Justice

Want Better Police Relations With the Community? Let Local Youth Train Them

In Baltimore, a social justice organization led by teens has begun training city police on how to better interact with the communities they serve.
REUTERS/Jim Bourg

As the list of African Americans who’ve died or were maimed in police custody grows, plenty of groups have come forward with ideas and strategies for reform. One idea: How about letting African-American youth train police on how to better interact with their communities? After all, it’s mostly black youth who are having deadly encounters with police.

This is exactly what happened last week in Baltimore, where teens from the Inner Harbor Project, a youth-led social-justice nonprofit, brought police academy cadets and city officers together to train them on how to better serve and protect young people of color.