Looking beyond training: Race and police culture
Brooklyn’s borough president shares his history, experience and solutions
Brooklyn and the nation are grappling with visceral issues of police brutality and cases of police-involved killings. In Brooklyn, two officers await trial on charges stemming from an incident involving an assault on an unarmed black teen, and the borough’s district attorney weighs the decision of whether to charge a rookie police officer in the shooting death of unarmed black man Akai Gurley.
These cases place Brooklyn in the center of a nationwide conversation of how police officers interact with minorities — a conversation that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams expanded on in a New York Times op-ed last week.
“[T]he training taught in police academies across the country is not being applied in communities of color,” Adams wrote in the op-ed. “After six months in the police academy, that instruction is effectively wiped out by six days of being taught by veteran cops on the streets.”