Washington Lawyer - November/December 2020 - 37

FEATURE

Sheppard Mullin

department. Aronie committed to the
effort in a pro bono capacity.

JONATHAN ARONIE
Project ABLE

"Fast forward to today, after the George
Floyd killing, when we received collectively over a hundred calls from police
agencies begging for this training,"
Aronie says, adding that the NOPD
alone could not meet all the training
requests. "We needed a national
platform to pull this off, and my firm
was looking for something meaningful
and authentic and effective to do. So,
we reached out to Georgetown and
Professor Christy Lopez, and Project
ABLE was formed."

During the open house, which included insight from Lopez and various
officers from the NOPD, many participants wondered about the
outcome of Floyd's encounter with the police had the three other
officers intervened in Derek Chauvin's brutal manhandling of Floyd.

"When a police officer is at the scene, and all of a sudden an interven-tion
is called for, if they've never practiced or even contemplated one,
intervention is much harder to come by," says Aronie. In fact, George-
town Law and Aronie discovered that many police officers' gun---fight training far exceeds their training in intervention and conflict
de-escalation.
Aronie likens police officers calling out their colleagues' bad behavior to
lawyers calling out their associates and partners with regards to discriminatory acts and language. He says that police fear retaliation but have
other reasons for non-intervention, such as not knowing all the facts and
lack of confidence or experience in intervention and de-escalation.
"There are plenty of people pushing for programs to break down the
blue wall of silence. Project ABLE incentivizes officers to intervene before
the bad thing happens. So, the risk of repercussions or ostracization is
much, much lower. The active bystander also can prevent another officer
from getting fired," Aronie explains.
Reach D.C. Bar staff writer John Murph at JMurph@dcbar.org.

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NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020

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Washington Lawyer - November/December 2020

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