SOME MESSY ISSUES AFTER A FAMILIAR TRAGITY “WILL LAW ENFORCEMENT BE TRUSTED BY THE BLACK COMMUNITY”

Detective Christopher Ridley

Although the full story surrounding the brief career and violent death of Christopher Ridley, the young Mount Vernon police officer cut down by "friendly fire" police bullets in January, has yet to unfold publicly, key law enforcement officials are already looking to changes they hope will help prevent future tragedies.

Mount Vernon police plan to double the instruction that officers now receive in how to conduct themselves in confrontations between uniformed police and fellow officers who may be off-duty, undercover or otherwise in plain clothes - an area certain to garner attention in the probe of how Ridley was killed; he died Jan. 25, shot by brother police officers as he tried to make an off-duty arrest in White Plains.

"I intend to have that training twice a year now and I intend to have that training not lumped in with all the other training," David Chong, the Mount Vernon commissioner, told The Editorial Board. Since the 1990s, the city has provided such confrontation training as a supplement to instruction that all personnel receive in the Westchester County Police Academy. "By separating it from the routine, you're giving something special attention," Chong said.

In Westchester County, Public Safety Commissioner Thomas Belfiore has called for a top-to-bottom review of use-of-force and confrontation training, both for members of the department and academy cadets. His officers fired the fatal barrage at a gun-wielding Ridley, who was in street clothes and mistaken for an assailant. The county oversees the 20-weeks-long academy, which serves 43 departments. "We don't want this to happen again," said Belfiore. He wants a study group to report back in the next 60 days.

Both departments are under pressure to respond - even before all the facts are known - to what has become a too familiar nightmare, when a plainclothes officer, usually black, is mistaken for a criminal and shot by fellow police. "We never thought (these kinds of incidents) would come in our backyard," said Damon K. Jones, a county corrections officer and executive director of the Westchester Chapter of the National Black Police Association. "Now that it is here, we have an opportunity to be in the forefront of this."

Since the Ridley shooting, Jones and representatives of other groups representing black police officers have been highly critical of law enforcement, in both public statements and media interviews. A common complaint is that ingrained stereotypes that correlate blacks with criminality place minority officers at added risk when they act out of uniform. Jones has called for more community policing, better representation of blacks throughout department ranks, as well as more tactical and diversity training.

"We have to rise above our biases," said Jones, who applauds past efforts by the New York City Police Department, after a similar (but nonfatal) friendly fire shooting of a black undercover officer in the mid-1990s, to foster better understanding of the problem. That effort included updating training tapes and other material so they also depicted racial minorities, not just whites. There were also forums featuring minority police officers speaking about their experiences on the force. "That's good. That could work," Jones said. "You need that kind of discussion. . . . If that's not the case, we may have more Christopher Ridleys."

Charles Billups, chairman of the Grand Council of Guardians, which represents black officers in the New York Police Department, called for stepped-up training as well. "The (NYPD) has come a long way," Billups said. "The suburbs are behind what's going on in the city." He told a gathering of the Westchester NBPA last weekend: "We need to do something."

Seven weeks after Ridley's death, only the basic details of what transpired have been made public. The most elemental facts are that Ridley was wielding a gun, in plainclothes and trying to make an off-duty arrest - in a jurisdiction not his own -after interceding in a violent altercation between two men. During a struggle between Ridley and the alleged aggressor, a weapon was discharged; county officers then converged on the scene, on Court Street near the county social services offices; they fired on Ridley, purportedly after he did not respond to their commands to drop his weapon.

Ret. NYPD Detective Roger L. Abel, Northeast regional president of the NBPA and a student of such friendly fire shootings, said black officers out of uniform are particularly vulnerable under such circumstances. He faults the officers' colleagues: "They don't think of you as a police officer." He added: "Training is never a factor. Training is excellent. The problem is in executing the training."

