By Andrew Maykuth
Philadelphia Inquirer
WASHINGTON — For the 100 Philadelphia police recruits who toured the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum yesterday, the exhibits were numbing and unsettling:
Photographs of starving concentration camp prisoners. Thousands of heaped shoes from death camp victims. And throughout the museum, the nagging photographic evidence of the complicity of German police officers, which enabled the Nazis to perpetrate one of history’s worst atrocities.
“Let me ask you - is this the job of police?” tour guide Richard Schwartzbard asked, pausing in front of a photograph of police officers forcing Jews to wear signs around their necks. “There’s a difference between enforcing the law and humiliating citizens.”
The message was disquieting to the young men and women who will be sworn in as officers later this month: What did the history of European Jews have to do with the 21st-century conditions they will encounter on Philadelphia’s streets? Was their profession somehow being equated with Nazis?
But by the end of the day, the larger aim revealed itself. The tour, designed by the museum and the Anti-Defamation League, was intended not to provoke guilt, but to inspire the young officers and remind them of the higher calling that attracted them to the profession: to protect and serve the public, not tyrants.
“This is the big picture - it’s not just about the number of arrests you make and the number of cases you close,” said David Friedman, director of the ADL’s regional office in Washington. “It’s about how you treat us, the public.”
The 10-year-old training program - “Law Enforcement and Society: Lessons of the Holocaust” - was inspired by Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey when he was Washington chief. More than 42,000 law enforcement officers have attended the program, now required for all FBI agents, but it was added to the Philadelphia Police Academy curriculum only this year after Ramsey’s arrival.
In an interview this week, Ramsey said he came up with the idea after touring the museum in 1998 and being shocked by the role of police when Germany’s democracy deteriorated into authoritarianism in the 1930s. He was particularly disturbed by a photograph of a police officer holding a crazed, muzzled German shepherd - an image, he said, that many Americans shared of their own police.
“What struck me was the role of the police officers in the Holocaust. I never realized it,” Ramsey said. “I always thought it was the Nazi soldiers that were responsible. It made me wonder, ‘How did that happen?’ ”
At the time of Ramsey’s epiphany, in 1998, police agencies were under fire for racial profiling and departments were directing officers to attend unpopular sensitivity training, which Ramsey said “put everybody in a defensive posture from the beginning.”
But Ramsey thought that by examining the police role in the Holocaust, officers could better understand the role of law enforcement in protecting constitutional rights in the context of one of the world’s worst abuses of police power.
“It was a real, live event that took place far enough in history so that the people in the classroom were not direct participants or experienced it, but the lessons learned are still relevant today in a democratic society,” Ramsey said.
“The broader implications are important,” he said. “When you’ve got a few shootings, a gang problem, and you think the solution is to lock everybody up on that corner, think about what you’re doing.”
Though the program can also be tailored for veteran officers, yesterday’s presentation was aimed at recruits, to reinforce the shared values of policing - to go beyond the marksmanship and legal knowledge that are drilled into recruits at the academy.
“These are idealistic young people who haven’t been hardened yet by law enforcement work,” said Barry Morrison, the ADL’s Philadelphia regional director, who helped raise the private money to pay for the two buses that took the recruits to Washington. “We want to get them when they’re fresh, to provide them with something that they can identify with in later years as law enforcement professionals.”
Michael Edwards, 23, who decided to become a police officer two years ago after his best friend, William Palmer, was killed while working as a parking-lot attendant at Hahnemann University Hospital, said he found the program inspirational.
“I never understood the Holocaust before, the role that police officers had in it,” he said.
William Righter, 23, said he was shocked by the extent to which many people in Germany stood by silently and allowed the mass murder of millions. “The willful ignorance on the part of everybody, even educated people. How could they allow this to go on?”
Friedman, the ADL’s director in Washington, reminded the recruits that many Americans hold the police in contempt, but that what sets the police apart is the discipline not to live up to stereotypes.
He urged them never to lose sight of the larger purpose of their job to protect society, because if they do, they are destined to fail.
“There’s a purpose to your sacrifice. . . . If you stop caring, if you stop respecting, your job’s hollow. That’s what makes us different as a country.”
Copyright 2008 Philadelphia Inquirer