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WEIGHING IN – Just after 11 a.m. last Monday, Schenectady police found 30-year-old Philomen Henry shot dead inside a Crane Street home. The slaying marked Schenectady’s first homicide of the year, and now police are searching for answers.
A day later, two Saratoga County Sheriff’s deputies were shot by a 23-year-old subject of a six-month, four-warrant U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration investigation. The deputies took on fire as soon as they entered a Clifton Park apartment, with one deputy shot in the thigh, shattering a femur, and another struck in the chest. The deputy hit in the leg needed surgery; the deputy shot in the chest wasn’t seriously harmed because the bullet ricocheted off body armor.
As Saratoga County Sheriff Michael Zurlo said at a news conference: “There are no words to sufficiently describe how grateful I am this is only a press conference and not a eulogy.”
All in all, it was a trying week for local officers. Back-to-back days in which Schenectady faced its first homicide and Saratoga County Sheriff’s deputies were shot are as real a reminder as any that members of law enforcement have demanding jobs.
Around the country and in our own communities, police officers have faced appropriate scrutiny in recent years, amplified following the senseless and disturbing murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which occurred three years ago last week. Sadly, that incident remains part of a troubling, ongoing trend of deaths coming at the hands of officers who are supposed to provide protection.
But even as police conduct absolutely must be held accountable, weeks like this past one in our area are reminders of the bravery and resolve that go into a typical shift. Accordingly, we should consider the ways in which some of our national conversations around policing are having a detrimental impact on actual police work as we also recognize how far we still have to go three years out from Floyd’s murder.
By many measures, policing has become more dangerous since the spring of 2020. In fact, the number of officers shot in the line of duty is up 52% from May of 2020, according to the Fraternal Order of Police.
But more than just police work becoming more perilous, departments have been hampered as a result of criticism leveled at them.
Notably, recruitment and retention have been much tougher in the past three years.
A recent survey of 182 law enforcement agencies by the Police Executive Research Forum revealed that even though police departments’ recruitment is now up since a 2020 downturn, departments have faced a 47% increase in resignations and a 19% increase in retirements in 2022 compared to 2019.
“Multiple experts attribute the recruiting challenge – that fewer people are willing to be police officers in 2023 – to increased external scrutiny and reputational harm to the overall profession,” according to an April ABC News piece that reported on this survey.
Local forces such as Schenectady have dealt with this dynamic directly.
Schenectady Police Chief Eric Clifford told me that in Schenectady County, the number of people taking the written screening test is a 10th of what it was roughly a decade ago.
“I think what’s happened over the last three years is less people are interested in the job,” Clifford said. “The last three years the dialogue that you’ve seen on mass media has really told young individuals that might be thinking of that pathway to really rethink it, to say, ‘Do I want to put myself out there?’ ”
Meanwhile, our Tyler A. McNeil reported this week that Fulton County’s road patrols have shrunk by half since last May as a result of fewer recruits and increased retirements.
With hiring lagging and departures piling up, departments struggle to meet the needs of a community, impacting everything from how much time officers can walk a beat to how long they can interact with the public.
“It really has ripples all the way through the organization,” Clifford said.
Staffing struggles also lead to further disparities between wealthier jurisdictions that can attract and keep more police officers by paying higher salaries and less affluent districts with limited resources. As a result, some agencies may be forced to accept weaker police candidates, which can diminish the quality of the police work – from slower resolutions of cases to more hostile interactions with the public.
And, thus, problem policing persists.
So, no, we cannot and must not ignore what police body cam footage continues to reveal. We can’t ignore the continued police brutality, including in Colorado, where a family was just awarded a $19 million settlement after a sheriff’s deputy killed a 22-year-old man dealing with a mental-health crisis in 2022.
We can’t ignore the fact that the culture of aggressive cops needs to disappear, as argued by Colby College sociology professor and former California cop Neil Gross in a Time column published on the May 25 anniversary of Floyd’s death.
“Although many police officers – most, perhaps – do their difficult jobs admirably and well, incidents of egregious abuse are all too common and police reform has proved an elusive goal,” Gross wrote.
We can’t ignore the need for that reform, even as Gross seems to believe the impact of it will be negligible. We need to continue to change training practices so that cops are routinely considering implicit biases, looking to de-escalate, and not taught to treat every traffic stop as if it’s the start of a war.
But we also can’t forget that cops have stressful and emotionally fraught jobs that require them to be everything from mental-health care providers to medics in addition to crime solvers.
We have to remember that their hard weeks are especially hard, with stakes that are literally life and death.
We should remember, too, the progress we’ve seen. For instance, in Schenectady recent reforms include working to provide antiracism training for all officers, the addition of a mental-health professional to the force, as well as new body cameras and other technology to increase transparency, such as patrol-mapping software that should promote more equitable policing.
Lastly, we should remember that most cops want to support their communities.
Three years ago, Schenectady’s Chief Clifford made national news when he and fellow cops knelt with Black Lives Matter activists. A video taken by former Gazette reporter Pete DeMola of Clifford marching with activists while holding a sign reading “Black Lives Matter Period!!” went viral.
Clifford said if he had the opportunity to do it again, he would.
“I was taking a knee with community members who were suffering,” he told me.
Three years ago, Clifford told DeMola it was a symbolic moment. “You could hear the cheers as soon as we took a knee. And simultaneously, you could feel everyone take a deep breath; the tension was cut, and things changed.”
Three years later, too little has changed.
But even as tough times continue, we should all support each other as we hope for better weeks ahead.
Columnist Andrew Waite can be reached at [email protected] and at 518-417-9338 Follow him on Twitter @UpstateWaite.
Categories: -News-, Andrew Waite, Email Newsletter, News, Opinion, Opinion, Schenectady, Schenectady County
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See Waite you will never understand, people like you blame the police rather than the criminal. Almost every death by cops is because the offender does not comply. Comply don’t die. There were 4,530,000 arrests in 2021 and 1048 people shot and killed by police that is .000231% that’s a little over a thousand killed by police with 4.5 million arrests and that number is even smaller because police/civilian interactions are at least 20 times that. Liberals like you never tell the whole story just the parts they want you to hear.