By Sadef Ali Kully
The head of the 105th Precinct, Inspector Michael Coyle, spoke with church and community leaders at Bethel Ministries Church on Jamaica Avenue last week, addressing the upcoming changes at the precinct.
Coyle, promoted recently from deputy inspector, said the precinct recently received 18 additional police officers who will undergo new training. Coyle has also taken additional training since the announcement of the new NYPD action plan.
The plan, known as One City: Safe and Fair Everywhere, was initiated after the death of Eric Garner, who died during a police chokehold July 17, 2014 in Staten Island. Protests and riots over police-community relations followed, as they did after similar incidents across the nation in which white police officers killed black men.
“You have to let community and civic leaders know that they are part of your community—that has been part of my philosophy during my career and is one of the reasons why I have been so successful. In part I owe that success to the communities I have worked with,” Coyle said.
Coyle said the current field training is dramatically different from what officers were taught just a couple of years ago.
At the 105th Precinct, 18 police officers will be assigned to a mentorship program with veteran officers for day, night and overnight shifts. The foot posts will include commercial districts and religious institutions to allow officers to build a relationship with different parts of the community. The new officers will be assigned to their platoons after they have completed their mentorship training. This represents a major change from “the old standard, where an officer is put into an area that’s rife with crime and and it was enforcement, enforcement, enforcement,” Coyle said.
Coyle, who took the training alongside NYPD Chief James O’Neil as part of the action plan to retrain at least 20,000 officers said the three-day training focused on community and prevention of a situation turning into a violent incident.
“The first two days are about community and police and the third day is the physical day where they offer team takedowns rather than the use of chokeholds and they focus on de-escalating a situation,” Coyle said. “The training is excellent. It is going to change the way we do business.”
For the 105th Precinct, where Detective Brian Moore was shot in Queens Village, there is a new outlook on the community since Moore’s death.
“The cops did not know how many community members were on their side until Detective Moore’s murder. The memorial we had in front of the precinct, in my 22 years I have never seen anything like that,” Coyle said.
He said it would have been easy for officers to lump everyone together with Demetrius Blackwell, the accused gunman in the death of Moore, but they saw the real community when the people showed up to give them support.
Reach Reporter Sadef Ali Kully by e-mail at skull
