The city’s top cop found himself on the spot Friday when a high school student from Staten Island pressed him during a town hall on what the NYPD is doing to hold accountable officers who commit misconduct.
“The NYPD has a history of police being overly aggressive toward people of color,” said Kehinde Adeoso, a 17-year-old junior at Eagle Academy Staten Island. “As commissioner what policies have you put in place to hold officers accountable who have exhibited unwarranted, unjustified violence toward people of color?”
The question — during a Zoom town hall sponsored by the Eagle Academy network of six charter schools in New York City and Newark — seemed to strike home for Shea, who is currently dealing with a spike in shootings, the continuing effects of the pandemic and a drumbeat of criticism of the NYPD.
Shea acknowledged that some NYPD crime-fighting strategies — including making large numbers of arrests for low-level offenses and stop-and-frisk — have alienated many in the city’s Black and Hispanic communities.
But Shea said the police have worked hard to address criticisms of those practices.
“The challenge is there’s a great debate going on in NYC about reforming the police and certainly people want to keep crime down. I think those two conversations have to come together and I think we can do both,” he said.
Adeoso, who plans to study computer science in college, said his question was inspired by the murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 17 and the protests that followed.
“A lot of the things that happened last year were bad to people of color,” he said. “I wanted to see what we were going to do to address it.”
Shea said Friday’s town hall was inspired by Josiah Battle, a 10th grader at the Eagle Academy school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, who met him at another town hall three months ago and suggested he should engage with youth more.
“He wanted to sit with teens and ask how we felt about the police, and I approached him afterward,” said Battle, 15. “I said this is an opportunity that everyone should have because how often do you get to speak with a police commissioner.”
Battle is a member of the NYPD Explorer program and plans to go to John Jay College of Criminal Justice and eventually become a police officer.
During the online town hall, Shea was joined by three cops who graduated from Eagle Academy’s schools — Juan Peralta, 29, Ariel Gonzalez, 28, and Jassiem Isom-Jenkins, 25.
“It was a calling ever since I was young, from volunteering in my church,” Gonzalez said of joining up. “It was an accumulation of things I’ve noticed, like a fist bump I got from a cop or the horrible event (on) 9/11. I wanted to do something. I wanted to serve. I wanted to make a change.”
Eagle Academy official Aaron Barnette said the event demystified the police for students and showcased a career path they may not have considered.
“I absolutely think it’s a fantastic thing,” he said. “The only way we can make real changes to not only hold officers accountable, but we can also make change from within.”
