Fall 2017

THE

JOURNAL

INSPIRATION FOR THE COMMON GOOD •

VOLUME 9 •

ISSUES 2&3

•

FALL 2017 • $16.00

CHANGING THE STORY Two real-life narratives illustrate the tensions between communities of color and police (p. 50). What kind of leadership is needed to bridge these divisions?

CHANGING THE STORY Special Civic Engagement Edition

(Print edition: ISSN 2328-4366; Online edition: ISSN 2328-4374) is published quarterly by the Kansas Leadership Center, which receives core funding from the Kansas Health Foundation.

The Kansas Leadership Center equips people with the ability to make lasting change for the common good. KLC focuses on leadership being an activity, not a role or position. Open to anyone seeking to move the needle on tough challenges in the civic arena, KLC envisions more Kansans sharing responsibility for acting together in pursuit of the common good.

KLC MISSION

To foster civic leadership for healthier Kansas communities To be the center of excellence for civic leadership development

David Lindstrom, Overland Park (Chair) Ed O’Malley, Wichita (President & CEO) Ron Holt, Wichita Mary Lou Jaramillo, Merriam Karen Humphreys, Wichita Susan Kang, Lawrence Carolyn Kennett, Parsons Greg Musil, Overland Park Reggie Robinson, Topeka Frank York, Ashland PHOTOGRAPHY

Heather Smith Jones heathersmithjones.com

Contents

MANAGING EDITOR

Chris Green 316.712.4945 cgreen@kansasleadershipcenter.org

CHANGING THE

STO R Y

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER

Terry Rombeck 316.712.4960 trombeck@kansasleadershipcenter.org ART DIRECTION + DESIGN

Novella Brandhouse 816.868.9825 www.novellabrandhouse.com

Kim Gronniger Sarah Caldwell Hancock Mark McCormick Dawn Bormann Novascone Laura Roddy Shaun Rojas MeLinda Schnyder Joe Stumpe Brian Whepley

INSPIRATION FOR THE COMMON GOOD • VOLUME 9 • ISSUES 2 & 3 • FALL 2017 PUBLISHED BY

Erin DeGroot

KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

ILLUSTRATOR

A Wichita native, Erin studied art and graphic design at Friends University.

In 2011, after six years in commercial design, she started her one-woman design business with the goal of creating work that encourages empowerment, empathy and social justice.

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Flooding the Civic Arena BY: BOARD CHAIR DAVID LINDSTROM

4.

Making Local Matter

COPY EDITORS

BY: CHRIS GREEN

ILLUSTRATIONS

8.

Bruce Janssen Shannon Littlejohn

Erin DeGroot Pat Byrnes

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Jeff Tuttle Photography 316.706.8529 jefftuttlephotography.com

JOURNAL CONTRIBUTORS

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

KLC VISION

KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ARTWORK

THE

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Shajia Donecker

Shajia Ahmad Donecker CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Shajia is a freelance writer based in Garden City. The proud flatlander is a journalism graduate of the University of Iowa and a former newspaper reporter for The Garden City Telegram. Shajia lives with her husband, Scot, and currently works in student services at Garden City Community College.

WEB EDITION

Introduction: Changing the Story

The Promise and Peril of Reaching Out

PERMISSIONS

325 East Douglas Avenue Wichita, KS 67202 www.kansasleadershipcenter.org

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SUBSCRIPTIONS

Annual subscriptions available at klcjr.nl/amzsubscribe ($24.95 for four issues).

Single issues available for $16 at WatermarkBooks.com.

KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

BY: CHRIS GREEN

BY: CHRIS GREEN

klcjournal.com

Abstracting is permitted with credit to the source.

For other reprint, copying or reproduction permission contact Chris Green at cgreen@kansasleadershipcenter.org.

What if Charlottesville Came to Kansas

BY: LAURA RODDY

Mark McCormick CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Presently the executive director of The Kansas African American Museum in Wichita (his second stint there), Mark is a New York Times best-selling author with 20 years of journalism experience as a reporter, editor and columnist.

22.

A Steady Hand - So Far BY: JOE STUMPE

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Revealing What Hides in Plain Sight BY: BRIAN WHEPLEY

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System Pressures BY: KIM GRONNIGER

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Two Perspectives ILLUSTRATIONS BY: ERIN DEGROOT

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The Trust Factor BY: SHAJIA DONECKER

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Learning on the Fly BY: DAWN BORMANN NOVASCONE

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Seeking Justice Not ‘Kumbaya’ BY: LAURA RODDY

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The Habit of Denial BY: MARK MCCORMICK

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The Balanced View BY: CHRIS GREEN

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Blue Highways FEATURED POET KEVIN RABAS

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my story today

FEATURED ARTIST HEATHER SMITH JONES

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Rectifying Our Empathy Deficit BY: MARK MCCORMICK

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LETTER FROM KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER BOARD CHAIR DAVID LINDSTROM

Flooding the Civic Arena KLC’S NEXT BIG CHALLENGE: ENCOURAGING THE CIVIC ENGAGEMENT OF ALUMNI

I can only imagine what Lamar Hunt felt like in 1959 when the principal founder of the American Football League and the owner of the team that became the Kansas City Chiefs, mobilized seven colleagues with a Big Challenge. They called themselves the Foolish Club because of their seemingly foolhardy venture to take on the established National Football League.

