OPINION:
When young men riot, as they did in Baltimore last week, it is the police on whom we depend to restore order. But how do we expect this to be done? What were these police actually to do?
They certainly weren’t going to grab up a thousand or even a few hundred kids, handcuff them and throw them into wagons like the one where Freddie Gray died.
They weren’t going to start swinging their riot batons, breaking bones and sending dozens of kids to the hospital. Nor were they going to fire their guns; the Baltimore police have not fatally shot an unarmed man for almost two decades.
What police do is not really about force. Police preserve peace and order principally by educating, leading, persuading people to cooperate in a peaceful community. Any veteran officer will tell you that the essential police skill is talking to people. That is especially true for dealing with young people, who in large parts of Baltimore no one else really talks to at all.
You cannot properly police people if you can’t talk with them. After the riot has broken out is a poor time to start.
How are cops to learn to talk to young people, perhaps to keep a riot from starting? Nothing in conventional police training prepares officers to do much more with kids than arrest them. The Maryland Police Training Commission has more than 900 training objectives. Not a single objective concerns communication with children or young people. Not one concerns the problems these young people face in their daily lives, with their often disordered families, the bullies in their streets or the failed schools full of danger. Maryland officers have never been offered any training that would help them contribute affirmatively to the lives and development of the young people of the city; they aren’t even taught how to properly get intelligence information.
The most ambitious attempt to connect police to young people was carried out just a few years ago by the Baltimore Police Department. From 2008 to 2012, under the leadership of Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld III, the department engaged in a remarkable attempt at self-reform and change. Every unit of the Department — patrol, detectives, special operations, drugs — rotated in turn through a full month devoted entirely to retraining, with substitute units covering their regular assignments.
The heart of this new training was directly working with juveniles. The youth work began at Outward Bound, alongside an equal number of young people from a middle school in the neighborhood in which the officers worked. Together the participants played games, surmounted difficult physical obstacles, shared lunch and just talked, under the guidance of highly-skilled facilitators. Most of the youth selected were behavior problems, truants or worse: more than a few had criminal records. Before days’ end, officers and kids were exchanging cellphone numbers.
Next the officers visited the youths’ schools, where the kids eagerly introduced “their” officers to the entire school. Then came attention to the gang problem — not through police lectures or videos, but by officers working with reformed gang leaders and with present gang members.
Officers visited the juvenile booking and custodial facility. They ate dinner with groups of mothers who had lost their own children to criminal violence. They constantly discussed what they had seen and heard.
The officers created their own unit work plans, all focused on youth: visiting schools, streets and corners, learning names and faces, trying for footholds for action. One district created a program to mentor young people who have already had trouble with the police; two young sergeants created the Harbor House, a program that sheltered street children overnight rather than arresting them. Here was an entire police department committing to friendship with the young people of the city.
But Baltimore could barely afford to train one unit a month, and at most 40 kids. So the city went to the Department of Justice to plead for a little funding to expand these efforts, which the DOJ’s own juvenile justice experts proclaimed to be unique in the nation, and the best police training they had ever seen.
They gave the Police Department not a dime.
About this time, Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon was forced to resign for embezzling charitable funds. The new mayor did not extend Commissioner Bealefeld’s contract, and ultimately hired a new commissioner from the West Coast. He cut off all training beyond the two days each year mandated by the Maryland State Training Commission. All efforts to reach the youth of Baltimore stopped (although the commissioner himself mentored one youth).
When Baltimore had approached the Justice Department for funding help, the city had told Justice that the young people Baltimore was trying to work with would otherwise become the street criminals of another five years on. That memo was dated April 23, 2010. On April 27, 2015, almost five years to the day, the youth of Baltimore took to the streets.
• Adam Walinsky is president of the Center for Research on Institutions and Social Policy.
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