Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.
–Margaret Wheatley
How can police officers and young people who fear and distrust law enforcement change the negative dynamic that has often been generations in the making? New policies or general orders—even new laws—won’t change people’s feelings. Building authentic relationships is a one-on-one process, which is difficult for an agency the size of the Chicago, Illinois, Police Department (CPD). As the second largest police department in the United States, with nearly 13,000 sworn members, the agency needed to find a new way of talking with young people, not just to them. Drawing upon the principles of restorative justice, the idea is to change the manner of conversation in order to change the relationship.
When a young person who has been kicked out of school, arrested, or incarcerated and bitterly proclaims fear of or hatred for the police finds an officer who shares his or her own close calls with bad choices or fear of not being accepted in the past, there can be a spark of kinship. When an officer can hear firsthand why someone may be afraid to report a crime or not at least appear to be aligned with the criminal element on his or her block, there might be a change in the officer’s perspective and response the next time a young person is in trouble or causing it.
These transformational moments do occur, and the opportunity to share stories seems to be craved by everyone, officers and young community members alike.
Youth Engagement Challenges
The CPD has for decades engaged with young people in programs such as Police Explorers. Like many law enforcement agencies, this formal youth corps is one of several initiatives that bring officers and kids together. But, it is the young people who wouldn’t dare join any such group that are most in need of a connection—the so-called at-risk or justice-involved youth and emerging adults. These young individuals are disconnected from their neighbors; their opportunities; and, certainly, from police officers. It is within these youth that an “us vs. them” mentality is most entrenched and most damaging. They are disproportionately at the center of the harmful behavior and violence that has persisted and even increased in the face of tough policies and zero tolerance practices. In the Chicago region, 29 percent of the Cook County Jail population on any given day is younger than 25, and around 70 percent of the jail’s population is African American.1 In the 10 years ending December 2017, more than 1,600 young African Americans under the age of 25 were killed in gun violence (compared to approximately 420 Latinos and 36 Caucasians in the same age group).2
For the youth most at risk for becoming part of these tragic outcomes, interactions with police are likely to be negative or downright dangerous. It is frequently a racially charged relationship, with black and brown youth disproportionately coming into contact with police who often know little about their history and culture, much less about their individual story or condition. What often gets lost in these youth-police interactions is that officers have much more in common with young people than that which divides them. Everyone is afraid of failure. Everyone wants to get home safely. Everyone is looking for respect, belonging, and success.
Only by individual discovery and open conversation do these common humanities surface, and the opportunity for CPD to find a way to build those connections came when the Metro YMCA Youth Safety and Violence Prevention program asked the department to collaborate to address their young participants’ concerns around safety. Many of the youth were at a critical crossroads: return to the familiar way of the streets and risk life and freedom or try to learn a better way.
The choice may seem obvious to outsiders, but these young people live among the very element that they wanted and needed to get away from. Challenging their affinity with previous acquaintances and illicit activities brought fear of bodily harm or death. Many people call upon law enforcement to protect them, but for these youth, encounters with police had been just as treacherous as the lifestyles they were desperately trying to escape.
In order to see a change in how the youth saw the police, there had to be a conversation. Both officers and youth posed the same question though: how do you have a conversation with someone you don’t trust?
Bridging the Divide
CPD Officer Vanessa Westley was working with the team at the YMCA, and she realized this trust issue could not be addressed in the same way that had been done in the past with other community members. “It had to be more than an event, we needed something deeper… to do something we had not done before in order to get something we had never reached,” said Westley. She was inspired by the growing support for restorative justice and its practices in the criminal justice arena, particularly, the work of a local juvenile court judge, Colleen Sheehan.
Judge Sheehan had started asking members of law enforcement to come and meet with youth confined in the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. She wanted to facilitate some positive interaction after years of hearing equally awful opinions from young people and police officers about one another.
At the same time, Judge Sheehan was already in the planning stages of the North Lawndale Restorative Justice Community Court. It opened last year on Chicago’s west side, addressing non-violent crimes in the North Lawndale neighborhood. Judge Sheehan presides over the court, but says the power is with those affected by the crimes. “The community has the power to determine how to heal the harm from crime and conflict. It is the community that has the wisdom to do this,” says Sheehan. The court uses the concept of “Peace Circles” to come to its resolutions among victims, the accused, and community stakeholders. Residents of North Lawndale have been trained as Circle Keepers.
With the YMCA already incorporating Peace Circles into the Youth Safety and Violence Prevention program, Officer Westley and her small CPD team started the journey of being trained as Circle Keepers. In order to bring the officers and young people together, they created a themed project. CPD and the YMCA sponsored a photo contest in three neighborhoods with high police activity. Officers and youth were asked to take pictures of those things they felt represented strength and beauty there. The plan was to host a public exhibit of the photos as a culminating event of the project. The more than 200 pictures that were submitted revealed that officers and young people were taking pictures of the same things.
It was a small but undeniable glimpse of common values that led organizers to see the potential for something far beyond a photo exhibit. The youth and officers who historically communicated mostly during crisis now had something to talk about. Those who submitted photos were invited to sit with one another, using Peace Circles to listen to each other’s truths without judgement. Over a period of weeks, the discussions got deep and sometimes painful. The Peace Circle made it possible to safely navigate through the more emotionally charged topics. After each Peace Circle, both youth and police expressed a sense of hope that neither had felt in a long time. They shared a desire for safer, more peaceful communities and wanted to do more than talk. To come up with a plan for collective action, we used the participatory dialogue process of World Cafe.3 Officers, young people and additional community members sitting in small groups, going through a series of guided questions to create strategies they would commit to.