Rather than being squashed by its more established competitor, the AFL prospered, and eventually the NFL sought out a merger.

As a result of Lamar Hunt’s vision, the NFL that we know today emerged. It’s the most popular sports league in the United States, and its championship game is among the biggest club sporting events in the world.

Big Challenges are often complex and difficult.

KLC’s goal to transform the civic culture of our state so that Kansas becomes the center of civic leadership development, and Kansans thrive like never before is certainly that. And if we are to be visionaries on a par with Lamar Hunt, success will take time and multifaceted strategies to achieve.

Over our first decade, we worked hard to develop skill and expertise in leadership development.

As the years went by, we created a special place for thousands of Kansans to learn leadership.

But there is more to do. As we enter our second decade, we are adding a second focus to our work: encouraging the civic engagement of our alumni.

Why? Because leadership development, even at the large scale delivered by KLC, can’t, by itself,

transform our civic culture. Over the next decade, we want to help our alums exercise more leadership. We want to point more of those alums (and future alums) and their skills toward the state’s most pressing challenges.

KLC alums come from all sectors and parts of the state. They come from the right, left and center of the political spectrum. They may not agree on policy goals, but they tend to believe civic issues are best solved when people exercise the type of leadership taught at KLC. Much like when we started work on leadership development at KLC, it will take years of experimenting to get this right, but we are on our way.

Our first big experiment is to annually encourage alums to initiate civic discourse around one concern that the board of directors deems is pressing but also may lie just outside the public’s focus. Our team will research and write about the issue extensively, never taking a policy position, but always trying to illuminate the issue and to prepare KLC alums to engage.

We’ll encourage KLC alums to gather Kansans for discussion, in living rooms and civic halls, helping each participant discover what they can do to mobilize progress on the underlying concern.

Rather than one or two big convenings at KLC, our vision is to hold dozens of discussions around the state, hosted by KLC alums, and all oriented around crucial topics such as water resources, education, taxes, etc. Alums can help Kansans understand the issue and its complexities, and what their role is in order for progress to be made.

Energizing alums to leverage their passion, skills and connections to elevate the discourse in Kansas is important, timely and necessary to truly transform civic culture.

We are looking for alums willing to convene these discussions and will support them as they do, preparing them with facilitation guides, training and connecting them with other alums who are doing the same.

This edition of The Journal is focused on the issue for 2017: the relationship between law enforcement and communities of color. It’s a paramount example of a daunting adaptive challenge. There is no easy answer, but KLC alums have skills to bring to bear and, given events in our country over the last few years, it’s clear this is a challenge that can’t be swept away.

If you really want change, you can’t do the work yourself. You need to give the work back to others and provide the tools and resources they need to mobilize others. This is a great time in the history of our state for KLC alums to play a more significant role in shaping our state’s civic conversations.

Make no mistake: The goal is action, not talk.

And not one action, but hundreds or thousands of Kansans each taking action to help make progress. The civic arena will be flooded with KLC alums primed to do their part.

The result of this Big Challenge will be a stronger Kansas. And, those who are around in the years and decades hence will marvel at the strength and stability of our state. They will know it took a tremendous team of thousands of Kansans, each exercising leadership for the common good, to make it happen.

Onward!

DAVID LINDSTROM CHAIR, KLC BOARD OF DIRECTORS

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Celebrating where you live is trendy these days.

Making Local Matter

Civic pride is on the rise in Wichita, where symbols from the city flag are on wide display. Plans to revamp Topeka’s downtown and a historic theater are unfolding. Lawrence, Manhattan and Kansas City boom as showcases of cool. You can grab a locally brewed beer in downtown Salina or follow the beer nerd trail west to Sylvan Grove, Beaver (it’s about 25 miles north of Great Bend) or Hays, if you’re so inclined.

By:

There’s lots of talk of buying local, whether it’s patronizing homegrown restaurants over chains or hitting up small, local retailers for gifts around Christmastime. And with farmers markets dotting the state, the eating local food movement remains on the upswing. It’s the local touches that often give Kansas communities visibility and personality, whether it’s a special festival or a beloved coffee shop.

CHRIS GREEN

Need another reason for voting in the Nov. 7 general election for city government and school board positions? If you care about where you live, consider that your local vote will have thousands of times more power than your presidential ballot.

government. Topeka and Kansas City, Kansas, will elect mayors, while most other voters will have a chance to choose members of their city council, city commission or school board. This year’s vote will mark the first since the 2015 Kansas Legislature voted to move local elections from the spring to the fall of odd-numbered years.

One of the expressed hopes behind the move is increased voter turnout. Historically, voter interest in elections has peaked during even-numbered years in which Kansans help elect a president, with local elections representing a low point for participation.

But what about voting local?

In Sedgwick County, for instance, more than two-thirds of registered voters turned out to vote in the 2016 election in which Republican Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. Just 16 percent of the county’s registered voters turned out a year earlier to vote in local races, including one for Wichita’s mayor. Such disparities are typical throughout the state.

