Markeshia Ricks Photo
Roslyn Brock, chair of the NAACP National Board of Directors, told a crowd filled with law enforcement officials, first responders, clergy and community that like 50 years ago, when protests and court battles changed the U.S., “we find ourselves in a similar time of political and social change — a time that presents for us a host of opportunities and challenges.”
One of those opportunities and challenges centers building trust between the community and law enforcement, the subject of a conference held at Co-op High School Monday afternoon. The NAACP and the U.S. Attorney’s Office cosponsored the conference, entitled “Building Bridges.”
Brock (pictured at right above with local NAACP leader Doris Dumas and state NAACP leader Scot X Esdaile) said it comes down to relationships.
“I believe that Michael Brown would still be living today if the officer in the police car was an officer of color,” Brock said, referring to the 18-year-old black man shot dead in 2014 by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in an incident that helped start nationwide protests over police violence. “As he was walking in the street, I would surmise, he probably would have given the officer lip, would have talked back to him, said something out of the way, and [the officer] would have understood that this is a young black man around his friends and he’s just puffing up.”
Brock said she believes that an officer of color, unlike former police officer Darren Wilson, would have understood that Brown was showing off in front of his friends and felt more comfortable verbally asserting his authority.
Brock said changing the face of policing and the narrative around policing communities of color means confronting violence within communities and holding law enforcement accountable for aggressive policing.
“We have to give new light and life to the narrative that black lives matter when we are the ones that are doing the killing,” she said. “We must double down on efforts to end gun violence, but we must also address aggressive policing by those charged upholding the law — to law enforcement, that’s your part.
“We demand comprehensive cultural competency training, to eliminate conscious and unconscious bias; we want community policing officers working in urban areas to reflect the communities they serve; we want police officers to wear body cameras to ensure accountability; we want law enforcement to take responsibility when they have been wrong, and not stand behind the blue wall.”
That said, Brock is from a law enforcement family — she has a brother who is a 22-year sergeant with the Newark Police Department — and she committed to learning about the challenges officers face when they go into communities of color. “We seek mutual ground, but we seek change in our community,” she said. “Only by working together can we get to common ground.”
In the spirit of working together, a panel that included public school officials, local clergy and a child psychoanalyst talked about what could be done to address some of the things that put certain communities at risk and what to do about them before the police gets involved. The panel identified the need to mitigate factors such as chronic absenteeism and tardiness. They also pointed to the lack of alternatives beyond the drug trade for young adults who are not college bound.
“Speaking as a mother of a 24 year old who was killed in this city, as someone who’s worked as a school social worker, principal and now a member of the board, another piece that is critically important…is giving our young people opportunities,” New Haven Board of Education member Alicia Caraballo said. “As a community we have to do as much as we can to listen to our young people to hear what they’re saying to give them respect to provide opportunities for them. We graduate, every year at adult ed 200 to 300 students, but the prospects are not great. People are not hiring them. As we talk about young people hanging at corners, struggling we may not want to see them, but they’re here.”
“We have an opportunity to work on prevention,” said Gemma Joseph Lumpkin, the school system’s director of youth, family and community engagement. “When we see the high numbers of children in kindergarten through third grade chronically absent, it gives us an indicator of what’s going to happen to young people.”
Lumpkin said the community has a role to play in promoting the importance of regular, on-time school attendance, and helping develop creative interventions for addressing that problem, but people have to realize that New Haven is a “stressed” community in need of this kind of help.
“We live in a high poverty community,” she said. “If I have a two-week old baby and I can’t get my kindergartner to school on time, it’s our job as the school system to have the best interest of that student. We can have a lot of conversation about ‘Well, she could, she should have,’ but this is a reality families face trying to get to various schools.”