Realizing that these strategies needed a place for implementation, CPD committed to revamp the existing Youth Subcommittees within the local District Advisory Committee structure. The goal is still to bridge the divide among officers and youth, but also to support the co-created plans for neighborhood safety that come from the dialogues and, most importantly, to establish an authentic platform for youth voice and help them become collaborative leaders.
The photo contest was a project that helped the department realize the value of a process for empowering the voices of youth and officers. That process is now part of CPD policy, employing restorative practices and participatory dialogues in Bridging the Divide.
In August 2014, the first team of 25 CPD Peace Circle Keepers was trained, introducing a new tool for co-creating safer, more connected communities. Bridging the Divide cohorts of officers and young people were launched as pilots in four police districts in the fall of 2014, and the program has since expanded into eight districts. As this personal and human-centered practice generally requires privacy and a degree of confidentiality, one challenge has been figuring out how to share the hopeful outcomes of this process with the broader community. Just as constantly hearing about negative interactions or viewing them in viral online videos can cause vicarious trauma, more awareness of the common ground being discovered by officers and young people in Peace Circles and dialogues might spark vicarious healing. Using audio recording only is one way to share the work. During the initial collaboration, the YMCA used its Story Album project to capture the feelings and experiences of officers and young people, producing a CD.
Sharing Stories: CPD’s Peace Circles
In addition to the district level cohorts that bring the same group of officers and young people together for 10–12 weeks in the Bridging the Divide process, CPD applies the practices to a wide range of interactions with youth.
In the winter of 2016, CPD partnered with community groups and three alternative high schools in the city for a month-long basketball tournament composed of games each week. All of the students at these particular schools were attempting to complete an education that was started at another campus, but were interrupted, usually by the student’s involvement in the criminal justice system. The young men were lured by the chance to play basketball indoors, in safety; have transportation and food provided; and earn a good mark on their social record. They were not keen on playing with the officers—the students would have much preferred playing against the officers. However, CPD has learned from experience to avoid all iterations of opposite sides, at least until after the two groups get to know each other a bit. A loss on the court is taken with a sense of humor when the participants have shared laughs (and some secrets) with each other. It’s all about the relationship.
Each game night started with a hot buffet meal that was donated to the community partners. Classmates, family members, police colleagues and friends were welcomed as spectators and to join in the dinner. One great advantage about a gym full of police officers is a definite sense of security, so community members regularly filled the bleachers. However, no spectators were permitted during the 60–90 minutes slated for pre-game conversation—there is no audience in Peace Circles.
The young people and many of the officers were a little leery of the Peace Circles idea at first. Just talk? To them? About what? About things that matter. About hopes and fears, the first time each person had an encounter with law enforcement (people seem to forget that police officers were once young people having to deal with police officers themselves), the first time a friend was lost to violence, the first dead body or abused child the officer had to cope with. Talk about being jeered because of the uniform in neighborhoods that the officer is trying to serve and protect. Talk about being spread eagle on the hood of the squad car because of a hairstyle or low-hanging pants. Talk about being stereotyped, misunderstood, and dehumanized. Talk about all the things it turns out that officers and these fellow community members have in common.
Sharing stories is how people build relationships. Of course, strangers don’t just start chatting it up because they’re in a circle. There is a very careful progression, including activities (ice-breakers), readings and the empowerment of each person to add values and guidelines that all must agree to. It is all focused on building the often talked about but seldom achieved safe space where everyone’s voice and everyone’s truth can be heard without judgement.
It works. On the first night, one young man was very vocal about not wanting to “sit with the cops.” By the next week he was lobbying for a change, “I can play basketball anytime; I want some more of that talking.” In written feedback from the CPD officers, all but one said they would like to participate again. In the months following the tournament, several officers took to dropping by the high schools to visit the students they’d met during the tournament. A few officers even accepted invitations to the students’ graduation ceremonies.
It would be a fine thing to be able to gauge the impact these interactions might have on a young person’s perception of other officers they encounter or the officers’ responses to other youth, but relationships are not easily counted and measured. There are many surveys on “attitudes toward police” that consistently show people of color, especially African Americans, are experiencing and viewing interactions with law enforcement much more negatively than other segments of their communities. This divide has developed over many years, decades, and perhaps, even centuries. A positive shift won’t be perceptible for quite some time. Nonetheless, making progress within the most difficult relationships is the emerging promise of restorative practices.
Conclusion
Effective Peace Circles require a suspension of hierarchy and a thoughtful balance of transparency and privacy. Any agency considering this kind of process should look for authentic practitioners as partners and trainers. Restorative justice is on the rise, and it is both global and extremely local—so credible resources are becoming more plentiful.
Some people, including police officers, are initially put off by the ‘mystical’ terminology—one CPD deputy chief asked if the name of the Peace Circle training could be changed to just about anything else! Not every officer is suited for Circle Keeping, but CPD has found members of the rank and file to be incredibly open-minded and courageous participants. Stepping outside the comfort zone of their traditional roles also gives officers a voice. The Circle Keepers are their colleagues with serious skills of the heart and mind that change conversations and relationships in meaningful ways. As the name indicates, the approach is about peace, the people we need to find peace with, and the people we need to keep peace with.
From the very top, community policing is proclaimed as the core philosophy of the Chicago Police Department, as crucial to our success as advances in training and high-tech tools. Superintendent Eddie Johnson repeatedly reminds CPD officers and command staff that “we cannot do this alone.” If police officers need their fellow community members to co-create safer, more peaceful neighborhoods in every part of Chicago, authentic relationships must be built—and relationships start with conversations.
Notes:
1Cook County Sheriffs’ Office, internal data, 2018.
2Chicago Police Department, Research and Development Unit, 2018.
3The World Cafe, “World Cafe Method.”
