Start Date: January 22, 2022
Friday January 21, 2022. A 911 call comes into the NYC responder system. A woman explains that she is having an argument with her adult son who is becoming agitated and she would like for officers to be sent to speak with him. In many strapped metropolitan regions one could imagine that the answer would be simple.
“NO! What are you doing calling 911. We barely have staff to respond to shootings and stabbings”
The mantra since 2020 has been to use social workers and mental health professionals for “non-violent” conflict. Of all places New York City should have the resources, given that the NYPD lost ~ a billion dollars of budget to be allocated by Mayor DeBlasio’s wife for mental services. Sadly no one seems to know where the money went.
I had occasion to speak to a young Latina officer of the LAPD in the time of the riots of 2020. She said that of all the tasks to which they are assigned the one she dislikes the most is removing a child from an unsafe home. As she described it, the man is hitting the woman, the woman is hitting the man, and all anyone sees is someone in a uniform carrying a crying child. She would love to hand over those cases. Yet child and family services tasks the police.
Why? Because there are untold number of ways that a domestic situation can go bad and they are not about go near it. Send in the big people with uniforms and guns. Let someone else deal with the chaos, risk their life, risk getting sued or fired for excessive intervention.
If you have the stomach you can go on YouTube and find dozens of body cam videos of the last minutes of an officer’s life while engaging in situations we are told should require no armed or official presence: traffic stops like the one that cost a young female officer in Chicago her life, or the ones that seem to be going well until, suddenly, they aren’t. Officers blown away before they reach the front door where they’ve been sent to serve a warrant.
And so on a Friday evening a 27 year old Dominican officer, a 22 year old Dominican officer, and a rookie who was along for the ride, walked into the maelstrom. With no advanced warning about the presence of a gun the first two walked down a narrow hallway toward a door and an ambush. The 22 year old is dead. The 27 year old died days later. His final act was the donation of life-saving organs to 5 patients. The rookie must be an excellent candidate as it is reported that he instantly sheltered the mother and other son in the kitchen and then stopped the murderer in the midst of a brutal, terrifying, and unexpected attack.
It isn’t a video game. It’s not the tea room at Radcliffe’s Sociology Department. These officers can’t hit “Reset” and get a do-over. The shiny object in a waistband in the dark of night. If it is a gun and you are a second late you are dead. If it is a cell phone and you fire you may as well be dead. Your life is over.
The late 22 year old Officer Rivera joined the NYPD in 2020, probably facing as much hatred and anti-police violence then at any time in its history. Yet his attitude, conveyed in a letter, was: “I know that something as small as helping a tourist with directions, or helping a couple resolve an issue, will put a smile on someone’s face.“ Sounds like he would have been a great social worker!