Speaking before the New York City Council Monday morning, police Commissioner William Bratton told lawmakers that for the first time in the city’s history, the NYPD would begin requiring its officers to undergo additional tactical training each year – “refresher courses” with a renewed focus on de-escalating encounters and treating citizens with respect, even during arrests.
“The verbal and physical tactics necessary to assess and control a situation are perishable skills,” Mr. Bratton said. “We cannot reasonably expect police officers to maintain those skills on the basis of the training they receive as academy recruits, without regular refreshers to keep them current and sharp.”
The announcement of the department’s new annual “in service” training comes less than two months after Eric Garner, a 350-pound black man, died allegedly at the hands of New York police. Mr. Garner, who resisted arrest, was subdued in an apparent chokehold that has been banned by police policy since 1993.
The arrest was vividly captured by bystanders’ smart-phone videos and led to another summer of simmering tensions between the NYPD and the city’s black and Latino residents.
The tension in New York became more acute a few weeks after Garner’s death, too, following the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. That death roiled the nation and put a spotlight on police tactics in minority neighborhoods around the country.