On Nov. 7, Kansans across the state will choose the individuals who represent them in local

There are a lot of good reasons why voter turnout in local elections has often been lower than

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in state or national elections. The number and competitiveness of local races vary widely from community to community. They were scheduled for years when there aren’t votes for president, congress or state offices in Kansas, and advertising for and media coverage of elections tend to be lighter, unless there’s some sort of scandal or major controversy. And unlike state and national offices, local positions are elected on a nonpartisan basis, which may provide voters with fewer cues about whom to vote for and that they need to go vote.

But if you care about where you live and want it to improve, there’s a powerful reason for you take the time to cast a ballot this fall. Outside of a Kansas House or county commission race, you’ll rarely have more ability to shape the outcome of an election than you will have on that day. If you take a closer look at the math involved, it’s not even close.

Here’s why. If you voted in the 2016 presidential election, you cast one of about 137 million votes.

If we’re counting on the basis of the popular vote – not the Electoral College – your one ballot is 0.0000007 percent of the electorate for that office. It’s a drop of water in a vast ocean.

But the closer an election is to your neighborhood, the more relative power you have. If you voted in the 2014 gubernatorial election, for instance, your vote in that election carried the same weight as nearly 154 people in the 2016 presidential election. For a congressional race, you have the same clout as about 400 or 500 presidential voters, depending on which district you live in.

It’s when you take it down to the local level, though, that the figures become truly eye-popping.

One vote in the 2015 Wichita’s mayor race carried the equivalent amount of power as nearly 3,651 voters in the 2016 race for the White House.

If you voted in the 2013 mayoral race in Kansas

City, Kansas, your vote had the same power as that of 8,298 presidential voters in 2016.

For the Topeka mayoral race that year, one vote was more powerful in deciding the outcome than 11,700 voters in the 2016 presidential vote.

The smaller the number of total ballots cast, the more magnified a single vote becomes, massively so in some cases. In the 2015 Emporia USD 253 Board of Education election, a single voter commanded the same clout as more than 67,000 people who voted in 2016.

Voting in a local election may not be as glamorous as a presidential race. You may have to work a lot harder to learn about the candidates, the issues in your community or figuring out what’s on the ballot.

But when you do vote, it’s a supercharged decision.

There’s a bit of irony in the fact that so much time, energy and attention goes into the presidential election, the one where an individual’s vote carries the least impact while the local races where one has exponentially more clout so often fly under the radar. But math such as this can provide a clearer sense of where you can be most impactful as a voter.

And the truth is, those figures should probably be confirmation of what most people already know – that the government closest to you is the one that you are most able to shape for the better, as well as the one that is most likely to affect your daily life. (It’s also, if opinion polls are correct, the level of government people tend to trust the most.) As with so many areas of life, local matters when it comes to your livelihood, your quality of life and even your health.

If more Kansans could find a way to make local voting matter to them on Nov. 7, it might be another step down the path of creating healthier, more prosperous communities through the state.

Power to the People About 137 million people cast a ballot in the 2016 presidential election, meaning that one vote carries very little sway in determining the winner of the popular vote. And that doesn’t even factor in the Electoral College. By voting in local elections, you have considerably more power over the outcome.

2015 OVERLAND PARK WARD 3 ELECTION

=

86,545

presidential votes

2015 EMPORIA SCHOOL BOARD ELECTION

=

67,889

presidential votes

Want to find out about where to go to vote? Want to know what your ballot will look like?

Visit https://myvoteinfo.voteks.org/VoterView/RegistrantSearch.do and enter your home county, first name, last name and birth date. You’ll be able find your polling place, see a sample copy of your ballot, learn what districts you live in and check out your voting history.

This chart shows what one vote in local elections around the state is worth in comparison to one presidential vote in the 2016 contest.

2015 MANHATTAN CITY/SCHOOL ELECTIONS

=

30,250

presidential votes 2015 OLATHE MAYORAL ELECTION

=

21,701

2015 SALINA CITY/SCHOOL ELECTIONS

=

presidential votes

26,438

presidential votes

2013 KANSAS CITY, KANSAS MAYORAL ELECTION

=

2015 WICHITA MAYORAL ELECTION

Take Action

When does your vote count most?

=

3,651

presidential votes

2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

1 VOTE out of 137 million

8,298

presidential votes

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W H AT I F C H A R LOT T E S V I L L E CAME TO K A N S A S ?

By: CHRIS GREEN

The sights and sounds of hundreds of neo-Nazis and white supremacists shouting and marching with torches in Virginia in August was shocking to many Americans. Then came the violence.

The white nationalists showed up with weapons and armor.

One of the white supremacists allegedly rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer, and injuring 19 others.

Now after the largest white supremacist event to occur in recent years, communities across the country, especially college campuses, are preparing for similar activities to come to their communities. What if they come to Kansas?

In a recent tweet, the mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, Sly James, encouraged people in his community to “just stay home” in the event of a “Nazi rally.” “They crave attention and want conflict,” he wrote. “Hard to have conflict if there’s no one there.” Some on the right say a segment of leftist groups make the violence worse. But others argued that racist views need to be visibly opposed.

What would you do if a rally like the one in Charlottesville came to your community? Ignore it? Try to counter it? Or something else?

And what if the hate on display in Charlottesville is already here?

