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Brownsville Leaders Got Their Pick Of Police Commander. But Can He Change How The NYPD Does Business?
By
Yasmeen Khan
Published Aug 10, 2020
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Angela Cholmondeley / Gothamist
By
Yasmeen Khan
Published Aug 10, 2020
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The new commanding officer of the 73rd Precinct in Brooklyn, which encompasses the communities of Brownsville and Ocean Hill, is now two months into his new position and intent on wading in to solve problems in the field. Literally, sometimes, wading into a sea of people.
“We're getting a lot of large gatherings beyond anything that we've ever seen — not typical for a normal summer,” said Deputy Inspector Terrell Anderson, who moved into his new post after it was vacated by a commanding officer under investigation for an incident of misconduct during recent protests.
“And when I say ‘large gathering,’” said Anderson, “I mean 400 to 500 people on a block.”
The bars and clubs are closed, he said, and he understands that people have been cooped up and need outlets to socialize. But what can start out as a small barbeque can quickly turn into a massive crowd. Sometimes these parties aren’t a problem, said Anderson. Other times, they bring nuisance complaints or can lead to violence. The neighborhood, like other parts of the city, is trying to get a handle on a more than 200 percent increase in shootings this summer compared to last year.
“So how do we approach that?” Anderson said of these gatherings. “Do I approach that — ‘oh, let me call 40 cops over here.’ No. What I’ll do is talk to people and try to get them to understand what’s the inconvenience and why we would be interested in breaking up this party.”
Anderson spent his early childhood years in Brownsville until he moved to nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant, where he still resides. He says he sees himself as being of the neighborhood, which may help his ability to negotiate shutting down a large block party.
“When I see these kids, you know, I see myself,” Anderson said. “I did grow up in hip-hop culture, so that is a culture that I embrace. The way some of them dress — well, I dress that way as well. So, you know, I'm not going to automatically criminalize anybody.”
Some people in the neighborhood are hoping that choosing Anderson, a Black man, to lead a police precinct that encompasses a majority Black neighborhood will make for a more understanding and compassionate way of policing.
Jamal Glasgow, 18, lived in Brownsville until about a year ago, but works with an anti-violence group in the neighborhood called Elite Learners. He’s in Brownsville nearly every day, and says just hanging out with a group of friends seemed to invite officers to question, or even search, them.
“I feel they just want to believe to themselves that we doing something that we really not doing,” Glasgow said. “So they come over, they harass us, hoping they find something.”
Listen to reporter Yasmeen Khan's radio story for WNYC:
It’s not just teenagers who feel that cops have misjudged people in the neighborhood. Christopher Legree, who’s 64, runs a youth football program in Brownsville.
“Some of the bad cops, they look at us as animals,” Legree said. “You go to work with that perspective and any little thing is ignitable.”
For the record, Legree said he has good relationships with officers. His sister was one. But the NYPD’s approach to policing, with a focus on driving down crime statistics, has just contributed more harm to Brownsville—a neighborhood whose public safety issues are tethered to problems like joblessness, mental illness, or poor housing conditions.
“It’s a data driven industry, and they use this data, obviously, to justify certain things,” Legree said, such as using an increase in street crime to justify more police stops. “And I've said that I think Brownville has become victimized by the systematic way that we think of policing in this city in general.”
Legree is supportive of Brownsville’s new commanding officer. He thinks that, yes, one person could have an impact on changing how policing works on the ground.
“Does that alleviate all the illins? No,” Legree said. “But I think it sets a tone.”
This change of police leadership in Brownsville came about because of the recent protests against systemic racism and police brutality—or, at least, one incident from those demonstrations.
In a moment of police violence caught on video, Officer Vincent D’Andraia shoves a young woman to the ground. She curls up clutching her head, while D’Andraia, an officer at the 73rd Precinct, and his supervisor next to him continue their stride. That supervisor was Deputy Inspector Craig Edelman, then the commanding officer of the 73rd Precinct.
The protest incident is still being investigated internally by the NYPD. D’Andraia was suspended without pay and faces criminal charges. Edelman was transferred out of his post in Brownsville, but has not yet faced any discipline. He now serves as second-in-command of the Gun Violence Suppression Division, a centralized unit that investigates gang operations and the pipeline of illegal guns.
However, in the months before the protests, many in Brownsville were agitating for a change in NYPD leadership on the ground in their neighborhood.
“Prior to what the world saw, we had requested his removal,” said Councilmember Alicka Ampry-Samuel, referring to Edelman.
She, and other elected officials at both the state and federal levels, plus those from community-based organizations, felt that Edelman was not a good fit for Brownsville, a majority Black neighborhood where residents have appealed to the city for generations for more community resources. They said Edelman, who is white, brought a more hard-line approach to policing.
“It was more of, ‘I'm NYPD. I'm authority. These are the rules, and you're going to respect these rules,’” said Camara Jackson, founder of Elite Learners.
Commanding Officer Terrell Anderson gives a fist bump to a man on the street
Angela Cholmondeley / Gothamist
Edelman started as commanding officer in the 73rd Precinct in January 2019, and major crime did fall by more than 9 percent that year. Overall arrests declined 20 percent, while gun arrests ticked up slightly.
But Jackson said she wished Edelman’s approach was more inclusive of organizations like hers to solve neighborhood problems—like gun violence, but also lower-level issues like open containers or smoking pot. After all, the NYPD had paid lip service for years to the idea of rebuilding trust with communities like Brownsville, that had a history of frayed relationships with cops.
Ampry-Samuel said she submitted three names to City Hall that she thought would be a better choice for commanding officer. Deputy Inspector Anderson was one.
Anderson will admit that his own 16 years in the NYPD were not without mistakes. Just before coming to the 73rd Precinct, Anderson served as commanding officer in the neighboring 69th precinct, which includes Canarsie. That’s where, earlier this year, plainclothes officers violently arrested a young Black man, Fitzroy Gayle, allegedly for smoking marijuana.
*“*I'm okay with acknowledging what went wrong in that situation and saying that the officers were wrong and not communicating with the young man,” Anderson said. That incident is still under investigation by the NYPD, and Anderson said he could not comment on how the officers involved are being held accountable.
Anderson himself spent much of his career as a plainclothes anti-crime officer, working to get guns off the streets. Those teams have been widely criticized for their aggressive tactics, and were recently disbanded.
Over those years, Anderson acquired three allegations of misconduct that were substantiated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board. He said he only knew of two (he thinks a charge for improperly executing a search warrant is listed in duplicate) and that in one of them, “abuse of authority” related to a car search, an NYPD trial judge found him not guilty.
“I worked with some great cops and we took a lot of guns off the street,” he said. “And also I had to go through, you know, growth as an officer and how to approach certain situations.”
The challenge now is how to approach a whole community. Anderson says he knows he’s not going to arrest his way to safety in Brownsville, and that he wants to use his role as a commanding officer to connect people to social services.
He took care to emphasize an important lesson he said he has learned: to take cues from people in the community on how they want policing to work in their own neighborhood. He said not every officer understands the importance of this.
“There is a culture in the NYPD that needs to change,” Anderson said, “and part of that culture is, ‘We know better.’ And I can't come into Brownsville and tell people in Brownsville, oh, this is how we're going to do this.”
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