Stratford program aims to bridge gap between cops, community
STRATFORD — Curtis Eller and James Lofton don’t need to change your mind.
They just need you to realize what might be inside somebody else’s.
The two Stratford cops — Eller is a lieutenant and Lofton is a detective ser
geant — lead the department’s Police Engagement Program, designed to teach officers and civilians alike de-escalation techniques, mutual empathy, and how to recognize and address implicit bias.
The terms can come across as lofty. But the program’s ultimate goal is simple.
“You can disagree, but everybody still gets home safely,” Lofton said.
The program — presented through the department’s Police Activities League to dozens of community groups, police departments and colleges and universities — started five years ago, and has only grown in urgency with more and more high-profile incidents of violence involving cops.
“Ever since George Floyd, obviously things changed significantly,” Eller said. “This work was necessary before, but even more so now.”
In addition to Eller and Lofton, presenters include officers Jose Dias and Robert Muschett, and local lawyer Donald Smart. Erin McLaughlin, a civilian police department employee, serves as director of outreach.
In addition to formal presentations, PAL coordinates dozens of activities — like pop-up parties and parades, Christmas shopping trips, and rides to summer camps — with community organizations, schools and other groups to facilitate understanding and recognition between police and the communities they’re sworn to serve and protect.
The initiative has gained some notoriety for a catch phrase — “Calm, Cool and Comply” — to guide interactions between police and members of the community, akin to “Stop, Drop and Roll” with fire.
Eller and Lofton realize the message can be problematic, which is why they present footage from real life scenarios and cases where such interactions go wrong, and result in either civilians or cops getting hurt.
“When you hear that word ‘comply’ and it’s being said by an law enforcement officer, it creates tension sometimes,” Lofton said. “We felt the only way to actually explain the importance of compliance is an environment like this where we can slow it down and show what could happen with a lack of compliance.”
They also realize police officers need to take the catchphrase to heart, too.
“The compliance level for us is to comply with the oath we have taken,” Lofton said. “Don’t violate anybody’s rights. Keep your morals. Be tactful.”
“Treat anybody you come across just like you would want your mother, your father, your brother, your sister to be treated,” Eller said.
Lofton said the ability of a police officer to communicate effectively is the best weapon in their arsenal.
“Twenty years ago in the police academy, we might have been taught the warrior mentality: ‘We have to win, we have to come out on top, we’ve got to dominate,’” he said. “This day and age, what this program is trying to introduce to officers is using our ability to communicate with people.”
The lessons pay off — like during an incident in May where after a reported shooting a juvenile holding a loaded handgun fled from two detectives who had participated in the program, Alex Torres and Jon Policano.
Lofton said Torres yelled “He’s got a gun!”
Policano recognized the juvenile and called out their name. The pair were able to talk the suspect down and take them into custody.
“We can’t say that was wholeheartedly because of program, but we’d like to think it showed dividends,” Lofton said.
At the same time, he said, they realize things don’t always work out.
“There is a time when we have to go hands-on, we understand that,” Lofton said. “But there are times when if you just have an opportunity to have a conversation with someone, it de-escalates to a point where everybody walks home.”
Sometimes it doesn’t — including in Stratford, where the fatal shooting by police of a domestic violence suspect has been under investigation for more than six months.
“Obviously we can’t comment on that but what our program is trying to do is eliminate interactions like that, to prevent it from escalating to that,” Lofton said. “This is how we’re trying to prevent that incident from becoming a fatality. How do we eliminate that? How do we cut down the percentages of that happening?”
During a presentation — they have two-, four-, and eight-hour versions of the program — they display a meme showing how white men who are armed or suspected of multiple murders are arrested without injury, while Blacks who have committed minor offenses or none at all end up dead.
It’s not always the most popular part of the presentation when the audience is made up of cops — and police aren’t to blame during every use of force incident — but that makes it all the more vital, Lofton said.
“When we’re speaking to our officers, we let them know, ‘These are true feelings. These are not just things we made up,’” he said. “It’s the reality, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.”
Cops can and do disagree — as in the case of Jamie Rivera, a Stratford Police sergeant who was suspended for three days after calling Black Lives Matter a “terrorist organization” in a Facebook post last September that was widely shared on community pages.
Lofton said a lot of people asked them about the post.
“We all don’t feel the same way about a lot of different topics,” he said. “We know Black Lives Matter not to be a terrorist organization. We’ve talked to Black Lives Matter organizers and worked alongside them. We understand what their concern is and what their questions are and what their intentions are.”
Eller said that no matter what an officer may think, “we are still required to do our jobs fairly and impartially and we will continue to do that regardless of our personal opinions.”
During another segment, they show a video released by an Ohio police department of a traffic stop where an armed white man threatened to shoot an officer and sped away before he was eventually stopped and arrested.
Then they introduce a hypothetical — what if the same thing happened, but the suspect were Black?
“My honest answer is I don’t know,” Eller said. “We can speculate based on whatever past things have shaped our thoughts, but I don’t know.”
“We would like to think it would have ended the same way,” Lofton said.
Smart, a lawyer who reviews Fourth Amendment rights as a presenter for the program, disagrees.
“I would like to think if the driver was Black it would have ended the same way, but the great weight to the cases and the facts and circumstances of so many cases just like this (indicates) if the driver were Black, he would have ended up dead,” he said. “I’m uncomfortable saying this, but there’s no question in my mind that he would have been shot. Anybody that says otherwise is not really familiar with the streets and the great weight of cases that are out there.”
The community conversations aren’t easy, especially when they involve communities of color in a country where law enforcement has had a checkered past when it comes to race.
“A lot of people in general don’t really truly know the history of hurt for the Black and brown community, and the role policing has played in that throughout the years,” Eller said.
“We try to get in front of it and acknowledge there is a pain people in the community have when it comes to law enforcement,” Lofton said. “The history of law enforcement with people of color has not been pleasant, and that’s how it goes down from generation to generation.”
Sometimes cops get offended at aspects of the presentation, like a video with audio of “The StarSpangled Banner” accompanying footage of police violence.
But if that helps them see how other people feel, then all the better.
“You are going to come into contact with somebody who feels this way,” Lofton said. “Understand that, acknowledge it, accept it. Now how to we interact with that person without it escalating? You have to understand where they’re coming from.”
“These are people we’ve sworn to protect and serve,” Eller said. “You have to be open to different perspective.”