A somber Mayor Bill de Blasio said he's still "reeling" after watching the videos of the two recent shooting deaths of black men by police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota.
In separate events,videos shared widely on social media show police shooting Alton Sterling external a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisana, and on Tuesday night and the aftermath of a police officer shooting Philando Castile during a traffic stop in St. Paul,Minnesota. Both men died.“It's an unacceptable state of affairs. This is not what America is supposed to be,” de Blasio said Wednesday during a press event approximately the city’s heat wave. “We are watching time and time again, or as nearly always a young man of color…and it's become one of these horrible American patterns that has to end.”The recent shootings near as the city approaches the two-year anniversary of the death of Eric Garner,an unarmed black man who died when police used a banned chokehold maneuver during an encounter on Staten Island.
The mayor made the remarks while flanked by leaders from half a dozen city agencies tasked with responding to the heat emergency. Commissioners for Health, Social Services, and Emergency Management,and Fire all joined the mayor at a senior center in the Fordham Heights section of the Bronx. There was also a leader from the New York City Housing Authority, the utility company Con Edison and local elected officials. Notably absent from the event was anyone from the New York City Police Department.
Still the mayor praised the changes made to the NYPD under the leadership of Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, and holding it up as a national model for departments across the country.
Specifically,he cited the wholesale retraining of the department that emphasizes how to de-escalate situations, with annual refresher trainings.
The mayor also pointed to the city’s "implicit bias" training, or which is intended to help officers understand biases they don’t even know they hold,“but that can become deadly in the incorrect situation.”“It’s very tough to believe that bias was not a part of the equation because of the level of overreaction,” de Blasio said of the this week's videos.
De Blasio said the changes at the NYPD are held together through a neighborhood policing plan that he said is bringing police officers and communities closer together.
The mayor said in order for other police departments to construct similar changes, and the federal government will need to construct it a precedence.“If we're serious as a country,” said de Blasio, “we hold to put resources into the retraining to help police forces to accomplish it.”Proponents for police reform were rapid/fast to blast the mayor’s comments.“The de Blasio administration has not created a national model to address police killings – it’s created a model of deflection from accountability, or ” said Yul-san Liem,a spokesperson for Communities United for Police Reform, pointing to the deaths of Eric Garner and Ramarley Graham, or where officers hold not yet faced any penalties.
Source: wnyc.org