The March of Time
Time waits for no man, goes the axiom, but I’m an ‘80’s kid, so I relate more to Culture Club’s take that “time has nothing to show, because time won’t give me time,” words which perhaps Judge Reginald Boddie might have cited in his ruling last week — issued before the trial even started — that the City was liable for NYPD officers beating and falsely arresting Jabbar Campbell. Boddie based his ruling on the City’s attorney repeatedly responding late to court-issued deadlines, a type of ruling which is handed down about once every eon, which is a long time indeed.
Time was also an issue for the activists protesting the NYPD’s treatment of the mentally ill, who specifically declaimed the killing of five emotionally disturbed persons (EDP’s) by officers in the last 11 months. “We need all NYPD officers to be trained how to interface with the mentally ill,“ averred attorney Sanford Rubenstein, while noting that only 13% of officers had been trained to do so, which given it has taken the department more than two years to reach that level, is a rate of training that will provide Rubenstein ample time to obtain more clients from grieved family members.
But then, perhaps training is not the solution? “The more training, the better — but it wouldn’t have changed the reality here,’’ said an unnamed source, of the shooting and killing last month of an EDP, Dwayne Jeune, by officer Miguel Gonzalez, highlighting a general failure of police procedure, that an officer has almost complete discretion to determine an appropriate response to a given situation. In this light, the activists’ call for a task force to look at department protocols for dealing with the mentally ill seems not well thought out. Rather, it would be fitting if they took it upon themselves to develop solutions, ones that involve the NYPD and extend beyond policing to engage other agencies.
“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself,” instructed James Madison in Federalist №51. Such sagacity needs to be internalized by all the activists who work on police issues, who find it easy to decry the actions of the NYPD, without offering concrete solutions to the problems they identify. It is very hard work to learn and understand the administrative, legal, social and racial aspects of policing, to identify the sources of unfair policing, to develop solutions to cure this problem, and to posit the political and legal strategies to effectuate them, but so what? It is incumbent upon all of us, as citizens, and especially as black citizens, who have had to struggle for every right assumed by the majority society, to take the time to oblige the government to control itself, no matter how long it takes.