Cops Show Kids
Taekwondos & Don’ts

“Kiyah!” shouted Roynisha Dennie — as she kicked Assistant Police Chief Pat Redding toward the wall of the gym.

Before the kick the fifth-grader had learned to show respect by bowing. Of the three types of focus — that of body, eye, and mind — she learned mind is the most important. Then she learned how to control her breath to be confident.

The lessons of the 1,000-year-old Korean martial art of taekwondo and their carryover to school and daily life were just part of a demonstration delivered to Roynisha and her fellow fourth- and fifth-graders at Lincoln-Bassett School on Tuesday afternoon.

The instructors were the New Haven police department’s only Korean-American officers, Charles Kim and Robert Hwang.

They were there as part of an all-volunteer program teaching kids about different cultures represented in the NHPD. The program aims to put personal faces on the people who wear the uniform, especially in the city’s tougher neighborhoods.

The program, called New Horizons in Diversity, is the brainchild of 16-year department veteran and current night shift commander Lt. Patricia Helliger. She was a world-traveling Pan Am flight attendant before becoming a cop.

“A lot of kids don’t have good knowledge of cultures of the world,” Helliger said as she helped Kim and Hwang distribute a pre-taekwondo lesson sheet explaining the blue and red Yin-Yang symbol at the heart of the Korean flag.

So far Helliger has brought cops representing India, Peru, Belarus, and South Korea to the kids at Lincoln-Bassett. (Click here for a previous story on the visit of Mumbai-born Officer Maneet Bhagtana.)

Helliger said that last month’s program featured New Haven’s only officer from Belarus, officer Yelena Borisova. Borisova told her that she was recently at the supermarket and a kid who had been in the program recognized her.

Not only did that child say hello. She introduced Borisova to her whole family.

“That’s the point,” said Helliger.

The program is well-suited for Lincoln-Bassett, said Principal Ramona Gattison, who was last year’s principal of the year in New Haven.. 

Lincoln-Bassett has historically been an all-African-American school, she said. No longer. ​“We’re quite diverse,” Gattison said, About 10 percent of her 400 K‑8 students speak have a first language other than English.

“Koreans, Haitians, Indians,” she said. The school is more bilingual than ever and this year has its first English Language Learning, or ELL, teacher.

Lt. Helliger said she chose Lincoln-Bassett for her program for two reasons.

First, of all the schools in the city, it has the most incidents of gunfire in its environs, she said.

At the beginning of her career, Helliger was a beat cop. She walked nearby Winchester Avenue in 1995 during New Haven’s first community policing experiment.

Hwang,whose family owns three taekwondo schools in Greater New Haven, has been a New Haven cop for two years, after four with the Yale police. On Tuesday, he politely and firmly lined the kids up and gave them stand-up-sit-down exercises in discipline.

“Can you get straight As without focus?” he asked. Then he explained the three different kinds of focus, of the body, eye, and mind.

“The martial arts are not about breaking boards or beating someone else,” he said as he instructed. ​“It’s about controlling yourself in everyday life.”

Then he asked them what subject they were weakest in. When kids answered, he said that was what they should not forget to practice.

Then Roynisha and the other kids practiced kicking with their weaker leg.

“Now bow to your teachers who are here every day,” Hwang said at the end of his instruction.

As a group, in a strong, confident tone, all the kids bowed and called out as he had taught them, ​“Kam sam ham ni da.” Translation: Thank you!

After Hwang had finished running the kids through their martial arts paces, he handed the class over to Officer Charles Kim, a five-year veteran who works the Newhalville area near the school. Kim finished up with 20 minutes of instruction on Korean culture.

The kids appeared captivated by the lesson, or maybe exhausted by the kicking and deep bowing. They paid close enough attention to remember how to count to five in Korean for the rest of their lives: hana, du, set, net, dasut.

Next up for the lucky fourth and fifth graders at Lincoln-Bassett: In December Officer Oscar Diaz will be telling them about Chile.

This year, as last, Helliger said she hopes to bring all the kids on a culminating trip to the United Nations, if she can find the ​“won.”

That’s money, in Korean.