After all, a Kansas man is facing federal hate crime charges for fatally shooting an Indian national this year in Olathe. Three militia members are facing domestic terrorism charges for plotting in 2016 to bomb a housing complex in Garden City where Somali immigrants lived and worshipped. Also, last year, Bethany College and its president became the target of racist messages such as “Make Lindsborg White Again,” which were written in chalk on campus sidewalks.

If hate based on people’s race or ethnicity is in our midst, what does that mean for us as Kansans? What is at the root of this extremism? What kind of leadership does it call for?

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CHANGING THE STO RY Improving the Relationship Between Communities of Color and Law Enforcement By:

Another story examines the challenges that the mayor of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kansas has faced in trying to foster a community conversation on policing in the wake of two officer deaths.

In Garden City, a place where community policing has been successful in establishing trust with a diverse mix of immigrant communities, officers and residents grapple with the implications of immigration becoming a polarizing issue.

CHRIS GREEN

For at least the past three years, since the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, the relationship between law enforcement and communities of color in the U.S. has been at the forefront of a heated national conversation, one that is literally a matter of life and death.

Events reached a crescendo last July when Alton Sterling died at the hands of police officers in Baton Rouge on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, police officers killed another black man, Philandro Castile, in St. Paul, Minnesota. The next day, five Dallas police officers died in an ambush initiated by a veteran angry over the police shootings of black men. It ranked among the deadliest days in law enforcement history.

The reverberations from those events were felt all the way in Kansas. In this edition of The Journal, our correspondents tell the stories of Kansans who have attempted to exercise leadership on this issue.

The edition revisits the efforts of a Wichita police chief to keep his community’s heat in the productive zone. It also reflects with community organizers who took the risk of accepting the chief’s offer to conduct a community cookout with law enforcement rather than protest.

Two University of Kansas professors detail their research that presents a tough interpretation about the negative impacts that a specific kind of police stop has on minorities.

A ride along with Shawnee County Sheriff Herman Jones captures some of the challenges that officers face in the daily course of trying to do their jobs.

In two illustrations based on narratives collected during the research of Wichita State University’s Michael Birzer, graphic artist Erin DeGroot captures the differing experiences that minorities and police have with the issue of racial profiling.

Caleb Stephens and Black Lives Matter LFK have worked to raise the heat in Lawrence, influencing their community’s dialogue and sparking criticism of their tactics.

As he learns how to drive, Christian Williams, age 14, also discusses race and policing with his father, Van.

More than a year ago, the Kansas Leadership Center Board of Directors decided to begin investing the organization’s resources into elevating the dialogue around the relationship between law enforcement and communities of color in Kansas. The edition represents The Journal’s contribution to that effort by providing readers with a variety of different perspectives and viewpoints from which try to understand the issue better.

Readers will learn from community organizers, police, academics, immigrants, and local officials.

One won’t find an easy solution or a scapegoat, only an effort to understand the roots of the problem and what might be done about it from a variety of angles. It is by no means a perfect encapsulation of all the issues and viewpoints at play and The Journal welcomes your feedback on where we have done well, where we have missed the boat and what we will need to do in the future to better tackle tough issues.

The Kansas Leadership Center asks alumni across the state to play a role themselves by leading local dialogue on this topic in their own communities.

As David Lindstrom, KLC Board Chair, explains in his introductory column, the hope is these talks could lead to “hundreds of thousands of Kansans taking action to make more progress.”

The hope is that this edition of The Journal provides useful information that will inspire healthier discussion and more effective leadership across the state on this difficult but important civic challenge in Kansas.

Questions to Consider: 1. What resonates with you most from this edition? What challenges you? Why do you think that is?

2. When you think about this topic, what is most important to you? What would you like to see changed?

3. Where do you see the issues raised in the magazine represented in your community or organization?

What makes progress difficult there?

4. What type of leadership do you think it will take to foster progress?

5. What role do you see yourself playing in helping mobilize progress on this challenge?

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After helping lead a peaceful march in Wichita to protest the deaths of African-American men by police in other cities, A.J. Bohannon admits he was wary of agreeing to host a community cookout with police. But he remains patient in pursuing change and says supporters of that decision vastly outnumber naysayers.

CHANGING THE

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THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF REACHING OUT By: LAURA RODDY

Young Wichita organizers took a big risk in agreeing to a cookout with police at the height of a summer of racial tension. More than a year later, they answer the question: Was it worth it?

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In today’s often polarized world, a zero-sum mentality has taken hold: There are winners and there are losers, and there is no in between.

Working with the other side is scoffed at as a mark of retreat and defeat.

If you’ve been there, you understand.

Compromise doesn’t necessarily feel great to either side. No one is elated. No one can claim moral superiority.

But the good-versus-evil battle that makes for such compelling drama on TV or the silver screen is ultimately little more than the name of the genre itself – fantasy. In the real world, shades of gray are everywhere, and it can exact a greater personal cost to work across factions than to draw a line in the sand.

Reaching out can advance your goals, but it’s also dangerous. You run the risk of being seen as disloyal to your own side or ending up with the lesser end of the deal.

These are trade-offs that three young AfricanAmerican organizers from Wichita know all too well. In 2016, they took a calculated risk in agreeing to the First Steps Community Cookout with police at a time of heightened racial tension nationwide.

Now, as they reflect on that decision a year later, A.J. Bohannon, Djuan Wash and Brandon Johnson are satisfied with the choice they made but not entirely content with outcomes it produced.

