Riding with the Ramapo PD

 

Like many stories about members of Generation X, this one involves Facebook. Danny Hyman and I both grew up in the town of Ramapo, New York. We went to junior high and high school together, but we didn’t really become friends until the summer of 1984. That year we were both 17, and worked as junior counselors for the youngest boys at Surprise Lake Camp, a sleepaway camp just over the Bear Mountain Bridge in Putnam. As co-workers we shared a cabin with two other junior counselors.

            I could have told you then that Danny would become a cop. One Friday night, when we were both off work Danny and I took two of our female colleagues in his car for a trip out of camp. As the driver he got to set the itinerary, so we went back to Ramapo to show off our home town. We encountered a car crash on Route 45 and Danny pulled over to help, springing into action (deploying his training from the Spring Hill Ambulance Corps, for whom he was a volunteer) with a first aid kit that he kept handy for just such occasions. We never got another date with those two young ladies, but it was a memorable evening.

            Danny, following in the footsteps of his dad, a NYC firefighter, joined the NYPD, and is now Captain Daniel Hyman of the Town of Ramapo Police Department. My life path meandered a bit, but I eventually settled nearby. I live with my wife and daughter in New Jersey and teach in the History Department at Brooklyn College (my specialty is the history of China). Danny and I have only seen each other two or three times in 3D space since high school, but like many fifty-somethings we have seen a lot of each other on Facebook in recent years.

            That is how I got the invitation to come ride along on patrol with one of Ramapo’s finest. As is true of many college professors, I am liberal in my politics and free with my opinions. I shared the widespread sorrow and outrage of much of the nation at the murder of George Floyd. Those feelings, and the larger movement for police reform that grew out of them, inspired the Facebook post that brought Danny and I together in non-virtual space again.

            On December 5, 2020 U.S. Army Second Lt. Caron Nazario was pulled over by Officers Joe Guttierez and Daniel Crocker of the town police force in Windsor, Virginia. The officers had signaled Nazario to stop because they did not see the dealer plates taped into the rear window of his new vehicle. Nazario, who is black, on realizing he was being pulled over, led the police for a mile until he could pull into a well-lit service station. Gutierrez and Crocker approached Nazario’s stopped car with guns drawn and began to dress him down in very belligerent, blatantly disrespectful tones. Despite the fact that Nazario remained calm and respectful at all times (he persistently asked why he had been pulled over, but never raised his voice or directed insulting remarks at the officers themselves), he eventually was pepper sprayed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed.

            Video of the incident became public in April of last year, as a result of a lawsuit that Nazario brought against the police. At one point in the video Nazario tells Officer Guttierez that he is afraid, to which Guttierez responds “You should be.” On seeing the video, I posted to Facebook: I can think of many appropriate responses a police officer might offer when a citizen says, “I’m afraid.” “You should be” would top the “don’t” list.

            Danny commented on that post. He didn’t defend any of the conduct depicted in the video, but warned against leaping to conclusions or accepting facile arguments to “defund the police.” At the end of a friendly exchange he extended an invitation for me to join one of the officers of the Town of Ramapo police on patrol: “I think you will have a new perspective, and so will the officer.” I didn’t need any convincing.

            That was how I found myself putting on a bullet-proof vest to join Officer Sean Baird on patrol at 4:00 PM of Friday, August 6, 2021. At the roll call for that evening, near the lieutenant’s podium, was a plush toy raccoon with a coffee can on its head, a gag teasing one of the officers who had been acknowledged by PETA after rescuing a wild raccoon found in just that condition. Most of the discussion at roll call involved the ins and outs of a new computer reporting system that the department had just adopted and that many of the officers would be using for the first time that night.

As we set out in his cruiser after roll call, Sean explained that Friday nights in Ramapo, the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, are expected to be quiet. Much of the town belongs to what the police refer to as “The Community”: the patchwork of Hasidic and Modern Orthodox Jewish groups that have settled in and around the village of Monsey, which houses the Hasidic settlement known as New Square (i.e. New “Skver,” the shtetl from which a former chief rabbi first led his followers in the last century).

The Community has all but displaced the society of non-orthodox Jews among whom I grew up. The Pomona Jewish Center, a Conservative synagogue in which many of my high school friends became bar mitzvah, has been sold and converted into a Zoroastrian fire temple. Temple Beth El, the Reform synagogue that I attended, has been razed and the property converted into multi-family dwellings. Across the street from where Beth El used to stand, Ramapo Senior High School, my alma mater, is in an advanced state of decay. Once one of the finest public high schools in New York state, now trees are growing through the broken bleachers on the athletic field.

The town is much changed since I last lived there, and at times while Sean and I drove through on patrol I did not recognize stretches which had been old haunts when I was a teen. One thing that has not changed is the social and economic diversity of Ramapo as a whole. Though the Community now accounts for a full half of the town’s population, the rest of its residents form a vibrant mix of Haitian, Asian, and Spanish-speaking communities. On the wealth scale Ramapo contains some of the wealthiest families in America and some neighborhoods that have persisted in poverty since I was a child.

Early signs pointed to an atypically busy Friday night. Sean responded to a domestic disturbance call, a woman who, it turned out, wanted the help of police in disciplining her son. As I waited in the foyer and watched Sean and his colleagues deal with the situation patiently and courteously, I had my first window onto another world. For the police, none of the boundaries of privacy or intimacy that we ordinary citizens take for granted apply. Their experience of living in a community is completely different than almost any of its other residents.

