NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- The NYPD’s new Chief of Training is revamping and retooling the way police officers do their jobs.
Kenneth Corey took the helm at the NYPD’s Training Bureau at the beginning of the month. His goal? To improve interpersonal communication skills, whether cops are making car stops, speaking to a victim or getting into a confrontational situation.
1010 WINS’ Juliet Papa spoke with Corey about his new role.
Papa: I understand you have a new class. Tell me how many, and what you’re doing out in College Point, Queens at the Academy.
Corey: We were very fortunate. We were able to hire a class of 900 new recruits, that was back in the first week of November, Nov. 2. They started, and they’re well now into their roughly 6-month-long training regimen at the Academy, where they get a whole bunch of different disciplines. Obviously they learn about law and police science, and social science, and firearms and tactics, and we get them into great shape working in the gym. And then we add in all kinds of stuff that we’ve done over the last few years, like crisis intervention training and deescalation. And we bring it all together really well in this highly-structured environment for them.
What you think needs to change in this pandemic environment, in this environment where police maybe are seen as a hostile presence in a neighborhood? What do you do, what do you look at, what do you think to change in this training, or what do you think you can enhance in this training?
So, we’ve started a whole top-to-bottom review of all of our training. Our training goes well beyond just the entry training that people think of at the Police Academy. It continues throughout an officer’s career. Our civilian members, our school safety agents, our traffic agents all get some sort of in-service training. Much like a lot of different professions have continuing education, so do we. So we’ve started to do a top-to-bottom review of that, and that’s not looking just at what we teach, but how we deliver the training and who delivers it.
So right now we are lining up some academic institutions, to help us do that, to review the curriculum, make sure that it’s the most relevant, that it’s the absolute best that it can be, and at the same time, we’re starting to take all of these pieces of new things that we’ve introduced in the last few years — like we’ve talked about de-escalation, crisis intervention — and bring it all together into other areas of training. So that when we run recruits through different scenarios, we’re hitting all of those facets in a lot of different ways. It’s not just a standalone class that they have. We show them the actual value of it in practical experience.
We’ve had Black Lives Matter demonstrations, we’ve had protests in general recently, in May, June, July. There’s been some violence. How do you pivot, on some of this training, from what you’ve learned from those experiences?
Coming off of what we saw back in late May and early June, in particular, we re-trained nearly our entire patrol force in disorder control tactics, using lessons that we learned from that. So that’s not just the physical tactics of… making a line, and how to safely disperse a crowd, but again, hitting back on those communication skills and the deescalation. Listen, we’re not perfect. Our officers are human beings. Once in a while, somebody does get under their skin, and we try to give them tools on how to prevent that from happening, and really effectively communicate with anyone they’re dealing with, be it a demonstrator, be it a crime victim, or whomever.
So give me an example. There’s a protester in an officer’s face, and they spit in the officer’s face or they hit them. What is the response to something like that, if it’s something that’s violent or can put them in physical danger?
Anytime somebody puts their hands on a police officer, if somebody punches them, if somebody spits at them, that person is going to be placed under arrest. There is no space for that. That is not peaceful protest. That goes well beyond First Amendment speech. We want that officer to be able to take that person into custody very quickly, and using the bare minimum of force necessary. In that particular instance, what would be the bare minimum of force? Grabbing somebody’s arm, placing them in handcuffs, and that’s it. And if it needs to escalate beyond that then, again, using only the very minimal amount of force necessary. And that’s what we teach them. Force is a last resort, and when we’re going to use it, we’re going to start with the bare minimum and work our way up.
You’ve had success on Staten Island. You’ve been able to reach out to the community. You’ve been working with community organizations, church groups. What do you attribute your success to, and how are you able to communicate to these groups? What is the end product of that?
I’ve had a lot of different assignments throughout my career in the police department, and I lost count somewhere along the way…. But I’ve worked in a lot of different areas of the police department. And engaging with the community in almost every one of those has been critical.
[There was] a lot of tension in Staten Island coming off of the death of Eric Garner, and the aftermath of that. So one of the first things I did was, I reached out to different community leaders, and we sat down and we talked. And that circle expanded as I got to meet other people, and I had pretty much a standard line when people would ask me, "Well could you sit down and talk to these people?" And would tell them, "I will talk to anyone anytime anywhere. Just invite me and I’ll show up." And we had a lot of conversations.
And I’ll be honest with you, some of those conversations were really uncomfortable conversations. I remember standing in front of a room with young men, formerly incarcerated, for about two hours while they peppered me with questions. I didn’t leave the room with two dozen new friends, but I think that we all left the room with a different perspective. And it’s really hard to hate someone when you’re sitting across the table engaging in dialogue. What was the key to that, for me? It was honesty, it was transparency, and availability. Talking to people, being blunt, being candid, being honest, and being as transparent as I could with them.
