EAST HARLEM — When Jason Santa joined the NYPD in 2008 he was thrown right into the fire.
First assigned to the 30th Precinct in Hamilton Heights and, with only his academy training to guide him, he was given the overnight foot patrol shift.
“As a rookie cop when I started you just had to learn as you go and that’s where a lot of mistakes are made,” he said.
They weren’t life-or-death mistakes, Santa said. Most of them were filling out the wrong paperwork or not knowing how to interact with residents, he said.
When he’d ask for help the other officers were too busy to offer much guidance, so he had to learn on his own.
Now Santa is training the next batch of rookie officers.
In January, the 25th Precinct, where Santa now works, got six new probationary officers fresh out of the Police Academy. Under a new training program, instead of being thrown into the midnight shift, they will be assigned a mentor.
“I think it’s great, I wish I would’ve had something like this,” Santa said. “When I first came out I just had what I knew from the academy. Now they’ll know from my experience as well.”
Officers Jack Doherty and Earl Forde are the two rookies assigned to Santa. Both look like police officers — they have a badge, gun, handcuffs and stand tall in their uniform — the only obvious thing that sets them apart from Santa is that while he introduces himself by his last name, they introduce themselves by their first names.
The three officers ride in their patrol car responding to what comes over the radio.
The first few days they mostly responded to traffic accidents. As the rookies gained more experience they responded to other incidents like missing persons, domestic violence calls, robberies and break-ins, Santa said.
He reminds them about the little things, like instead of standing directly in front of someone stand at an angle, keep your hands out of your pockets and make sure to look up every time they exit the vehicle.
Responding to a variety of calls exposes the rookies to different aspects of police work, Santa said.
“It’s really cool,” Doherty said of the training program. “You get to work with different units.”
Working with crime prevention, Doherty met people who have been victims of crimes and helped them come up with plans to avoid it in the future.
Most of it is simple stuff like replacing a busted dead bolt, but they get to learn about interesting things like shatterproof glass for front gates, Doherty said.
Forde was impressed by how much the officers assigned to the school unit know about local teens — and are even aware of who is in which gang, who the top players are, and who they are recruiting.
“They follow up with the kids and try to keep them from joining gangs,” he said. “What I like about it is that it shows we are here for the community. If we can stem it by keeping an eye on them now, it’ll be better in the future.”
An important part of the new training program is to build stronger ties with the community. There is no better way of getting families' attention than helping their children, said Nick Lugo, the publisher of the Spanish-language newspaper La Voz Hispana.
“There is not a family I know of, that if you help their children they won’t appreciate it,” Lugo said.
Lugo has been in East Harlem for decades. As a business owner and an organizer of the Puerto Rican Day Parade he has worked with the police for years. But under the new training program that relationship has become a bit more formal.
Lugo is one of a handful of “community partners” who volunteer to meet with the rookie officers and show them around the neighborhood.
“For many of these rookies, it’s their first year and they are just getting acclimated to their new role of protecting the people so they need to understand who the people are,” he said. “You have to get [the officers] to understand what the community is all about — how the community thinks, how they act, how they view the police.”
One of the most important things to learn is the difficult balance between being sensitive and being tough. Officers should show restraint, even when people disrespect them, but at the same time their job is to enforce the law, Lugo said.
