Colby Itkowitz of the Washington Post just posted an inspiring story with a message of hope for communities struggling with tension between police and community members:
Activist A.J. Bohannon had organized more than 1,000 Black Lives Matters protesters to march the streets of Wichita on Sunday. But then, days before, he received a call from the new police chief with a different idea.
Instead of having an event that drew a hard line between protester and police, why not bring them all together for an evening of summer revelry and open dialogue?
So instead of marching, they gathered in a wooded park where the police department cooked and served up burgers and other picnic fare. The officers played basketball with kids. They took group selfies. One officer did the “whip and the nae nae” and the “Cha Cha Slide” in a crowd of dancing girls — a video that instantly became a viral sensation.
They called it the First Steps Community Cookout, a nod to what they see as the seeds of an ongoing effort to ease the tensions heightened by the recent shootings of and by police officers. Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay, who has been on the job since January, started the event by taking questions from residents for 45 minutes.
The questions were wide-ranging. One person asked about the “gang files,” a database the police have of everyone who ever had any affiliation with a gang, Bohannon recalled. He said that Ramsay promised he would look into creating a process for people to get their names off the list through either a clean record or some kind of community service. It’s an example of something actionable the department can do to heal relations.
Comments (2)