Yet it is hardly self-evident at this juncture just what might have made a difference during those frantic moments in White Plains -both for the 23-year-old Ridley and the police officers who let loose the fatal barrage. While a grand jury inquiry continues, officials have divulged very little about what transpired. Those details - derived from all the logical whos? whys? wheres? and hows? - will help inform, in a way the unavoidable racial elements of the tragedy cannot fully, how we came to lose one of Mount Vernon's finest, and how future heartache can be prevented.

A rare event
Not many police officers die as Christopher Ridley did. Nationwide, according to FBI statistics, 32 law enforcement officers were killed in accidental shootings between 1997-2006, the latest available data. Of that total, 19 died from cross-fire, firearm mishaps, and what the FBI refers to as "mistaken for subject" shootings. (The FBI does not breakdown the numbers any further.) By contrast, twice as many officers were killed in aircraft accidents (39) and four times as many (81) were killed directing traffic or assisting motorists.

But the circumstance of black officers being shot by fellow cops - by all accounts, black officers are the runaway leaders in this category of travesty - has searing, independent significance. For blacks within and beyond police departments, such shootings rub the same nerves already rubbed raw by the high-profile fatal police shootings of civilians Amadou Diallo, Timothy Stansbury Jr. and Ousmane Zongo, all unarmed and unambiguously innocent black men in New York who were mistaken for perpetrators.

The friendly fire shootings of black cops engender even more indignation and pack considerable irony; if a black police officer - someone who clearly runs against stereotype - cannot get a fair shake from the police, the thinking goes, how can other blacks expect any better? (An ongoing trial in Queens, of undercover officers facing criminal charges in the chaotic 2006 shooting death of Sean Bell, will help determine if another name is added to the ranks of Diallo and the others.)
According to Abel, the retired NYPD detective and author of "The Black Shields," a pictorial history and narrative of blacks' experience in policing, some 35 black city officers have been shot at or shot by their white NYPD brethren since 1941, resulting in four fatalities. He said the opposite scenario - a white officer being shot by a black officer - has never occurred. Abel's accounting does not go beyond a black-white paradigm. For example, it does not include the Jan. 28, 2006 shooting death of NYPD patrolman Eric Hernandez, who was the most recent friendly fire casualty prior to Ridley.

The Latino officer, off duty and in civilian clothes, had been beaten by a group of men inside a Bronx restaurant. Once outside, a dazed Hernandez pointed a gun at a man he mistakingly believed to have been involved in the attack. He was shot by a responding police officer, also a Latino, after failing to respond to the officer's pleas to drop his weapon. Police later determined that the shooting officer acted within department guidelines. Hernandez, who grew up in White Plains, was 24. (Of course, Abel's count also does not count Ridley, a black officer fired upon by a multi-racial phalanx of officers: two Hispanics, one white and one black officer.)

Friendly fire shootings can send reverberations throughout a police department. In the District of Columbia in 1995, a pair of friendly fire shootings of plainclothes black officers by white colleagues caused a firestorm that "brought the 7th District to the brink of a racial conflagration," the Washington Post reported.

In February that year, pregnant Detective Lani Jackson-Pinckney, then 33, was shot as she interrupted an attempted carjacking; her fetus survived, but Jackson-Pinckney was partially paralyzed. Months later, in December, James M. McGee Jr., a black officer working undercover, was shot as he trained his weapon on two robbery suspects. Under the official account, an officer converging on the scene ordered McGee to drop his weapon; he fired when McGee started to turn his way. McGee was dead at 26.

"It's going to separate us," a black officer told The Post after the Pinckney shooting. "There's going to be more tension," another officer said. "They [white officers] are so quick to shoot us. I hope it was an honest mistake." More tension arose on July 18, 1998, when the D.C. department lost another black officer to friendly fire; off-duty Thomas Hamlette Jr. was shot by a white officer, also off-duty, who encountered Hamlette and another man engaged in a struggle outside a nightclub.

During the melee, Hamlette's weapon discharged. By the official account, the officer converging on the scene ordered Hamlette to drop the weapon; he fired when Hamlette turned toward the officer. As with the two other D.C. shootings, a department inquiry cleared the shooting officer of any wrongdoing. "The only color of relevance is that both people involved are blue," Executive Assistant Chief Terrance Gainer told The Washington Post.

