Education Week - May 20, 2015 - 14

Program Targets Tensions Between Police, Minority Youth
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
lice has bubbled over in Baltimore,
Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and other
cities after the deaths of minorities
felled by police bullets or excessive
force.
The unrest has served as a call to
action: Amid growing concern about
racial bias in U.S. law-enforcement
agencies, groups are taking steps to
foster better relations between police
and minority youths.
In Chicago, lawyers, academics,
and activists have brought police and
teenagers on the city's South Side
together to discuss their often-tense
encounters.
In Mobile, Ala., the fbi, city police,
and the U.S. attorney's office host
workshops to teach young people how
to prevent contact with cops from
turning tragic.
Led by mayors in Philadelphia and
New Orleans, a coalition of big-city
leaders is shaping strategies to ease
the deep distrust and frustration that
sparked recent demonstrations and
clashes between police and protesters.
But as efforts emerge to quell the
tension between law-enforcement officers
and the communities they serve,
organizers and students concede that
they are searching for solutions to
problems that have existed for decades,
if not longer.
"It's a social issue, it's an economic
issue, it's something that's been going
on for a while," said Hyde Park Academy
senior Tytania Holliman, 18. "It's
so complex."
Everyday Encounters
Mr. Conway and Ms. Holliman take
part in the Youth/Police Project, a
program founded by the University of
Chicago Law School's legal-aid clinic
and the Invisible Institute, a publicadvocacy
group.
The effort started well before the
fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael
Brown in Ferguson last August,
though that incident gave the group's
work new urgency.
The project provides a forum for
teenagers to talk about how their
lives are "affected by the character
of police presence in their neighborhoods,"
organizers said.
The sessions focus on personal
experience rather than big-picture
discussions about the role of law enforcement.
"It
helps me get out some of the feelings
I have," Mr. Conway said.
Participants occasionally discuss
headline-grabbing incidents like the
one that led to the shooting death of
Mr. Chatman, who along with two
others allegedly carjacked a vehicle
at gunpoint.
But more often than not, students
share their stories of everyday encounters
with uniformed and plainclothes
officers, said Jamie Kalven,
a journalist and community activist
who runs the Invisible Institute.
"That encounter can go wrong in so
many ways, and often does," Mr. Kalven
said. "The most terrible things
inform the everyday encounters. It
leaves them with a sense of powerlessness."
The
concerns aren't unique to ChiStudents
at Hyde Park
Academy in Chicago
react as organizer
Chaclyn Hunt, at center,
plays back a video of the
class acting out a police
interaction. Through a
program called Youth/
Police, the Invisible
Institute, located in the
South Side section of the
city, works with the
school's media program
to provide students an
outlet to talk about their
interactions with police
officers.
cago or the cities where incidents
have sparked protests and unrest.
The deaths of 12-year-old Tamir
Rice in Cleveland and Mr. Brown in
Ferguson by police have led to similar
conversations in many urban areas.
"We have decades of research that
proves youth in inner-city America
are treated differently," said Natasha
Pratt-Harris, an associate professor of
sociology at Morgan State University
in Baltimore.
"The problem stems from adults not
talking to children."
To grapple with the issues of race
and policing, the Youth/Police Project
convened a two-day summit in Chicago
in late April with students, law"
The
end goal is to
keep our kids alive
and law-enforcement
officers safe."
KENYEN BROWN
U.S. Attorney, Alabama
enforcement leaders, and some of the
nation's leading scholars on policecommunity
relations.
The gathering happened in a city
with one of the worst records of police
violence. Just this month, the Chicago
City Council authorized $5.5 million
in payments to victims of police torture,
mostly black men from the city's
South Side.
Ms. Holliman, the Hyde Park
Academy student, took part in a
panel discussion, "How Youth See
Police. How Police See Youth," with
guests who included Tracie Keesee,
a co-founder of the Center for Policing
Equity at the University of California,
Los Angeles.
In interviews with Education Week,
both Ms. Holliman and Ms. Keesee
14 | EDUCATION WEEK | May 20, 2015 | www.edweek.org
bemoaned a lack of effective communication
between law enforcement
and teenagers.
"There's a conundrum. Everybody
was a teenager, but we often forget
what that's like," said Ms. Keesee, a
retired 25-year veteran of the Denver
police department. "Law enforcement
must have a deeper understanding of
young people, but adolescent development
isn't something that is taught in
a police academy."
