Last Wednesday, Devon Guisherd shot a Philadelphia Swat officer in the chest before the officer returned fire and killed the 27-year-old. Guisherd had been wanted on murder charges tied to the death of 25-year-old Megan Doto, who was struck by a stray bullet in 2014. Doto’s unborn daughter also died in the incident.  Guisherd’s death marked the first time this year a person shot by an on-duty Philadelphia police officer died as a result of their injuries. A few years ago, it would have seemed impossible that seven full months could pass before the city hit this milestone. In 2012, 15 people died after being shot by Philadelphia police, according to the department’s own records. In 2013, 13 people died.  But in 2014, this number plunged to four, and in 2015, the city is on pace for even fewer. Police commissioner Charles Ramsey, who has been with the department since 2008, attributes this dramatic reduction to better training, new policies, and a department-wide emphasis on de-escalation. “Our officers come into very volatile situations,” Ramsey said in an interview with the Guardian. “How do you de-escalate those situations so you don’t have to use not just deadly force, but force in general?”  Related: The Counted: people killed by police in the United States in 2015 – interactive  According to Ramsey, “reality-based” training, during which officers are placed into live simulations, is key. Also critical is training frequent enough that officers can react “without even thinking about it, it because it’s just reflex”, Ramsey said.  Ramsey, who was selected by President Obama to co-chair the presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing earlier this year, is no stranger to overseeing this type of decline in shooting deaths. In 1998, the same year Ramsey took the top cop job in Washington DC, the Washington Post released a scathing five-part series detailing how bad training and lax investigations had left the city’s metropolitan police as the deadliest major police force per resident in the 1990s.  Ramsey asked the Justice Department to investigate and make reform recommendations. As a result, fatal officer-involved shootings fell between 1998 and 2001, from 12 to one.  Those reforms seem to be standing the test of time, too. According to The Counted, the Guardian’s ongoing investigation on police killings in 2015, the Washington DC metropolitan police department is the only major city department nationwide not to have had a fatal officer-involved shooting this year, although a transit police officer did fatally wound a man in March.  But the use of deadly force isn’t the only measure of a department. In Washington DC, despite the success of many of his initiatives, Ramsey’s tenure was marred by a series of mass arrests of protesters. In both 2000 and 2002, DC metropolitan officers improperly rounded up hundreds of anti-IMF and World Bank demonstrators, costing taxpayers over $20m in settlements.  In Philadelphia, Ramsey’s reform-minded administration seems vulnerable to decades-old mistrust between many of the city’s black residents and the police – mistrust recently catalyzed by the now-viral video of an April arrest of 22-year-old Tyree Carroll.  Carroll was initially stopped by officers for riding his bike the wrong direction on a one-way street. In the video, officers can be seen repeatedly punching and kicking Carroll, and beating him with nightsticks. One officer can be heard yelling “tase the motherfucker”; another calls Carroll a “piece of shit” during the altercation.  By the end of the arrest, 26 officers are present on the scene. Before the video ends, one officer appears to angrily toss Carroll’s bike to the side of the road. It was later revealed that the officers who arrested Carroll were from the narcotics unit, and police said that 5.3 grams of crack cocaine were found in his possession. The incident is now under investigation by the department’s internal affairs department.  Ramsey said that making an arrest of someone who does not want to go “isn’t pretty, and if it’s on video, it’s not going to look pretty”.  “How much force is too much force: that’s what I have internal affairs looking at,” he continued.  Berto Elmore, one of the attorneys representing Carroll, said the force used in the arrest was clearly excessive. “If you’re making an arrest as a trained officer you’re taught to do it a certain way. What I saw in the video where an officer immediately gets out of his car and kicks – where is that in a training manual?”  Elmore said he frequently represents young men from the predominantly black Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown, where the arrest took place. Among the community there, he said there is a pervasive feeling that police are overzealous and prone to abusing their power. According to a 2014 USA Today investigation, blacks in Philadelphia are arrested at nearly three times the rate of whites.  “From what I understand, you run from the police, they catch you, they beat you, and they charge you with assaulting an officer,” Elmore said.  Elmore’s understanding was echoed by several young men who know Carroll, and who spoke to the Guardian after video emerged of his arrest. Many, citing frequent interactions with police, were hesitant to give their full name for this story.  AI, 33, said he saw Carroll every day at a makeshift basketball court that sits on a private lot near where the arrest took place. Like the rest of the men who are regulars at the court, he was not surprised by the brutality of the arrest. “They stomped me in my chest right over there,” he said, gesturing down the road.  Another man, who goes by “Dream”, said: “There’s a reason why we’re over here on private property; otherwise we’d have to go in the house.” Dream and others all concurred that in Germantown, young black men cannot remain on streets or sidewalks for very long without being questioned and hassled by Philadelphia officers. “They’re the biggest gang in Philly, and they got all the lawyers in the city and their bosses behind them,” he said.  One man, Kha, said he has known Tyree Carroll all his life. Asked what he thought watching the video, he said: “I just felt like that could have been me on the ground ... screaming for my folks.”  In the video, Tyree can be heard calling out desperately for his grandmother, Nancy Carroll, who lives on Locust Avenue where the arrest took place. She said that hearing him calling for her on the recording “was like a dagger through my heart”.  Nancy Carroll and Tyree’s sister, Ebony, want the officers involved to face repercussions for the brutality of the arrest. “We pray and hope they will be held accountable, but you never know,” Ebony Carroll said.  To address issues of excessive force – deadly and otherwise – Ramsey enlisted the help of the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (Cops) office, which released a detailed 173-page report on the PPD in March. Among the most troubling findings in the report was that many officers did not have a firm grasp of the legal justification for using deadly force. According to the report:  The dictum ‘in fear for my life’ was the most common theme throughout all of our conversations with PPD officers and sergeants regarding deadly force policy. Yet, notably, the word ‘fear’ does not appear in [the department’s policy] nor is it supported by current case law.  The actual standard for use of deadly force, according to the department’s policy, requires that officers “have a set of facts and circumstances that a reasonable or rational officer would determine would likely result in unavoidable death or serious injury”.  New trainings designed to correct this misconception focus not only on when officers can use force, but when and how to not use it.  But the Cops report, made public long before anyone had seen the video of Carroll’s arrest, also lays bare the type of mistrust that still exists between the community and the department. The report finds that distrust in the department, specifically its ability to investigate itself, “pervades segments of the community”.  “This distrust stems from incidents in which members of the department have engaged in corruption and excessive uses of force and from the department’s lack of transparency on these matters,” the report reads.  And this is likely a chasm that no situation-based training can fix. “It’s like every time you turn the news on, it’s cops beating someone. It’s like: when will it end?” Ebony Carroll said.
With only one killing recorded this year, brutality incidents and years of mistrust still mar the city’s reputation