That assessment was called into question when the dead officer's family - Hamlette Sr. was also a police veteran - later won a $1.2 million settlement to end their civil rights lawsuit against the city. A subsequent investigation by the newspaper revealed numerous lapses in departmental training, failures to meet basic firearms proficiency standards, as well as a poor track record for investigating shootings, despite considerable practice: D.C. police shot and killed more people per capita in the 1990s than any other large city police department.

"All D.C. cops shoot first and ask questions latter," Gregory Lattimer, the Hamlette family attorney, told Washington City Paper. "Especially when the person on the other side of the barrel happens to be a young black man. Black is black. You're black first and a police officer second."

To shoot - or not
Westchester certainly isn't the District of Columbia, which was the "murder capital" of the nation through much of the high-crime 1990s. Nor is it New York City, the safest big city in America, notwithstanding the 497-some murders there in 2007, the fewest since John F. Kennedy was president. But the experience in both locales - the experience framed in such harsh terms by lawyer Lattimer - helps form the prism through which the Ridley tragedy is seen.

"It's not just black propaganda," said Jones of the Westchester NBPA, referring to the perception that blacks are subject to harsher treatment by police - and hence the tragedy that claimed Ridley's life. "People have done studies. This is deep-rooted in the whole theory of policing. And it applies to both blacks and white officers." Former Detective Abel said black police officers pay the price for an attitude he said was common among police, that "it is better to be judged by 12 than carried by six."

That is a jarring assessment, to be sure. But the sentiment, whether widely held or not, does not exist in a vacuum. A 2001 Justice Department report showed that black suspects are five times more likely than white suspects to die "at the hands of police." At the same time, police are five times more likely to be killed by a black suspect than a white suspect, according to the report. Those are messy, uncomfortable facts that have to be a part of any honest discussion about interactions between police and civilians, and confrontations between uniform officers and police in plainclothes - the Ridley scenario.

Relatedly, an important study was published last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "Across the Thin Blue Line: Police Officers and Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot" was notable - numerous news organizations wrote articles about its findings - because it was based upon experimental data of actual police behavior in confrontation situations. (The article notes that findings of numerous other studies "indicate that race can play an important role in decisions about the danger or threat posed by a particular person," but rarely do these inquiries speak directly to what cops do.)

The researchers from the University of Chicago and University of Colorado tested how study participants - Denver police, national police and community representatives - shown video-screen images decided whether to shoot (or not shoot) either black subjects or white subjects who were either armed or unarmed.

Overall, the police outperformed the community sample in key respects; ignoring race, they were faster to make correct shooting decisions, better able to detect a weapon, and they set a higher criterion for the decision to shoot, "indicating a less 'trigger-happy' orientation." Yet both police and community members exhibited "robust racial bias" in response speed. Accurate responses to targets that were congruent with cultural stereotypes (the armed black targets and unarmed white targets) required less time to make than responses to stereotype-incongruent targets (the unarmed black targets and armed white targets). In other words, the participants needed more time to think when they saw images that ran against the grain of their biases or expectations.

Additionally, "when the target was White, all [of the groups] set a relatively high criteria [for shooting], and none of the [groups] differed from one another," the study said. "But when the target was Black, the community set a significantly lower (more trigger-happy) criterion than the officers." The researchers saw good news in this, suggesting that while training may not affect the speed with which someone processes stereotype-incongruent targets (the unarmed black or armed white), training - the kind of training that police receive - does affect the ultimate decision whether to shoot. "The data suggest that the officers' training and/or expertise may improve their overall performance (yielding faster responses, greater sensitivity and reduced tendencies to shoot) and decrease racial bias in decision outcomes."

That is a long way back to what happened in White Plains, but such context is everything if law enforcement, community leaders and the public are to come to any understanding of the overlapping issues that swirled around Ridley when he interceded in the melee in White Plains.
'Unidentified armed person'

Westchester's Public Safety Department has had a written protocol - General Order No. 1.24 - for how officers should conduct themselves in confrontations between uniformed officers and unidentified officers, typically police who are off-duty, undercover or otherwise in civilian clothes. The instruction seeks to choreograph an interaction that, in the absence of any rules, would have incalculable peril for all parties, including members of the public. The policy was put into place on July 31, 2006 - just months after the friendly fire death of the NYPD's Eric Hernandez in the Bronx.