I try to just give them the facts, and this is where communication comes back in. There’s a lot of misconceptions about what the police do, what we can do, what we can’t do. So when we look at that, and have these conversations with people, and we explain to them why we’re doing something, the rationale for doing it, and really what the purpose is at the end of the day, that’s when you start to get to the point that we all realize that we have a common goal. And the common goal is safety. We all want a safe place to live, a safe place to work, a safe place to raise our children. We may not always agree on the same path to get there, but that’s where we all want to be at the end of the day.
I know the department had a listening tour in all the boroughs. What was your takeaway from that? What did you learn from hearing from residents, and members of the community, and organizations who came there?
I found them all very interesting. Some of it was people venting. They came there, they said what they had to say, maybe a criticism, maybe a little harsher than that, not a lot constructive to take away. But there were a lot of other people who had some really good, constructive ideas. And some of that we’ll certainly work into training. And we’re engaging with groups all across the city even now, beyond those listening tours. Groups of community stakeholders. And we’re taking all of that back and seeing, "Okay, what parts of this can we change, what parts of this can we adapt?" And like I said, there’s some people out there with some really great ideas.
What do you think is the biggest shift in focus, or in training, that you can make, or mindset, for the new officers going out there, and the seasoned officers that have to maybe look at things a little differently?
Coming out of these listening sessions and some of the groups that we’ve had, it all boils down to communication. Now that’s a really big umbrella, right? But interpersonal communication. And particularly with some of our younger officers who, they don’t communicate with anyone the way that you and I did. They don’t converse. Everything is digital. They’re doing it on an app, they’re doing it by text message. How do you sit down with a crime victim, or… somebody that you stopped for a traffic violation, and how do you engage in that conversation with them when it’s something that you’ve really never done before in your life? Giving them those interpersonal communication skills that we know that officers, historically, have learned over time. Detectives are much more effective at sitting down and interviewing crime victims than patrol officers are. Why? Because they’ve done more of it, and because we’ve taught them more. Bringing some of that in, and teaching our younger officers up front how to be better communicators, how to listen to people, how to give people the opportunity to speak and really have their own voice heard. And I think that will go a long way.
What does this new class look like, diversity-wise, men and women-wise, what are we talking about here? These are new, young people in the city. Are they from in the city? Outside the city?
It’s a mix of all of the above. It’s very diverse and our classes, certainly over the last 10 or 15 years have been very diverse. They represent the city. It’s not a perfect representation of the demographics of the city. We need to do better in many areas, particularly in recruiting more Black men to join the police department. Women, the number of women in the police department has grown fairly steadily. It’s about 21 percent women now. Big changes from when I started 30 years ago. A number of those officers in there, a significant number, speak more than one language, as native speakers, which is also a tremendous asset in a multicultural city like New York.
How do you get more Black men to join the police department?
That is a challenge that the entire profession is struggling with and has struggled with for many years. A lot of that comes from building trust. A lot of that comes from… allowing them to see law enforcement as a viable profession. We’re engaging with a lot of different groups. There’s a phenomenal group of young people on Staten Island, they call themselves the "Young Leaders of Staten Island." They emerged out of these protests. They formed together in the wake of the protests back in May and June, and they’re in that age demographic that we have such a hard time connecting with. Eighteen to 24. And we’ve had so many great conversations with them, and our recruitment people, and our community affairs people, and I know that there’s other groups like that all over the city that we engage with. And they really need to tell us where we’re going wrong and how we can engage better with young Black men so that they see law enforcement as a viable profession.
Gun violence has been on the rise. You have your officers out there, and you have the seasoned people out there, the anti-crime unit is gone. Everything is reconfigured. How do you train people who have to confront armed individuals in dealing with this violence and protecting the community? Is there a new methodology in dealing with this?
This comes back to what we were talking about before with those scenarios, and the training that our officers receive at firearms and tactics and how to keep themselves safe, how to keep other people safe. Is there new methodology? No, there’s not. But they have options. And they have options that didn’t exist years ago. Some of that is communication, some of it is better equipment that didn’t exist years ago in terms of protection for themselves. Some of it is devices like tasers, which are more widespread, which didn’t exist years ago. And it’s not just giving them the equipment now. Now it’s really showing them where it has value, right? So when we run them through these different scenarios, years ago, or when I went through the Police Academy, those scenarios were, “Shoot, or don’t shoot.” It’s not like that anymore. Now you have a variety of tools in the tool box. Which option are you going to use in this particular scenario?
When we put the officers in these scenarios, the scenario that we run them through may last 15 or 20 seconds, followed by 10 minutes of critique. “Well, what did you see? What were you feeling? Do you think you could have done something different? Do you think you could have elicited a little more information up-front from the victim and maybe made different choices?” All of that to get them thinking.