NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton is turning to rather unorthodox measures to weed out prejudice in his department. He’s making new recruits go to a play.
The play, hopes Bratton, will be an antidote to the spread of prejudice throughout the department.
“I lived a lot of it, and I think that’s why it touched me,” the commissioner said during an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday.
“I grew up in the 50s in Boston, a very segregated city at the time,” he continued. “I didn’t interact with blacks in any large numbers until I joined the Boston police force. And as a young 23 year old white kid, I was patrolling on foot in an all-black neighborhood. And that experience was really, as you can imagine quite awakening; this seems to me a way of introducing my police recruits into the reality of racism, the reality of religious persecution.”
The new recruits will be required to see the play Janet Langhart, which is an imaginary conversation between Holocaust victim Anne Frank and Mississippi lynching victim Emmett Till.
Along with the focus on the issue of prejudice, the commissioner also attended the “Women Inspiring Women” seminar, which included sessions titled “Break Your Barriers,” “Facing Life with Laughter,” and “Meditation for Well-Being.”
That Mayor Bill de Blasio had a hand in encouraging Bratton’s anti-prejudice initiatives would be surprising. The issue of prejudice among the NYPD was further inflamed by de Blasio in December of last year, when he said in reference to talking to his bi-racial son Dante, “you have to train them to be very careful when they have an encounter with police officers.”
Bratton’s interview took place as the NYPD lost its 4th officer in the last eleven months due to a shooting. NYPD officer Randolph Holder was murdered by Tyrone Holder, a drug dealer who shot the officer after getting into a gun battle in East Harlem.
Image (via AP): New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton, right, speaks during a media briefing in New York, Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2015. New York Police Department Officer Randolph Holder died Tuesday night after being shot in the head in a gun battle while pursuing a suspect following a report of shots fired, police said. Police on Wednesday named 30-year-old Tyrone Howard as the man they believe killed Officer Holder.