Successful Police-Community Relations Requires This Component
By: Christina Hicks-Goldston
Tags: Collaboration, Communication, Reform, Police, Community Engagement

The recent riots across the country in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minnesota police reminded me of those turbulent days in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict in late April 1992. I was a second-semester graduate student at Emerson College in Boston, working on my final research papers or projects and preparing to return home to Texas to see my parents and friends for the summer. One evening as I prepared to go to my part-time job, I heard a din of voices outside my dorm room window. Although Beacon Street noise regularly drifted up from the traffic, people, or music below to my tenth-floor room, on that evening the noise was a mob of people marching, moving as a single unit, chanting, “No justice, no peace!” I had not heard about the King verdict in that pre-Social Media era. Instead, I was in the computer lab, working furiously on my papers since I had to work that night and would miss the opportunity for more lab time.

Of course, the following days were filled with reports of riots and civil unrest, and we all watched as once again the issue of race in America revealed two separate realities. Nearly thirty years of ideological hand wringing, Black lives lost in police-civilian encounters, and movements such as #blacklivesmatter have brought us less cohesion, less peace, and a continued sense of frustration. In a way, society has responded to the situation like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, with each man feeling a part of the elephant’s body and determining its entire appearance based on their singular experience and perception. We are trying to find answers to a large, systemic issue based on our singular perceptions and experiences.

Almost thirty years later, Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas premiered on HBO in April of 2018. Cenac (formerly on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show), hosted the series, which provided a half-hour of comedy-meets-information, and an extended feature piece offering more in-depth analysis of a particular issue. In the premiere, Cenac announced that each episode for the season would present a discussion of some aspect on the issue of policing in America. Interestingly, Cenac introduced the discussion with a reminder of the infamous shooting of Philando Castile by a St. Paul, Minnesota police officer during a traffic stop before allowing the experts such as former and current police officers, sociologists, journalists, activists, and former mayors to conclude the necessary component was better training for police officers. However, by the episode’s conclusion, the big reveal is that there is no national, standardized, or regulated training across the board. There were excellent programs in place for some communities, while programs in other communities reflected an antagonistic approach. Later episodes focused on the issue of apology (or lack of apology) from the police for unwarranted shootings or unnecessary arrests, the idea of “residing” officers who live in the neighborhoods they police, the troubled relationship between the homeless and police, between the mentally ill and police, the idea of nonlethal firearms for policing, the idea of restorative justice, and moving past the mindset of a “war” on drugs. By the final episode, the solution that worked best for a troubled city with police-community relations was not surprising: community problem-oriented policing, a Cincinnati initiative from 2002.

The key word is collaborative — the idea that both sides recognize the complicated, multi-faceted problems that create crime in a community and allow both sides to try and find solutions beyond aggression and brutality. As a Communications professional, my advice on the issue of improving police-community relations is to take a holistic approach culminating in collaboration. As a society, we must recognize the lack of cohesive training (particularly diversity training), and a history of distrust and abuse between law enforcement and the Black community that is painful to remember but provides context. As a society, we must recognize the need for a formalized apology and accepted responsibility from police for bad acts. We must recognize the need for collaboration between neighborhoods and the officers working in those neighborhoods to solve problems rather than react to them. The key takeaways are a need for acknowledging that any systemic problem requires a network of professionals contributing their parts to the whole. The crisis of faith existing in the U.S. between police and the policed is the elephant in the room, and we as a country cannot afford to be the blind men making assumptions about the nature of existence via our limited view of the problem.

This kind of communication is based on empathy, on listening and support from community members who are willing to sit down each week and discuss what’s happening on the streets of their city. Training must include a diversity of voices, and the vocabulary cannot include divisive speech. At this point in our national dialogue, we are yelling, crying, marching, and suffering — but we are not listening. The idea of collaborative work on this issue is not lofty or idealistic, since Cenac’s program demonstrated that communities willing to begin the process experienced varying levels of success. If approaching the problem with policing in just one area (such as training, or introducing “resident officers”) produced success, imagine what is possible with a formulated plan supported by both sides at the table committed to making things work. The people marching in the streets are asking for the plan, but the question remains if the people on the other side of the protest sign are willing to show up for the meeting.