Brooklyn Students To Learn Cop Coping Skills After Subway Arrests

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — Violent encounters between cops and kids in Brooklyn subway stations prompted the city to launch a new program to teach homeless public school students about their rights when dealing with police.

Borough President Eric Adams announced Tuesday the new $25,000 pilot program, set to launch across the borough later this month, that will teach middle and school students their rights, about one week after video of cops punching and tackling teenagers went viral.

"[The video] clearly shows you how it was a toxic soup of ... the failure of police teaching de-escalation skills and no one empowering young people with the right tools and the right skills they need," Adams said. "That's why we're doing this."

The program — run through the Brooklyn nonprofit Community Counseling & Mediation — will provide peer-led training workshops in Brooklyn schools and possibly expand citywide in January 2020, according to the Borough President.

A student named DeQueen said of CCM, "It's not a program, it's a family," and explained what she saw as the value of its peer-led lessons.

"Some of our youths need to listen to us and not older people because they listen to older people all the time," she said. "And they don't understand."

It will be funded in part by the Borough President's office, allocating $5,000, and CCM, which will invest $20,000, officials said.

CCM will use scenarios to teach kids how to communicate with cops and protect their rights when dealing with police, a topic Adams argued everyone thinks they understand, but don't.

"It took me six months to learn my rights in the police academy, so no one is going to know it simply from watching 'L.A. Law'," Adams said. "That is not how you learn the law."

The announcement follows the spread of two viral video showing police officers tackling teenagers in Brooklyn's Jay Street-MetroTech and Franklin Avenue stations that spurred a turnstile-jumping protest in Brooklyn on Friday.

Adams argued the NYPD's failure to implement de-escalation training — the subject of a 2015 Department of Investigation report — was evidenced in the video of a cop punching three different people in the Jay Street-MetroTech station, and that launching this new training was a pro-cop move.

"You're a good police advocate when you prevent bad encounters from happening in the first place," he said.