Not a Surprise

Eric Adams ran for Mayor of New York promising a return to police impunity and law breaking, particularly against minorities and the economically disadvantaged. 

It should come at no surprise then that, police are returning to their lawless racist ways.

A fish rots from the head:

The New York Police Department’s anti-crime units are still stopping, frisking and searching too many people unlawfully — almost all of them people of color — despite assurances from Mayor Eric Adams that new policies and training would end the practice, according to a new report by a court-appointed monitor.

The monitor, Mylan L. Denerstein, filed a report in federal court in Manhattan on Monday detailing what she described as unlawful policing. Ms. Denerstein, whose position was created in 2013 after a court ruled the Police Department’s use of stop and frisk was unconstitutional, is assigned to oversee the units, which have a history of targeting Black and Hispanic people.

Earlier versions of the units were responsible for a disproportionate number of police shootings, and they were disbanded in 2020. Mr. Adams reinstated and renamed them after he took office last year, but critics were skeptical that they could be run without racially profiling young men of color, as previous units had.

Almost all of the stops made by the rebranded “neighborhood safety teams” analyzed in the report — 97 percent — were of Black or Hispanic people, and 24 percent of the stops were unconstitutional. Of 230 car stops included in the sample, only two appear to have turned up weapons, the report said.

Better training for cops will not get us better cops, much like diversity training does not produce make workplaces less discriminatory.

CONSEQUENCES produce changes of organizational culture, by which I mean firings, demotions, and prosecutions.

Unless and until you convince the racists and bullies in your organization that they face a real danger of personal consequences, they will not make meaningful changes in their behavior.