IT STARTED WITH A PROTEST

Anger and outrage were mounting that July.

In the early hours of July 5, Alton Sterling, a black man who appeared to be restrained on cell phone footage that circulated, was fatally shot by two white police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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The next day, a police officer shot and killed Philando Castile, a black Minnesotan, at a traffic stop in a Twin Cities suburb. His girlfriend live streamed the aftermath on Facebook as her 4-year-old watched from the backseat.

On July 7, Djuan Wash led a rally in protest in Wichita’s Old Town. That same evening in Dallas, an otherwise peaceful Black Lives Matter protest of the Sterling and Castile deaths turned deadly when Micah Johnson, a black man, shot and killed five police officers.

Days later, Wash and Bohannon led a peaceful march along 13th Street in the heart of a historically black neighborhood to protest the disproportionate deaths of African-Americans by police officers. Brandon Johnson and his daughter were among the hundreds who attended. Troopers and deputies blocked freeway ramps to avoid disrupting traffic there but otherwise did not impede the protest. But the organizers wanted to make progress on racial injustice, and they believed cultivating relationships with the police was an important means to that end. The police had built up trust through their handling of the protest along 13th Street, and now the organizers had an opportunity to display their confidence in the sincerity of the chief and his officers.

Wash, Bohannon and Johnson thought it was important to exercise their right of assembly, but that did not preclude them from building a relationship with Wichita’s new police chief, Gordon Ramsay. In fact, as Wash was marching, he was on the phone with Ramsay.

Wash, Johnson and other members of Wichita Urban Professionals, an ethnically diverse under-40s group, had met with the chief beforehand, and the chief had promised three things: to advocate for independent prosecutors in police-involved shootings, to require cultural competency training for officers, and to establish an independent civilian-police review board.

Brandon Johnson, an organizer of the First Steps Community Cookout who is now running for local office, says he initially took heat for agreeing to the event with police. But he says people are cautiously optimistic about the efforts of Chief Gordon Ramsay.

Wash says the relationship between leaders of Wichita’s black community and Ramsay had been developing since Ramsay’s interview the previous December and subsequent hiring.

“We didn’t see what you see in other cities with police on the scrimmage line,” says Wash, a field organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The most important part was to explain the changes the police had committed to, and also an opportunity for the community to voice their concerns.”

GIVE AND TAKE

To some degree, the men were an unlikely threesome.

“I’m kind of rough around the edges,” Bohannon says. “They go to the courthouse.

I go to the basketball courts.”

But the peaceful protest had been successful.

And they had the ear of the police chief, who had made overtures to their priorities.

The day after the march, Bohannon and Wash met with Ramsay and Herman Hicks, pastor of the Greater Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, according to The Wichita Eagle. Hicks, who like Johnson, is an alumnus of the Kansas Leadership Center, had protested in college decades earlier. He had reached out to the younger organizers to provide guidance.

At a follow-up meeting, when Ramsay suggested a community cookout instead of another protest, the group had some thinking to do.

Bohannon, manager of a wireless phone store who is also working on a teaching degree, was less than enthused. “At first, honestly, I didn’t want to do it because I felt it was their way of silencing us,” he says.

Johnson was wary, too. “Initially, we were kind of unsure because of where the community was, temperature-wise,” says the 31-year-old nonprofit director, who is now running for City Council. “We were worried about pushback.”

“This is something that won’t be solved in any of our lifetimes, I don’t think, but it’s important to at least try to make concrete steps.”

D J U A N WA S H

For people like Djuan Wash, who helped organize the First Steps Community Cookout, the barbecue provided some emotional moments, such as the one he shared with Laura Dungen. Wash says he views the cookout as one step in an effort to make progress over the long haul.

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The organizers decided that if the barbecue included a question-and-answer session with law enforcement, then it would be worth it to them to attend and publicize it. They also knew a few might see them as sellouts.

“I feel like it was the right decision,” Johnson says. “Since we did commit to it, if it was a success, we’d have more leverage in the department. … We took the olive branch.”

Earlier that day, a black man angered by the recent police shootings killed three officers in Baton Rouge. But the First Steps Community Cookout in Wichita went off without a hitch.

Law enforcement officers, most in uniform, attended, as did residents of all ages. Nearly 2,000 people ate, danced, laughed and had serious discussions – and then as promised, the open forum took place, and community members had an opportunity to air their concerns and grievances.

In Wash’s view, a protest accomplishes only so much. It raises awareness, but it must be accompanied by clear demands and goals for policy change. “You have to know how to leverage that power,” he says. “Who is the decision maker? Who has the ability to make changes?”

In the aftermath of the event, though, what went viral was video of a white officer dancing at the cookout. Ramsay was even invited to the White House to discuss community policing, although he had a conflict and was unable to go.

Wash wanted to improve relations between the black community and law enforcement, and agreeing to the cookout was a strategy to advance that goal.

This coverage didn’t please the organizers, who could control their decision to participate but not the outcomes from that choice. “I didn’t like the type of attention it got,” Wash says.

“Of course it was tough to sell back, because people don’t trust the police,” he says. “It’s important for both groups to get together to recognize each other’s humanity. You’re less likely to shoot someone you have a relationship with.”

