As police officers and members of the communities they're charged with protecting continue to go head-to-head in the streets, one thing is clear: Policing needs to change. At the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's fifth annual America Healing conference, transforming American policing is exactly what attendees are trying to do. The conference in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, attracts hundreds of activists, lawyers, and, academics from across the country.
In the nine months since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, police departments nationwide are under intense scrutiny-in particular the departments within cities and communities of color. Thanks to social media and smartphones, we've been able to document the unjustified police killings of black people in New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, North Charleston, and more.
At the America Healing event, civil rights and justice take center stage, as exemplified by the Tuesday morning panel titled "Healing Relationships Between Law Enforcement and Communities of Color.
As the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Sherrilyn Ifill has worked on improving police practices in Ferguson, Baltimore, and cities throughout the country. When the riots in Baltimore broke out on Monday, April 28, cable news pundits opined about property damage without considering the deeper issues that lay beneath the protests and riots.
"While the CVS burned," said Ifill, "no one stopped to ask why there was no grocery store in the neighborhood."
The housing discrimination that marks the city's history (and which still exists today) "made Baltimore an island reservation where they deposited poor people," Ifill explained. As a result of discriminatory practices, some Baltimore neighborhoods ended up becoming food deserts with dilapidated schools and inadequate housing. Police killings are just one part of the equation; real change won't happen, she said, until the problem of concentrated poverty is addressed.
But Ifill put some of the onus on activists, too. "We can't just march when something terrible happens," she said. Lawmakers must also be held accountable, she said, for the legislation they draft. When several police accountability bills were presented to the Maryland General Assembly, Ifill noted, activists missed an opportunity to organize around decision-making.
Melanca Clark of the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) division of the Department of Justice spoke of her office's interim report on President Barack Obama's task force on 21st century policing. The 109-page report consists recommendations and implementations of what Clark describes as "concrete, actionable solutions." The task force recommended building trust by making sure police officers acknowledge the role of law enforcement in past injustices and how that affects a community's ability to trust the police in the present. Other recommendations included new policies for oversight within police departments, using new technology (such as body cameras), and a return to community policing.
Because of newer technologies such as cell-phone cameras, the extent of police violence is being revealed to the nation. As Jeffrey Blackwell, chief of Cincinnati's police department put it, "many cities in this country are one incident away from Baltimore."
"We should be in the business of lifting people up, not locking them up," Blackwell said, drawing applause. Officers in Blackwell's department are encouraged be involved in the community. Blackwell spoke of how the police officers under his supervision are involved in such efforts as reading to children at elementary schools and feeding the homeless. "Police officers should be guardians of their communities," he said.
"As law enforcement we have this mentality of big me, little you," Blackwell said of the way many police officers approach civilians. "If we don't rethink the way police officers operate in our communities, we will always think that we have to police our way out of crime."
