Positive community-police interaction thread
Please respect the spirit of this thread.
There are two related problems going on:
1) It is absolutely true that people in power will protect their comrades in the general case. This isn't just true for cops, it's also true for politicians (like Shillary). Demanding accountability is good.
2) If you choose to focus only on negative incidents like these, it can reinforce your pre-existing biases. For example, if someone believes that cops are racist and evil, and then every day, looks for cases of them acting out that way, they ARE GOING to find it, because some of those types of cops will inevitably exist in a country of 300 MILLION people. But the exact same approach could be used to paint a negative picture of ANY GROUP.
We should distinguish between (1) and (2). (1) is useful, (2) is not.
To counter (2), one must flip the script. Assume that the group you think of as an enemy is good, and look for examples of good action, instead of only seeking out bad actions. That lends to a more balanced perception.
This thread is for that - we seek out examples of good community-police interaction, and post them here.
I will kick it off:
[B]BLM Protest in Wichita meets group of police, resulting in cookout.[/B]
[quote]What was originally planned as a protest march turned into a cookout where Wichita police and a diverse group of residents broke bread together.
The Wichita Eagle reports that organizers of the protest met with Police Chief Gordon Ramsay for several hours, ending with an agreement for the cookout, which took place Sunday at a city park. Several Wichita police officers took part.
Black Lives Matter protesters had planned to march on Sunday, but after organizers met with Chief Ramsay for hours, according to the protesters, they agreed to break bread together instead.
The goal was to open communication and build trust between police and the communities they serve. The crowd at the cookout included people who were white, black and Hispanic.
At one table, three men – a black man, a Hispanic man and a white man – sat down with burgers next to police Lt. Travis Rakestraw to share their ideas.
...
The three men said they were surprised to hear that Rakestraw seemed to care about what they were saying, and that he had thought about the same issues. But they all said that they were planning on still marching.
Rakestraw, in his turn, said that from the police perspective, a conversation like the one they were having at the cookout felt more productive than many of the protests he’s seen across the nation, which are based on confrontation rather than dialogue. But he had no complaints about the Wichita protest last week that was nonviolent.
“I don’t think it’s a conscious effort,” Rakestraw told them, about why racial biases sometimes persist. “[B]I don’t think anybody does it intentionally but we fill in the gaps with life experiences, what we read in the paper, and we start to view people as a generalization instead of understanding people as individuals.[/B]”
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[img]http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/e2x4z0/picture90247297/ALTERNATES/FREE_960/Wichita[/img]
[img]http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/vwvfy7/picture90247282/ALTERNATES/FREE_960/DSC00532[/img]
[img]http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/07/19/wichita-police_custom-8a11fe8608e29e81b84afff1d325ee04f1ca60e8-s800-c85.jpg[/img]