By Michael A. Farruggio
I was a police officer for 27 years, two years and my original academy training in New York City and 25 in Charlottesville. I’ve been a SWAT officer for 18, including a training officer, sniper, entry, and commander. I can say that most teams are woefully untrained because departments and communities don’t want to support it. That lack of training leads to many obvious problems. With that said, it is one of the most needed elements of every department.
In my 27 years I never saw any racist actions by police officers. I saw heavy-handedness in both departments, but more in Charlottesville. That heavy-handedness came from the hands of both black and white officers against black and white citizens. Not every one of those citizens deserved it and that is one of the problems of policing.
The more professional the department, and the higher grade of the training, the better the quality of officers. That’s why New York City was ranked by a world review panel as the finest in the world. Charlottesville does the best that it can with the money it is given. But you’re not going to find and hire all high quality candidates in the city with what is provided. I was the hiring officer and a manager in this department and saw how a lack of resources cost us good officers. Those who stay and make the grade do so for the great quality of life in Charlottesville. But you cannot count on that to supply all your officers.
To mitigate the problems with SWAT teams in this city we rarely — very rarely — use them. But that is very bad for the team, because training is not based on what’s happening in real life, only what you can reproduce in training. They should use their team in the city to do some more raids for drugs. Because of the concerns and fears, the drug task force does the raids without the SWAT team.
I have been on raids where we have almost hit the wrong house, where we hit the right house and nobody was home and where we had the right house but there was nobody there but a mother and children. That is due to a lack resources and a lack of professionalism by not having a surveillance unit and having to do everything with less. That’s typical in Charlottesville. But we managed to be conservative and not make many mistakes.
However, the idea that there is wholesale racism is ridiculous in my mind. For people to be rioting and looting because they believe this is criminal. That behavior cannot be excepted by the police department, any city council, and the American public. Just because an officer has a higher number of arrests of black citizens does not mean that they have racist behavior. They are working in a neighborhood that is predominantly black and that also happens to have crime problems. I am aware that many people would say that I am ignorant and that it is racist.
Also, I cannot believe that an officer would shoot an unarmed person, whether black or white, just because, it is insane. That officer probably feared for his life because of the circumstances that were unfolding in the seconds and milliseconds right in front of his face. Nobody — and I mean nobody — that’s reading this post would want their family member, who is a police officer, to come home maimed or worse by any citizen, whether a criminal or mentally unstable.
When it comes to a peaceful assembly that has some elements throwing chunks of bricks at police officers doing their job, protecting your society and your businesses, and it is declared an unlawful assembly and not peaceful, and the people are told to leave, they need to leave. Organizers of such events need to have controllers in the crowd and police themselves or call the police on people in the crowd who have turned violent. What are we, terrorists in the Middle East throwing rocks at the Israeli military?
I understand the anger and the fear and the concern that maybe what happened in the Ferguson case was an unwarranted death. But that’s why we have an investigation. And that police officer is judged by what was occurring in those milliseconds, not by what others’ suspicions are.
But I will say this: I am not happy with the face of unprofessional policing. I see a growing segment of police officers being more “us versus them,” and impolite and bossy every year. Much of it is because of situations similar to this where they are judge too harshly and smart people say, I’m not going into that line of work.
You’re starting to have more power-hungry knuckleheads desire to get into police work. And they go to the lesser paying departments such as small cities, counties and sheriff offices and use it as a stepping stone to get to a larger more professional department. In the city we hire some great officers and they leave. We try to hire minorities but they won’t even start here. They go to other, bigger cities that pay more. Mark my words, this will get worse unless we professionalize our departments by paying officers more, training them better, and supporting them emotionally and mentally for the very difficult job they do. And that includes providing proper training to both managers and supervisors so they can better support their staff.
And citizens now, because of their frustrations, have ridiculously high expectations. They want the government to solve all their problems and see the police officer as a panacea to their every complaint.
It’s a tough problem and I will never let any of my children become a police officer.
Michael Farruggio is a retired Charlottesville Police Sergeant.
