Nassau Police Puts Emphasis on De-Escalation

By Neil A. Carousso

Nassau County has revamped their policy to emphasize de-escalation of situations with the national spotlight on police officers’ use of force in the wake of a number of incidents caught on camera, sparking protests, leading to riots in communities like Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

So far this year, 776 people have been shot and killed by police officers, according to the Washington Post, which is tracking every death at the hands of the men and women in blue, whether justified or not. In 2015, 991 people died in police-involved shootings.

The issue of race has been brought into the national conversation about police use of force, but according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there is not a large differential between racial groups and use of force by police, not enough to make a strong correlation. The latest data available indicates that 3.5 percent of Blacks describe their most recent encounter with police to be forceful compared to 2.1 percent of Hispanics and 1.4 percent of Whites. Moreover, 44 percent of people who experienced force by police have had 2 or more encounters with law enforcement.

The Nassau Police Department’s major tweaks to its “Use of Force Policy” comes roughly 2 years since the Department embarked on the first significant overhaul of its use-of-force policy in more than 3 decades in the aftermath of a pair of high-profile shootings involving Nassau officers.