Ms. Keesee also serves as the project
director for the National Initiative
for Building Community Trust in Justice,
an effort funded by the U.S. Department
of Justice that is designed
to strengthen relationships between
minority communities and the criminal-justice
system.
What young people want is for law
enforcement to meet them on their
own terms, Ms. Keesee said, whether
that means coming to places where
they feel comfortable, engaging them
on social media, or stopping for chats
on the street without the threat of a
search or getting roughed up.
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter
recently hosted more than a dozen
mayors and hundreds of other municipal
leaders in his city to continue a
discussion of how to stop violence that
kills an estimated 13 black men and
boys every 24 hours.
It's the mission of the Cities
United partnership he helped
launch in 2011.
In Philadelphia, the effort includes
a push to improve relations between
law enforcement and youths through
increased investment in the city's Police
Athletic League and the Youth
Commission, both of which provide
opportunities for police to interact
with teenagers and preteens.
"Our focus is on knitting people
back together," said Deputy Mayor
Everett Gillison, Mr. Nutter's point
man on the initiative. "We have to dispel
the [notion] that it's an us-versusthem
situation."
To suppress crime, a city can flood
an area with officers, Mr. Gillison
said, but that approach doesn't address
the underlying issues of race
and class that often are at play when
police officers and young people clash.
Eighty-five percent of the people
shot and killed in Philadelphia are
black males between the ages of 14
and 35, many of them residents of the
city's most distressed neighborhoods,
he said.
Mr. Nutter and Mr. Gillison are
products of some of those same West
Philadelphia neighborhoods.
Initiative in Mobile
A meeting between a city's police
chief and the leaders of the naacp and
the Urban League won't help build
relationships, especially with youths
who feel marginalized, said Charles
Wilson, the national chairman of the
National Association of Black Law
Enforcement Officers.
"Most times, it's not the chief that
the community is having issues with,"
said Mr. Wilson. "Make sure community
policing is not just a concept and
byword. Get out there and find out
what the issues are."
Why law enforcement builds relationships
with communities is just
as important as how such officers go
about it, said Leon Andrews, the program
director for the National League
of Cities' Institute for Youth, Education,
and Families.
"Do we really show that we love
these kids?" Mr. Andrews said. "That's
the approach that we need to be
thinking about."
The National League of Cities is
part of the Cities United national
partnership.
In Mobile, federal and local lawenforcement
officials recently rolled
out a training program they hope will
head off the tense encounters that
occur when police officers question or
pull over young people.
Called style, for Successful Tips
for Youth on Law Enforcement
Encounters, the training includes
mock scenarios that help high
school students understand how to
respond when an officer questions
them or pulls them over.
In a statement, Kenyen Brown, the
U.S. attorney for the Southern District
of Alabama, said the program
helps develop "mutual respect and
rapport."
Mr. Brown hopes the sessions provide
opportunities for students to chat
with officers in a nonthreatening environment
and overcome the "tangible
fear of law-enforcement encounters"
that many teenagers have.
"The end goal is to keep our kids
alive and law-enforcement officers
safe," Mr. Brown said.
Like-minded programs have existed
for decades. Mr. Wilson, a lieutenant
for the Rhode Island College police department
in Providence, has led similar
presentations across the country.
"These kids get scared crapless
when they get approached by law enforcement,"
Mr. Wilson said.
The aim is to teach them "how to
walk away from a battle they can afford
to lose," he said.
That fear remains hard to shake,
said Ms. Holliman, the Hyde Park
Academy student.
"We don't know what a police officer
is going to do," she said. "They always
have the upper hand."
Mr. Brown, the U.S. attorney, likes
to remind residents that police face
threats as well. Dozens of law-enforcement
officers are killed in the line of
duty each year.
"There has to be accountability on
both sides," Mr. Brown said.
Ultimately, both sides-youths and
police-are trying to share the same
message, Ms. Keesee of the National
Initiative for Building Community
Trust in Justice said.
"Don't generalize all of us as being
bad."
Coverage of school climate and student
behavior and engagement is supported
in part by grants from the Atlantic
Philanthropies, the NoVo Foundation, the
Raikes Foundation, and the California
Endowment. Education Week retains sole
editorial control over the content of this
coverage.
Alyssa Schukar for Education Week
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - May 20, 2015

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