The agreement to the cookout resulted in the cancellation of another protest. That event was not being organized by Wash, Bohannon or Johnson, but by B.J. Jones, a local father who worked in aircraft manufacturing, according to The Eagle. Jones, who had never been to a protest before, was initially skeptical of the cookout, The Eagle’s Oliver Morrison wrote, but ultimately agreed to support it, with the help of some urging from Hicks.

So on July 17, the Wichita Police Department hosted a barbecue at McAdams Park in north Wichita just off 13th Street – the site of the peaceful protest just days earlier. The pleasant summer weather and good turnout stood in contrast to the dark events happening nationally.

BACKLASH TO COMPROMISE

Johnson says it remains frustrating that the majority of people who talk about the barbecue only give credit to Ramsay. Especially since Johnson took major heat himself for weeks afterward, including being called a traitor.

Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter from Los Angeles, and the Black Lives Matter chapter in Washington, D.C., characterized the cookout as being against the movement’s principles. And Black Lives Matter followers in Oakland, California, turned down a similar offer from police there for a barbecue to help start a dialogue.

There were local critics as well. “All of the people we have seen sharing the (cookout) story like it’s a good thing,” one man, Antar Gholar, told Morrison of The Eagle. “We’re

like, no it’s not a good thing, nothing has changed, no policies have changed.”

interactions with police so that both groups handle crisis situations better.

Even though they knew the decision to participate in the cookout wouldn’t make everyone happy, the criticism still stung. “I really took some time to let it absorb,” Johnson says.

“The whole job with policing is not just finding people who are doing wrong,” he says. “I don’t really see anything has changed.”

Johnson doesn’t blame people for being skeptical.

He understands the deep mistrust that black Wichitans often have for law enforcement.

“We each have had our own situations with law enforcement,” he says.

For his part, Wash has the long game in mind and remains positive about the cookout. “It really was a first step,” he says. “We’re talking about an issue that has persisted for generations.”

Johnson says he was arrested at age 19 at a community festival for trying to stand up for two people against whom police used excessive force. Bohannon was arrested after wearing a hoodie to Towne East Mall in the days following the killing of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager who was wearing a hoodie in a gated Florida neighborhood.

Wash says an entire movement to address unjust lethal violence against black people was birthed out of Martin’s death. “That kind of woke people up,” he says. “People began to recognize the need to make your voice heard whenever injustice occurs.”

All in all, Johnson is happy that a dialogue is ongoing between black Wichitans and law enforcement. “I don’t know what year two looks like,” he says. “There are new people building relationships every day. People have a cautious hope for Chief Ramsay.”

Bohannon is more circumspect in his assessment.

He was pleased with the Q-and-A session at the cookout, but he wants to see more community policing – more officers talking to people at the grocery store and elsewhere. He also wants more African-Americans to have positive

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From the African-American perspective, Wash says, policing has always been complicated and oftentimes oppressive: “This is something that won’t be solved in any of our lifetimes, I don’t think, but it’s important to at least try to make concrete steps.”

While the organizers have differing opinions on the headway made since the cookout, they don’t regret the compromise. In order for protests to lead to progress, they had to be willing to maintain a dialogue with police. They took heat personally for agreeing to a barbecue but were willing to do it for the greater good in the fight against racial injustice.

Bohannon says there will always be naysayers, but that for every one he encountered, there were 100 people who were supportive.

“I didn’t want to sacrifice the whole for one part,” he says. “One of the biggest things I took away from this whole thing was to be patient.”

RISK AND REWARD: Leadership lessons from A.J. Bohannon, Djuan Wash and Brandon Johnson One of the things that the Kansas Leadership Center teaches participants is that leadership is risky. And there are few aspects of leadership that are riskier than working across factions.

Here’s a look at what we can learn from the efforts of three Wichita organizers.

1.

KNOW YOUR GOAL.

The organizers were willing to exercise their rights to peaceably assemble, but they also had broader objectives in mind. As Wash says, protest can raise awareness, but it must be accompanied by clear demands for change.

They didn’t just take a risk, they did so with a clear sense of what they hoped to accomplish – improved relationships between the police and the community.

3.

LEA DERS HIP MEA NS LO S ING CO NT RO L.

The men had the power to make their own decisions, but they couldn’t control what happened after they made them. Some of the effects, such as the type of media coverage the cookout received, weren’t what they hoped to see. Trade-offs like that became the price of attempting to move the community’s dialogue forward.

2.

YO U’ LL LIKELY TA KE HEAT FRO M YO UR O WN S IDE.

Leadership often requires disappointing the people you’re most loyal to, at least a little bit.

And working with the “enemy” is always going to upset some. The key is making sure people aren’t so disappointed that you lose your credibility to make a difference or give up your key purpose.

The criticism the organizers received surely stung, but they believe they mobilized many more people than they angered.

4.

FIRST STEPS NEED SECOND STEPS, THIRD STEPS AND SO ON.

The biggest problems that call for leadership can’t be solved quickly -– and certainly can’t be solved by something like a cookout. Moving the needle on them requires taking concrete steps, patience and persistence. As Wash recognizes, addressing the relationship between police and the black community is a challenge that will likely extend beyond the trio’s lifetimes.

