The death of P.O. Omar Edwards was a tragedy. No, not more of a tragedy than the unnecessary death of so many others at the hands of police officers who shot first and asked questions later, but a tragedy nonetheless. The difference this time is that police feel something in the aftermath of one of their own being killed, where the death of others is an excuse to check the rap sheet first and explain why he deserved it anyway. They can’t play that game here.
But it looks like the New York Police Department might actually be open to doing something meaningful as a result of this tragedy, something all the marches and protests have been useless in accomplishing. From the New York Times :
Police officials were already moving on Sunday to change police training and to seek fresh ideas for preventing a repetition of the interracial killings of one officer by another that have claimed the lives of several black officers dating to 1940.
Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, said the department was immediately scrapping scheduled police training on courtroom testimony and replacing it with “confrontation training” — encounters like the one between Officer Dunton, who was with two other white officers in an unmarked patrol car, and Officer Edwards, who was in civilian clothes, and had drawn his gun while pursuing a man he had found breaking into his car on an East Harlem street.
According to the article, it appears that the police department, for the first time ever, is seriously re-evaluating its policies and seeking to find a real answer to how to prevent this from happening again.
“This is the first time I am hearing the department saying, ‘We need help,’ ” [State Senator and former police officer, Eric Adams] said, adding, “I believe the commissioner sees how large this problem is.”The focus is on how to prevent an off-duty cop, and particularly a black off-duty cop (noting that this doesn’t seem to be nearly as much of a problem with white off-duty cops) from being shot and killed. No one, at least for now, is considering the problem of killing innocent blacks (or whites, for that matter) who don’t happen to also be cops. That, apparently, still falls under the collateral damage theory in the war on crime. Unfortunate but unavoidable.
One might view this from the cynical perspective, but it strikes me as a start. If they can’t even figure out how not to kill their own, there isn’t a chance in the world that they can figure out how to not kill others. Changing the police mindset has to start down the path from somewhere. At least this may present a start.
No one has yet to come up with a solution. I certainly don’t have one. But the fact that the people who have the power to change things are, for the first time, recognizing that a problem exists and seriously seeking a better way is promising. Maybe, just maybe, once they figure out how not to kill black cops, they can figure out how not to kill other people. Maybe.
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Rubber bullets.