Garner on Staten Island and the fatal shooting of Akai Gurley in an East New York housing project.
Officer Peter Liang was convicted in Brooklyn court on Feb. 11 of manslaughter for killing Gurley.