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A STEADY HAND – so far By: JOE STUMPE

WICHITA’S POLICE CHIEF HAS BUILT GOODWILL IN HIS FIRST 18 MONTHS BY NOT LETTING THE LOCAL CLIMATE GET TOO HOT OR TOO COLD. WHAT KIND OF LEADERSHIP WILL IT TAKE FOR HIM TO CONTINUE TO NAVIGATE THE PRODUCTIVE ZONE OF WORK AND CREATE CHANGE WITHOUT PUSHING TOO FAR? CHANGING THE

S TO RY

For most of the past half-century, Kansas’ largest police department was led by one of its own.

Since 1968, there was just one six-year period, from 1989 to 1995, when a Wichita police chief who hadn’t come up through the department’s ranks held that job.

And that experiment ended with the departed chief writing a scathing novel about the agency and city.

Gordon Ramsay’s hiring as chief in late 2015 – he started in January 2016 – broke the pattern in more ways than one. Ramsay arrived from Duluth, Minnesota, as a straight-talking apostle of community policing, technology, diversity and what might be called nontraditional views on certain legal issues.

More than 18 months into the job, one could argue that Ramsay appears to be enjoying an extended honeymoon. But there are also signs that he’s built goodwill on his own by being effective at keeping the various stakeholders he works with or answers to – including city officials, the public and the officers he oversees – in the productive zone of work.

In leadership, the productive zone is the sweet spot where the heat is high enough that change can happen, but things are not so hot that people get pushed past their limits of tolerance. From his position of authority, Ramsay has at times raised and lowered the heat in hopes of strengthening the bonds of trust between the community and his force.

When tensions ran high over police shootings of African-American men in other U.S. cities, Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay built trust in part by responding to questions at a community barbecue that he had suggested to local protest organizers.

The event ended up drawing about 2,000 people and was such a departure in a summer of conflict that it thrust Wichita into the news for all the right reasons.

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THE BIGGEST Q U E S T I O N FA C I N G RAMSAY IS: How long can he keep himself and others there?

A five-day period in summer 2016 illustrates Ramsay’s desire to steer developments in a direction where progress can be made.

On a sweltering Tuesday night in July, with tension over police shootings of African-American men spiking across the nation, several hundred protesters blocked traffic in north-central Wichita.

Ramsay later disclosed that about 50 officers had been ready to deploy in case of trouble, but they mostly stayed out of sight and the event remained peaceful.

Organizers appreciated the hands-off approach, and when Ramsay suggested holding a community barbecue instead of another protest the next Sunday – “I had a lot of people thinking I was crazy,” the chief says – those organizers agreed.

The barbecue itself, while largely recreational, included a question-and-answer session where some residents voiced their frustrations directly to Ramsay.

“Those people who were angry at police, they still had a platform,” says Lavonta Williams, Wichita’s only African-American City Council member. “Those who were OK (with police) had a platform as well.”

The barbecue, which drew about 2,000 people, garnered Wichita positive national attention and Ramsay an invitation to the White House. (He couldn’t go because of a prior commitment.)

Ramsay stepped into a city where members of minority communities were increasingly expressing their distrust of the police department. One factor

was the number of police shootings of suspects in recent years, disproportionately affecting African-Americans, based on their share of the city’s population, and reverberating with similar shootings across the country. Another was the revelation that more than two dozen officers – including Ramsay’s predecessor as chief – were on a list of people with potential credibility issues should they be called to testify in criminal cases, based on past allegations of misconduct or dishonesty. Still another was the disclosure that the department had kept a so-called “secret” file on some cases, the contents of which have yet to be revealed.

From the department’s point of view, Ramsay says he found that some officers “had withdrawn a little bit from the community.”

The Wichita Police Department employs about 850 people. Running any agency that complex involves numerous technical hurdles related to personnel, budgets, programs and the like.

Ramsay’s bigger adaptive challenge was and is to bring those two aforementioned constituencies – the community and police – together over time.

As that happens, there are inevitably going to be conflicts, misunderstandings and differences of opinion. Yet without them, progress may be impossible. The challenge is to bring those conflicts to the surface and deal with them at a rate that people can accept. The temptation will be to keep the heat too low for anything to change; the risks are that too much can happen too fast and some groups won’t accept change.

It’s a balancing act that Ramsay doesn’t intend to shy away from.

“I don’t avoid conflicts,” Ramsay says. “I seek to resolve them.”

PERFECTING THE ART OF BEING CHIEF

Across the country, as police forces face greater scrutiny in the era of Black Lives Matter, more

communities are turning the reins over to reform-minded chiefs who often aim to bridge the divide between the police and community.

But preserving law and order and keeping the respect of the force while fostering change isn’t an easy feat.

Despite being held in high-esteem by the nation’s police elite, Baltimore’s reform-minded chief ended up out of a job after he failed to adequately earn the trust of the cops under his command, according to The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news site covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Charlotte’s police chief, an African-American, found himself in a firestorm over being too protective of officers when a black man was killed by police in that North Carolina community. Navigating competing loyalties can be difficult, and there are numerous examples of chiefs who suffered because they failed to keep things in the productive zone.

There’s little doubt that Ramsay’s police loyalties run very deep. “I love cops,” he says. “I love being a cop.” A native of Duluth, Ramsay was first exposed to law enforcement through a neighbor who was a police officer. He started working as a police officer part-time at the age of 20 in a nearby small town, then moved to his hometown department and earned a degree in criminology and sociology.

