[Ed. Note: It is always heartening to me to hear younger police leaders remembering the roots of effective policing — building trust and serving people. It seems that NYPD’s new Commissioner Dermot Shea “get’s it!”
Yes, the NYPD is a huge organization, but leadership matters and what Shea has to say as he takes over the PD and 30,000 officers matters greatly.
Effective policing is not and never has been about occupying and forcefully repressing a community. It has rather been about helping, serving, and building trust (there’s a history out there about this!). When a police department gets that right, magic happens!]
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NYPD’s new leader: Helping people is at heart of police work
By MICHAEL R. SISAK, Associated Press, January 12, 2020
NEW YORK (AP) — On the Bronx streets where New York City’s new police commissionerstarted as a patrolman in the crime-ravaged early 1990s, gunfire and burned-out buildings were everywhere.
Sometimes the police radio would crackle with a different kind of call, not for a shooting or stabbing but for a sick child, a locked apartment door or a marriage on the rocks.
“I remember thinking, ‘Well, why do they call the police for this? It’s not an emergency,’” Commissioner Dermot Shea told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “And, you know, you kind of get a little wiser over time. The reason they call the police is because they really have nobody else to call.”
Shea, 50, is drawing on his early days as he pushes the nation’s largest police department to cultivate deeper bonds with the communities it serves — a key, he says, to building trust and cutting crime.
Shea, the son of Irish immigrants who grew up with four siblings in Queens, wants the NYPD’s 36,000 officers to remember their jobs are primarily about people — whether that means rushing to a crime scene, comforting a victim or merely lending a hand.
In many ways, he said, officers are “the glue that holds the city together.”
“Hopefully that’s the message we get to our cops and recruits, that everything you do is about helping people, working with people, serving people,” Shea said.
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Read the full article HERE,
Improving Police: A Necessary Conversation 
People call the police and/or the fire department because they are the only government agencies that operate 24/7 particularly after 5 pm, on the holidays and weekends. Sadly, though with all the recent stories about the police killing people after they were called in to assist, many people are rather reluctant to call the police.
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