For example, the policy defines as a "challenging officer" the service member who happens upon an "unidentified armed person" - usually someone in civilian clothes. The unidentified officer is the "confronted officer," perhaps someone off-duty, undercover or from another service. Among other things, the policy instructs on tactics: challenging officers are told to take cover and approach an unidentified officer from behind - a strategy that gives both parties more time to react; in many of the friendly fire cases, confronted officers are shot when they turn their bodies to the side.

The policy instructs confronted officers to "remain motionless even if it means a fleeing suspect may escape" and "not to turn (their) body, especially if holding a firearm." It instructs challenging officers to announce "Police! Don't move" to avoid contradictory instructions, and to request that challenging officers tell them exactly where their I.D. is. Confronted officers are told to remain motionless; to identify themselves as police officers; to obey all directions from challenging officers; and how even to produce identification ("slowly, in a controlled manner").
The written protocols became part of formal Westchester Police Academy training with the start of the January 2007 class -a year after Officer Ridley matriculated. Officials familiar with academy training practices prior to the January 2007 academy class insist that confrontation tactics were included in the curriculum.

Since the early 1990s, the Mount Vernon department has had a "confrontation lesson" it includes in the in-service training extended to all Mount Vernon officers. This is the training that Chong, who became commissioner in May 2006, said he would now isolate "and not have it lumped in with all the other training." He said that the department will also conduct such training twice a year.

He declined to share a written copy of the instruction given to Mount Vernon officers, but said that it is "essentially word-for-word" with the NYPD's and Westchester's lesson. Neither he nor any law enforcement official connected with the Ridley matter, including District Attorney Janet DiFiore, would comment on any specifics of the Ridley matter because it remains under investigation.

Speaking generally of the department's training goals, Chong said: "You're dealing with a very highly stressful situation. You want to make everything as mechanical as possible. Train, train, train. Make it as mechanical as possible . . . You want to make it a mechanical reaction." He added: "We have to get people to realize that holding a gun is a dangerous thing to do. And if you're acting as a police officer, you have to think that. You have to think, 'I'm in plain clothes and I have a gun out.' "

What Westchester knows of confrontation training it learned from the NYPD; what the NYPD knows, it learned the hard way. As Roger Abel, the retired NYPD detective recalled, the department had a spate of friendly fire shootings in the 1970s. He said that fellow black officers were being shot at by white police officers - jittery because black radicals, members of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, were shooting at white police. He said that's when the first confrontation guidelines were established. Protesting black officers warned that if nothing changed, "we are going to start shooting back," Abel said. "That's when all these (protocols) came about."

More change came about in the mid-1990s, after black undercover officer Desmond Robinson was shot and injured by a fellow NYPD officer who mistook him for a perpetrator. "Over the years they stopped training as much as they used to, so the problem came back," James Fyfe, a former police officer who helped devise the department's guidelines, said after the Robinson shooting. The well-known criminologist died in 2005. Ironically, Commissioner Chong served in the same bureau with Peter Del-Debbio, the officer who shot Robinson; he was later dismissed from the force. And Westchester Commissioner Belfiore ran the NYPD police academy in the years immediately following the Robinson shooting. He would have helped implement some of the training reforms implemented afterward.

He will have another opportunity now. Deputy Public Safety Commissioner Monte Long will oversee a panel made of top law enforcement officials, representatives of minority police officer groups, academics, community and clergy members charged with reviewing use-of-force and confrontation training, both within the Westchester department and for incoming academy cadets.

"This is something we began working on,'' Belfiore said, "after some of the issues became somewhat apparent by the news reports and witness accounts that there may be some training inferences, or at least have some people take a look at the current training, so we can have this never happen again."

The writer is opinion editor of The Journal News and LoHud.com.