Q&A: East Hampton Town Police Chief Talks About Reform Process And Its Impact On Morale

In his eighth year as chief of police in East Hampton Town, Michael D. Sarlo, who has served 26 years with the Town Police, faced a challenge from Governor Andrew Cuomo: take a long, hard look at the department, and see what needs to change.

Every police chief in every department in New York State had the same mission, working with committees of citizens to discuss police reform, prompted by the national debate that began with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last summer, and continued with a series of protests, including on the East End.

On Friday, Chief Sarlo talked about the police reform conversation from the perspective of a veteran chief with a great deal of pride for his officers and their connection to the community he serves.

Q: So you’re a police chief who has gone through this process. In the end, do you think it was worthwhile? Do you think there was something valuable that came out of that process?

Absolutely. The level of engagement from the community members that were on the committee really drew out a tremendous amount of thoughtful and very positive questions and answers.

And what it did for me was highlight how much misconception about police work is out there, and that, really, a focus on community policing and our efforts toward communicating with the community doesn’t reach enough people.

When you start to sit and have really in-depth and engaging conversations with people across all sorts of spectrums of your community, you start to understand how we can do things better to communicate with the community and where we’re missing in some of our efforts to reach members of the community.

Q: What were some of the misconceptions?

A lot of people don’t understand the true role of a police officer and law enforcement, and they don’t understand what a lot of our training teaches us — in our safety practices, in our officers’ safety, to diffuse a situation, how to handle a traffic stop, how we focus the training of our police officers to handle situations and come to some sort of a peaceful and reasonable resolution to the situation while following the law, criminal procedure law, and respecting someone’s civil rights.

When you piece all of it together, the breadth of what we do is lost on a lot of people, and they have very high expectations for the services that we provide. And I think, nationally, this conversation that’s going on about the role of the police — I don’t think people truly understand what’s expected of us on a daily basis and how much we’re actually involved in our daily work.

So when I sat with people in the committee and talked to them about the domestic abuse calls and how we work directly with The Retreat … some of the mental health and substance abuse issues that we deal with, and how we make referrals and try to use all of the resources that are available to us. Yet, we’re still responsible for responding to that call in the middle of the night and being the first responder and the lone person on the emergency available to go handle that.

And when you really start to shed light on those — so many hats that we have to wear in doing our job — people gain a whole new understanding of how difficult it is and why some situations aren’t handled the way the public wishes they were.

But we don’t have resources available to us. I don’t have a social worker available to me at 2 o’clock in the morning when there’s a family domestic. At Sunday afternoon at 4 o’clock, there’s nobody from the county social services available to assist us.

When you have these dialogues, I think community members start to get a much better understanding of what we’re faced with and what we’re trying to do in our role as public safety here, especially on the East End and in smaller communities.

But … the process itself and how it was initiated by the state was frustrating. Because our training guidelines, our funding, many of the laws and the rules and regulations, are all regulated from the top down — from the state. So to put a lot of these things in the laps of the local departments and ask community members to get input on it, and then send it back up to the state? It’s sort of backward in some way.

Q: One of the narratives that has come out of the national conversation is that police get so much more training on the use of weapons and use of violence than they do on deescalation and dealing with tense circumstances. It sounds to me like you’re saying that’s not necessarily true at the local level, especially in places like on the East End.

That’s correct. Local agencies and smaller police departments, we spend a tremendous amount of time ensuring that we’re not only deescalating, not only that we have all of the latest resources available to us, but that the focus of our daily training and our on the job training is that model of deescalation — the use of the least amount of force, of recognizing and understanding the circumstances that the people you’re dealing with, of what they’re going through, and having that empathy and understanding of how to try to resolve a situation without it being necessarily enforcement or an arrest.

… So there is so much training to make sure that you understand what a deadly physical force situation looks like, that you understand when that weapon is to be drawn and when it’s not, and it has to become a muscle memory — just part of your natural routine and habit, that you understand when the hand goes on the weapon, when the weapon comes out of the holster. What you’re seeing in front of you, and what you’re prepared to do is so extremely important in that role.

We’re only authorized to use deadly physical force [when there is] deadly physical force against another person or ourselves, or whether it’s perceived. So you get into that “shoot/no shoot” situation. It is the highest level of training that’s needed for an officer. There’s no doubt about that. There’s no way to get around that.

Obviously, we train and work very hard not to have to reach that situation. And we’ve been very fortunate here on the East End that we’ve had very few of those circumstances among our East End agencies — but we have to be prepared for that. Ultimately in every situation we face.

Q: Let me ask: How frequently in your department is use of force an issue? And I don’t necessarily mean deadly force. I’m guessing there hasn’t been an incident of deadly force being used. How long has it been since there’s been an incident of deadly force?

I don’t know of any, to be honest with you.

… Basically use of force, we were required by the state to fill out a form any time we take any action that rises to the level of force action. So, that could be muscling someone to try to get them in the handcuffs. That could be having to tackle someone who ran away from us. Any of those situations — use of the Taser for someone resisting? — mandatory requirement to fill out all the paperwork. … The training officer reviews it, the supervisor reviews it, then it ends up coming to me, and we send it up to the state.

We typically handle about eight of those a year, less than 10, believe it or not. So for an agency that handles 20,000 calls for service, that typically makes 600 to 800 physical arrests a year, to have seven or eight of those incidents a year where we actually have to document the fact that we used some sort of our use of force training is, I think, it’s pretty remarkable and really shows the level of restraint.

Q: But that’s an interesting thing to look at. Because it makes me wonder if it’s proof that a department that’s willing to put in the time to do the training on deescalation, it results in fewer uses of force. Or is it just a matter of, that’s the community that you’re policing? I realize that’s unanswerable.