This was reinforced for me as I drove the town later with Sean as my guide. “A teenager was shot and killed over there,” he said, pointing to a makeshift memorial set up at a stop sign on a street that looked almost identical to the one on which I grew up. I wondered what the police could have told me about what went on in the houses in my neighborhood, back when I was in grade school.

            The most illuminating moment of the night for me was when we responded to a distress call at a public housing project in one of the town’s low-income neighborhoods. An older woman had been trying to contact her sister without success. We arrived with another officer to find the woman waiting outside the door of her sister’s apartment. Neighbors reported that they had not seen or heard from the sister in several days.

            Other officers arrived, including Lieutenant Dolan, the squadron commander. While we waited for the building superintendent to bring a skeleton key, Sean made a point of taking down the woman’s contact information. It was a keen instinct.

            When the super arrived, Sean and other officers entered the building as the Lieutenant and I waited outside with the woman. The Lieutenant’s personal radio registered a call for a medical team, and he ran in to join the others. Emerging from the building a few minutes later, he urged the woman who had placed the distress call to sit down. Her sister had passed away.

            The moment was not loud or flashy. It would not have been deemed worthy of an episode of Cops. But it was about as good an embodiment as one could ask for of what the job of policing entails, and of what the police mean for our society in the abstract.

            As the woman began to weep and the officers around her consoled her, I was seized by the distress of having intruded upon a stranger’s private grief, and having little to offer by way of help or comfort. I realized that this is a small taste of what the police deal with constantly. Much of the general discussion of police work focuses on the risks officers face, but what distinguishes the job more than danger is the virtual certainty that your working days will bring you repeatedly into contact with people you do not know at some of the worst moments of their lives.

           That type of pressure requires a particular kind of temperament, skill set, and training. It may seem a small thing, but think of how much worse the moment would have been for the woman who had placed the call if Sean had not taken her contact information before she had learned of the loss of her sister. Extrapolate from that to a scenario in which a citizen, rather than grieving, is confused, violent or even dangerous, and you can appreciate how much of a difference the training and character of an individual police officer can make to the life of a community.

          In a more abstract sense, the scene encapsulated a basic truth about police work: often the law needs to be enforced even when no law has been broken. There will always be a need for some authority that can guarantee the rights, privacy, and dignity of those who cannot do so for themselves. In this sense, a civil society without police is more than a fantasy, it is an impossibility.  Moments like the one I witnessed expose the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of calls to abolish the police, or slogans such as “all cops are bastards.”

            One of the best opportunities the night afforded me was to spend time with Sean and get a sense of his impressions of the job. Though he is fifteen years my junior, we share much in common. Like me he grew up in Ramapo and studied history in college, even working for a time as a teacher after graduation.

             Sean told me he loves his work, and nothing I saw that night made me doubt that. When I asked him what aspect of his career made him most proud, he spoke of his involvement with community policing, especially his contributions to programs that educate children about safety and civic life. When I asked him about his greatest regrets, he described the many occasions on which he was confronted by teens who committed serious crimes. This aspect of the job weighed heavily on his mind, and I would be surprised if in this he is not very typical of many career police officers.

            In the same way that police officers are confronted with tragedy on an almost daily basis, in the natural course of their work they are guaranteed to be asked to deal with the worst problems of the community at large. The point at which a seventeen-year-old is holding a loaded handgun is a moment of total social failure. There is no happy resolution to that crisis: the best that the police can do is to work toward the least bad outcome. Here again character and training make all the difference.

            All of these aspects of police work explain why the current moment of tension is no surprise. The police exist at a boundary where many of the problems and pressures of our society converge, so it is no wonder that their work has the potential to become politically fraught in the best of times, much less in a period of rising tension and conflict. This is not to minimize the current problem. My time with the Ramapo Police did not change my sense of the need for police reform. But it did confirm me in an impression that had been building in my mind for some time.

            We ask police to combine some part of the expertise of a lawyer, a soldier, a social worker, and an emergency medical technician. This obviously makes it a job of above-average difficulty and skill, yet the average salary for police officers is $67,000/year, the exact average of that for professional workers generally. Opportunities for overtime pay can make a police career more lucrative than average, but relying on overtime as an incentive and reward comes at a cost. Is it fair to demand that an officer work overtime to attain her work’s fair worth, and then expect that she will consistently give us “the least bad outcome” when she is called upon to deal with the kinds of tragic social crises that are part and parcel of the job?

            In the end we have to get beyond the narratives that cast police officers as either heroes or villains. They are people, and as a society we need them to do a difficult job. Any movement to improve the parameters of police work nationwide thus must come at the problem from two directions at once. Reforms to increase police accountability, such as body cameras and changes to rules governing police immunity, are sensible in principle. But any program that neglects the need to boost recruitment and improve the basic conditions of police work is fundamentally misguided.

I am not certain how far apart Danny and I were in our exchange on Facebook in the spring, or whether my night on patrol brought us any closer. If forced, I would guess that I remain slightly more enthusiastic about the idea of police reform than he is. But of one thing I came away firmly certain: anyone interested in police reform could do worse than going to the Town of Ramapo and studying what they are doing right.