Black History Month 2024: Activist Cop Brings Message of Police Reform to Medgar Evers College

Edwin Raymond is familiar with being a young black man routinely being stopped by local police for no larger reason than the color of his skin. Having grown up in East Flatbush, it was something he regularly experienced and vowed to try and fix from inside the New York City Police Department when he signed up to join the force in 2008.

The journey he ended up taking led to a 15-year-career, where he became the highest-ranking whistleblower in NYPD history. His story became the basis of An Inconvenient Cop: My Fight to Change Policing in America, a memoir he co-wrote with New York Times best-selling author Jon Sternfeld. It’s also a story Raymond is bringing to Medgar Evers College on Friday, February 2, 2024 at 6 p.m. in the Founders Auditorium.

The child of Haitian immigrants, Raymond and his brother, Ronald, lost their mom when the former was 3-years-old. Enduring poverty and dodging drug dealers, Raymond joined the force, where he quickly experienced a system that advocated ticketing quotas in a culture informed by stop-and-frisk, oftentimes at the expense of young people of color. It was an eye-opening experience that drove the rookie cop to rise through the ranks while fighting to change the system in a way that eventually led to “A Black Police Officer’s Fight Against the N.Y.P.D.,” a 2016 New York Times Magazine cover story. NYPD policy forbade active duty cops from writing books, which wound up being the inspiration for him to continue his activism as a civilian, starting with the release of his book.

“I really poured my soul out into that book,” Raymond said. “I thought it was crucial that while I knew I was going to be giving information that was going to be needed, I decided to do it in the memoir genre because I wanted people to understand the human being of who I am, how I came to be this way and why I’m driven on this mission. This book has been a central repository for a lot of what I’ve been trying to educate folks about over the years.”

In sharing his childhood experiences and policing anecdotes, Raymond included scenarios where he witnessed questionable law enforcement procedures familiar to many Medgar Evers College students. One of those places is the Franklin Avenue subway station, where quotas were met via actual fare evaders and others being ticketed for questionable offenses. The writing is vivid enough that the presentation coming to Medgar Evers College avoids the standard book tour set-up of an author reading book excerpts before taking questions. Raymond and his team have instead hired actors and built sets to provide a more three-dimensional presentation for attendees.

“I wanted the audience to have a visceral experience,” he said. “Rather than the boiler-plate format of reading excerpts, we decided to use theater. We picked four pivotal moments in the book and I got actors and a friend of mine who is a construction worker to build up the stage set. We reconstructed Franklin Avenue train station. We built the jail cell and my living room. Those are the three different settings and four different scenes played out in those settings. In between each scene, I gave additional context. It was such a unique way of presenting this information. It was like an evolution of the delivery of this type of information.”

For Raymond, Medgar Evers College is the perfect place to deliver his message regarding his fight to change policing in America.

“I’m a man on a mission and an activist first trying to move the needle in the right direction and the evolution in delivery of this message belongs at Medgar Evers College,” he said. “I know Brooklyn College wants us to bring it there, but as a personal favor to Miles [McAfee], who has always been a great supporter, I told Brooklyn College we’d get back to them. But I want to do this at Medgar first and I can’t wait to bring this production there.”

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BLACK HISTORY MONTH AT MEDGAR EVERS COLLEGE

For more information on the event for An Inconvenient Cop, please click here.

For our full calendar of Black History Month events, please click here.