No, I don’t have that answer. I review use of force or review policy and review our interactions. I look at our arrests. We have a very transient community here, especially during the summer. So it’s not just our 25,000 year-round population that we interact with on a daily basis. It’s also many people who frequent the area from all over the country. So we are interacting with a very diverse group of people here. It’s not just, we’re policing tiny little, sleepy East Hampton and its residents.

… So I say there’s some level of positivity to that assumption, that our training, our efforts, our communication skills, our understanding of the public and those situations obviously contributes to less use of force.

However, I don’t know. Because when you start getting into urban communities, and when you start getting into areas of higher instances of violent crime, you have situations where an officer’s level of perceived threat and an officer’s experience in dealing with the public changes their perception of how to deal with someone who is noncompliant. And that really changes the narrative.

I think something, all of us in law enforcement, we don’t mean to sound callous, and none of us means to make light of the situation, but in general, almost every single bad use of force, shootings, injuries that you see, is ultimately the result of resisting arrest, refusing to comply — aggravating factors where people just don’t want to cooperate with the police.

Q: But it sounds like a vicious circle, to some degree.

Absolutely.

Q: It’s the police’s response to a community, which then has a different response to the police — and something has to happen to break that cycle.

I agree. I don’t have an answer for that.

I obviously follow very closely the national issues, and I have a membership in the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and I’m very invested in the entire profession as a whole. I don’t have an answer for that.

Because, you watch, everyone watches, in horror some of these videos where someone gets shot by the police. But I have a hard time with the term “police violence,” because we’re out there to enforce the law, and we’re trying to seek compliance … The only reason officers are in those situations is because they’re trying to perform their duties to protect the public.

So you then turn around and watch a video where an officer gets shot on a traffic stop, when he was trying to be polite and calm and take it easy and not follow his safety protocols. And you watch some of these instances where officers are ambushed.

So when you talk about, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” obviously, I think in today’s society, there’s just this heightened tension between police and the community that we need to find a way to get past, because we need to be able to safely do our jobs. We can’t give up on enforcing the laws, and we can’t back away, or else we create less safety and less peace for our communities. Yet we need find a way to ensure that there’s more trust and that there’s more safety in these situations between the public and the police.

Q: So this is a time when policing is under a microscope at the national level. Did this conversation, and also the way it came about — what you talked about with the governor’s order — did it take a toll on your department’s morale? Did the police officers take this as an insult, for lack of a better term?

I wouldn’t say they took it as an insult. I would say they took a lot of what’s happening in the national narrative, and some of the snippets of the discussion about police need to be “reinvented” and “reformed” … The ones who do the job well and who care about their community, they do take that as an insult. Because we’re operating within a framework that’s been long established and has had many, many reforms over the years. And the training has improved. And the focus on professionalism and accountability has improved. And officers feel like one officer makes a mistake in a high-stress situation, and we all pay for it.

And I have six officers out, injured on duty, right now, out of 65 members of my department. And they were injured in situations where they were dealing with an emotionally disturbed person and trying to calmly and peacefully help that person — they got kicked in the knee, and they had to have surgery. They’re trying to execute a lawful arrest on a DWI with drugs, and the person resists arrest, and they tore their rotator cuff.

So I have very real concerns that where this narrative is going is also making the job more dangerous and even more challenging for the rest of us.

I don’t say that they’re necessarily offended, but I think officers do take it as, “Wow, our profession is really taking a beating.” And it is hard on morale. It’s difficult.

… I had a mountain of thank you notes on my desk that had come in over a course of a few months [during the pandemic]. And it’s thanking us for finding a lost child, it’s thanking us for bringing a lost dog home, it’s a Narcan save, where we saved a kid’s life who had overdosed. It’s taking a grueling investigation on a sex abuse case with a minor and bringing to a solid grand jury conclusion, where we indict somebody on serious offenses and we’ve protected that victim’s rights.

So much of that good work goes not only unrecognized but taken for granted. And I think officers feel like, “Wow, we really grind away to do the right thing for the community, and if I speak to someone the wrong way on a traffic stop, where they feel like I pulled them over for the wrong reason, we all go down together.”

And it’s a challenging position for law enforcement to be in right now, across the country, regardless of where you work.

Q: Critics say that policing has inherent biases. Do you believe that?

(Pause.) From a personal perspective, the job that I was taught to do here in the Town of East Hampton and my approach to policing, I don’t see that. I understand how that narrative comes into play, particularly when you look at urban areas, high-crime areas. And when you look at some of the problems we’ve had in our country with profiling on traffic stops and those kinds of situations.

So, have there been inherent issues with policing in our country? I believe so. Have we worked diligently and taken it very seriously to try to move past that and being as fair and equitable as we can? Yes, we have.

I have a hard time with that assumption because of the feeling that I have for the way we run our police department and how we generally treat people.

But I understand where that comes from in the national narrative.

Q: Through this process, what did you learn, if anything, that you didn’t know before?

I think I learned … two of my biggest takeaways from the reform committee process, were: so many of our community outreach efforts and so much of what we try to do to be proactive within the community outside of enforcement, does not reach enough people. And it does not have the impact that we hope it would have.

We host a Zoom, we go to a community meeting and we get too small of an audience, and we don’t reach as many people as we would hope that we would. That’s a big challenge.

And the second piece is, I think those misconceptions surrounding what the role of a police officer is in doing his duties and enforcing the law — a lot more education needs to go on within the community to help the community also understand what to expect from the police, and how to interact with the police. That’s a big key.

I think the more we highlight those areas, the more we come together. And I think that’s my goal out of this process. Rules and procedures, training, body cameras, all those things — they’re fine and they can just continue to progress.

But I still think we need a better understanding of the interaction between police and community, in settings, when we respond. And I think developing a better relationship there is where we start to really make improvements as a profession.