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### **The Law and Your Community: Building Bridges to Increase Public Safety**

March 2020 | Volume 13 | Issue 3

The evening news comes into our living rooms too often  with stories of senseless deaths of community members or police officers. As  the details for each event become public, we often ask, was there something  that could have prevented that? Why did it have to end that way? Communities  want to understand what makes a police officer use deadly force. Likewise, law  enforcement agencies are looking for meaningful ways to improve their  relationship with the communities they serve. The National Organization of Black Law  Enforcement Executives (NOBLE) developed *The**Law and Your Community* training  program in 2014 and later revised and expanded the reach of the program with  support from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office). The  program has reached over 50,000 youth in communities across the country and is  widely viewed as an essential tool to building meaningful community-police  relations.

 Whether you are a law enforcement agency, college or  university, school district, nonprofit, or religious organization, chances are  you are looking for ways to continue serving and improving your community. NOBLE,  a professional association of over 3,500 men and women in law enforcement, is  dedicated to improving community-police relations through meaningful public  safety programs. *The Law and Your Community* is a successful community  policing asset that we want to share with your community.

 NOBLE partnered with the COPS Office to create a training  that would bring police officers together to have a “conversation without  confrontation.” We believe that the program is an asset because it is a  nationally recognized hands-on interactive training program for young people  designed to improve their communication with law enforcement officers and their  understanding of federal, state, and local laws. The training also touches on components  of citizenship, law literacy, and law enforcement engagement.

 In the citizenship module, we provide education on how  representative democracy works and the role that citizens play in the  government. During the law literacy module, the goal is to increase participants’  knowledge regarding crimes that teens and young adults may lack knowledge of. The  critical law enforcement engagement module educates participants on the best way  to respond and react during encounters with law enforcement. How officers  should treat you, how to treat the officer, and how to handle police  mistreatment if it happens. 

The program brings community members and law enforcement  together in a safe environment to help educate and bring awareness to one  another. And the word is getting out there. Since January 2014, NOBLE has  delivered *The Law and Your Community* in middle and high schools across  the United States. The program is being taught in the Chicago area at 15 high  schools on a weekly basis. In California the course is taught one hour each  week for 12 weeks to at-risk males. NOBLE conducts *The Law and Your Community*in  Florida in middle schools in high crime districts. NOBLE has also presented the  training at almost all the middle and high schools in Delaware. 

 A police chief in Pennsylvania thought so highly of the  program that he had several of his officers take the training along with  himself so that he could use the program to engage the community in all his  police districts. When the chief relocated to a different state, he reached out  to NOBLE so the officers and community in his new agency could benefit from the  program. He told NOBLE, “*The Law and Your Community* is an outstanding community  education initiative which facilitates open and transparent communication  between police and community members. It is an important first step for police  gaining an understanding of community perceptions and the community gaining an  understanding of the challenges facing police.” Relationship-building through  education is a key component to building trust with communities.

 A survey completed with a focus group in New Jersey after participating  in *The Law and Your Community* training  events identified a few key themes that emerged from the groups:
          - Youth who attend the program have a better  understanding of why law enforcement does certain things and carry themselves  in a certain manner.
          - Youth learned what to do when interacting with  the police in various situations, including in the street, car, and home.
          - Youth gained knowledge about their rights, where  to go for information about their rights, and how to handle and report police  misconduct.

NOBLE has presented *The  Law and Your Community* at several colleges across the country. Two such  campuses that are very diverse in population are Gallaudet University in  Washington, DC, which serves a deaf and hard-of-hearing student population, and  to student athletes at Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, a historically black  college which serves predominately African American students. *The Law and Your Community* was  especially powerful at these campuses, at which campus leadership asked NOBLE  for the training to be done to meet a need in the campus community. Being asked  to deliver the program at a historically black college gave NOBLE the  opportunity to use *The Law and Your  Community* as an officer recruitment tool and to sow seeds of interest in  law enforcement careers. One student-athlete from Lane College who attended the  program was very candid about his experience with the training: “My favorite  part of the training was the traffic stop, because I learned some things that I  did not know that could put me at risk or even get me killed.” He also stated  that he now “gets it” that as a citizen, if you want to be respected you should  be respectful.

 If *The Law and Your Community* can help shape the  attitude of one person from negative to positive and that change saves the life  of an officer, then *The Law and Your  Community* is a community-policing resource that every community can use. Contact  NOBLE to help your agency facilitate open and transparent communication between  your police officers and the communities you serve.

Dwayne A. Crawford          Executive Director, NOBLE

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