‘To Protect, Serve, and Understand’: The Irondale marks 10 years of landmark program connecting police and the public

After Eric Garner was killed by police officers on Staten Island in 2014, Terry Greiss watched the video of the incident over and over again. 

Captured by Garner’s friend, the footage showed him arguing with police officers who believed he was selling loose cigarettes. The disagreement escalated until Officer Daniel Pantaelo grabbed Garner and put him in an illegal minutes-long chokehold, ignoring his cries of “I can’t breathe.” Garner’s death was later declared a homicide, and “I can’t breathe” became a rallying cry for anti-police-violence protests for years afterward. 

Greiss, the co-founder of the Irondale Ensemble Project in Fort Greene, said he grappled with different emotions with each watch — anger, sadness, numbness. 

“Without painting any fingers, one can honestly say cues were being missed,” he said. “They were not talking to each other, they were not listening to each other.”

Greiss felt that police had to learn how to listen and communicate better with the public, and that they might benefit from traditional acting techniques. He wrote a letter saying as much to then-NYPD commissioner William Bratton. 

“I really thought it was going to go right in the garbage,” he said.

When Greiss wrote that letter, said Susan Herman, then the Deputy Commissioner of Collaborative Policing, he didn’t know he was writing to a police commissioner who had always valued the art history courses he took in college above all others. 

“[Bratton] learned that other people saw the world differently than he did, but if he worked hard enough, he could understand their perspective, and he could see the world the way someone different from him saw the world,” she said. 

Two days after he mailed the letter, Greiss was called down to NYPD headquarters in Lower Manhattan to discuss his ideas with Herman. In 2015, they launched a collaborative project, “To Protect, Serve, and Understand,” at the Irondale. 

Now in its tenth year, TPSU brings together seven police officers and seven civilians for 10-week programs where they learn, act and play, hoping to leave with a better understanding of each other.

“When an actor comes onstage, the first thing you’re taught is how to listen,” Greiss said. “How to listen really specifically, really dynamically. You’re present with somebody 100% of the time.”

“If that doesn’t happen onstage, the actor gets a bad review,” he continued. “But if that doesn’t happen in life, if that doesn’t happen in an interaction between a police officer and a civilian, bad things can happen, and they have.”

Each session begins with a shared meal — an easy way to break the ice and get people comfortable with each other, Greiss said. Then there are acting exercises, improvisation, and training sessions. 

About halfway through the workshop, each participant has to interview someone on the “other side,” who isn’t in the program — officers interview civilians, civilians interview officers. Using that person’s words, gestures, and intonations, the interviewer steps into their shoes for a public performance at the end of the 10 weeks. 

Johnny Hines, who has served as an NYPD officer for 18 years, is one of dozens of officers who have participated in the program.

“I believe the work that’s done here is transformative beyond measure,” he said. 

Hines uses the skills he learned at TPSU in relationships outside of his work, he said, including with his children and family.

“It’s just about active listening and learning more about yourself,” he said. “With that, when you go into a situation as an officer, you understand more, you can hear more, you can feel more. And those are the lessons that can’t be taught in a book.” 

Greiss recalled the story of one former participant, a white police officer who interviewed a Black teenager at the halfway point. The teen told her he was afraid to walk home at night because he was afraid of being shot by a police officer. 

As they approached the end of the program, and the public performance, the officer started to doubt whether she could share his words on stage. She told Greiss she didn’t believe he could feel that way, he said — he was a nice kid from a middle-class family who had never been in any kind of trouble.

“I said, you have to say it. He gave you his story, and that’s a sacred thing,” Greiss said. 

When the officer came off the stage that night, she was “transformed,” he said. She understood that whether or not the teen was in real danger of being shot by a police officer, he believed he was, and that influenced his feelings and actions. 

Steph Barnes was one of the first officers to participate in TPSU 10 years ago. This year, he became the first participant to join a second workshop. 

Barnes never wanted to be a police officer growing up, he said — he wanted to be a firefighter. But he was called to join the NYPD, where he works with kids daily as a mentor and coach.

“Once I heard about this program 10 years ago, I said, ‘I gotta get on this,’” he said. “I gotta show the world that hey, cops are people too. My fellow colleagues, they have stories, they need to be a part of this.” 

In celebration of the program’s milestone anniversary, Council Member Crystal Hudson presented Greiss with a council citation, honoring his work and the good TPSU has done.  

Victoria Perry, deputy chief of the NYPD’s Community Affairs office, said the department is dedicated to the program and to improving relations between police and the public.

“We’re going to continue to do it every single year. This is 10 years, and we hope that we’ll be standing here again for the 20-year reunion,” Perry said.  “We’re committed to this program. We’re committed to serving the public and community affairs. Will do it every day no matter what.”

In 2023, TPSU found an audience outside of Brooklyn — all the way across the pond, in Belgium, where they helped a local theater company create their own version of the program. But Greiss feels the program is scalable across the five boroughs and the country. 

“We would like to be training hundreds of artists to do this work in communities around the country and not just with police officers,” he said. “There are plenty of people who need to talk to each other.”