Bill Bratton - The Profession: A Memoir of Policing in America

Turnaround

also by william bratton

Collaborate or Perish! (with Zachary Tumin)

On Saturday, December 20, 2014, Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley woke up in Baltimore and thought about killing himself. Hed been arrested twenty times, his friends had robbed and pistol-whipped him, and his girlfriend had dumped him. He still had her key, so at approximately 5:30 that morning he went to her house and put a silver Taurus 9mm pistol to his head. After she talked him out of it, he shot her in the gut and ran.

Now what? Brinsley could imagine the word on the street: he was a loser who couldnt even do suicide right and didnt have the balls to kill his girlfriend; hed only wounded her. He decided to go back to Brooklyn, where he was raised.

Counting my time as a military police officer in Vietnam, Ive been in the law enforcement business for nearly fifty years, and this kind of story is less unusual than youd imagine. In fact, it is kind of typical. Police see a lot of men and women who have put themselves in difficult positions try to change the narrative of their life stories to transform themselves into heroes. That morning, Ismaaiyl Brinsley was a bum who was going to be sought by the law for brutalizing an innocent woman. He was going to jail. So he decided he was going to kill some cops.

That July, Eric Garner had died while struggling with New York Police Department officers, and that August, Michael Brown had been killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. That November and December, grand juries had handed down no true bills, declining to indict the officers involved in either death. In the midst of all this, the Black Lives Matter movement rose to the fore. It had first appeared as a hashtag in the social media world associated with the trial and acquittal of George Zimmerman in the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin and then in the physical world in 2014 with a convergence of activists in Ferguson. Now the movement was being felt nationwide, driven in part by a roiling resentment of the police in the African American and other communities throughout the country.

Throughout New York City, every day there were daunting demonstrationslarge, small, medium sizeat which people were yelling at the police. Demonstrators were screaming right up in cops faces: All police are brutal, you are murderers, you are racists! I know from a lifetime of police work that this is not true, but the perception had taken hold.

The anger was real, though, even if the claims were not. For some demonstrators, the shouts were meant to provoke officers to prove the protesters points. Our men and women exhibited enormous restraint, first, in taking the face-to-face verbal, personal abuse, and second, in working hard to facilitate peoples protests, by following them through the streets, blocking traffic so they could maintain their groups, setting aside appropriate sites, and making sure that demonstrators were safe while demonstrating. This is, after all, America, where the right to protest is protected by our Constitution.

All assumptions to the contrary, the police work hard to make sure free-speech demonstrations happen, and happen successfully. In cities large and small, officers maintain the peace for every kind of protest imaginable. These were different: the police were the focus, not just the peacekeepers, and they were being baited at every turn. (Not until the summer of 2020 would officers see anything like this again.) The internet traffic was all about killer cops, cops need to pay, cops should be killed. The rules against advocating violence had apparently gone out the window. Our Threat Assessment and Protection UnitTAPUwas getting buried in internet incitements to harm, assault, or kill police. They were almost overwhelmed by running these threats down. Furthermore, unlike a one-day march for nuclear nonproliferation, say, these protests were nonstop and snowballed through the fall and early winter.

With this as the backdrop, Brinsley decided to make himself into an avenger. He had stolen his ex-girlfriends cell phone. He logged into his Instagram account. Alongside a photo of that same silver Taurus 9mm handgun he posted the message: Im Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours... Lets Take 2 Of Theirs #ShootThePolice #RIPErivGarner [sic] #RIPMikeBrown.

While on the bus, Brinsley called his girlfriends mother. She recognized the number, and thinking it was her child, picked up. Brinsley apologized for shooting her daughter. She called the Baltimore County Police. He is on Instagram, he called me and said something, I dont remember, like Im sorry or I didnt mean to do it or whatever it was.