As a neighborhood patrolman, Ramsay says he found a career that was more like a mission.

“One officer – the impact they can have on a neighborhood is tremendous,” he says.

But Ramsay’s loyalties to policing aren’t blind. As he tried to put into practice some of the concepts that he’d absorbed in the classroom, Ramsay found the way blocked by bureaucracy and the old ways of doing things.

“I thought, ‘If I get promoted, I can get some resources and cut through the red tape,’” he says.

Eventually armed with a master’s degree in management, Ramsay worked his way up to investigator, sergeant, lieutenant and area commander before being promoted to chief at the age of 34. Ramsay says he “probably didn’t have enough time in

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the cooker” when he took over the top job.

To compensate, he started a daily habit: setting aside about 20 to 30 minutes to read about what’s happening – good and bad – in other law enforcement agencies. When he left for Wichita a decade later, the reviews from his former employers were uniformly positive.

Ramsay has been married for 20 years, is the father of two elementary-school-age children and says that, other than running, “My hobbies have become my job.”

And he’s not shy about naming his personal goal.

“I want to perfect the art of being the chief.”

‘HE’S APPROACHABLE’

Engagement with the public is a big part of Ramsay’s approach to his job. But he’s not just known for chatting and shaking hands.

He’s also taken some clear steps to address concerns about the police department.

One of the first people Ramsay heard from in Wichita was the Rev. Roosevelt DeShazer. He left the new chief a telephone message a day or two after he started work: Would Ramsay meet with members of the Greater Wichita Ministerial League, made up of religious leaders from across the city? Later that same day, Ramsay texted that he’d be glad to. By Ramsay’s count, he has since appeared in about 60 places of worship in Wichita.

“He’s approachable,” DeShazer, pastor of the Progressive Missionary Baptist Church, says of Ramsay. “He doesn’t sugarcoat or try to blow smoke up our behinds. He comes straight.

From what I understand, he’s the same way with his officers.”

Also at DeShazer’s church that day was Lavonta Williams. She mentioned a concept being utilized in another city – a “God squad” of ministers to advise the police chief. Ramsay immediately agreed. A group of eight ministers continues to meet with him on a regular basis, voicing community

As chief, Gordon Ramsay cultivates a robust presence, regularly going out on calls himself and meeting with people like Alfonso Macías Ramos at public events.

“HE’S APPROACHABLE, He doesn’t sugarcoat or try to blow smoke up our behinds. He comes straight. From what I understand, he’s the same way with his officers.”

- REV. ROOSEVELT DESHAZER, Pastor of the Progressive Missionary Baptist Church.

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concerns and receiving information from Ramsay about what’s happening within the department.

Ramsay says the group has played an important role, appearing at the scene of a gang-related shooting this summer, for instance, to help relieve tension.

Ramsay’s visits to places of worship embody a key component of his approach to law enforcement, which is getting officers out into the community in ways that have nothing to do, at least directly, with traditional police work.

“To me, he’s a leader who leads by example,” says Brandon Johnson, a community organizer running for the City Council seat Williams must vacate because of term limits. “Kind of like what he’s talking about not harassing people about taillights and stuff like that, is what he’s doing as chief.”

Indeed, Ramsay has not just advised officers that they may issue warnings instead of tickets to motorists for minor traffic infractions, such as a busted taillight; he’s stopped drivers and done it himself. It’s part of an effort with some national traction to help low-income people avoid getting caught up in an escalating cycle of unpaid fines, multiple court appearances and even jail time.

“A hundred and fifty dollars to a single mom raising kids is a lot,” Ramsay says. “We need to consider the impact on citizens.”

Similarly, Ramsay last year implemented a policy that rather than arrest individuals found with a small amount of marijuana or drug paraphernalia, officers can write a notice to appear in municipal court, although he’s quick to add that “in no way do I support marijuana.” The City Council recently passed an ordinance that codified that policy.

Ramsay regularly goes out on police calls himself, talking to residents, taking photographs and posting comments on social media about what he’s found.

Williams says Ramsay was knocking on doors and talking to neighbors after one shooting when he was able to come to the aid of a resident who’d fallen and couldn’t get up.

“That part of the community fell in love with him right away,” she says.

SPREADING DECISIONS AROUND

As his interactions with Williams and DeShazer show, Ramsay is not afraid to make quick decisions.

Deputy Police Chief Jose Salcido, whom Ramsay named last year as the first Hispanic ever to occupy that post, says he sees it all the time. “I’ve seen decisions made in minutes that would have taken a year, a year and a half” before, Salcido says.

Ramsay says one of the first things he found in Wichita is that officers were too busy responding to emergency calls to engage in the community interaction that he believes is essential for creating a safer city. With buy-in from the City Council and city manager, a staffing study was completed this spring that recommends the addition of officers, and the first phase was approved in August.

He also determined that too many decisions were being pushed too far up the chain of command. He says captains in the department had forwarded a big stack of training requests for officers to his desk.

“I said, ‘I’m not signing off on this. Your sergeant should be doing that.’”

At the level above sergeants – the captains in the department’s four patrol districts – Ramsay said, “I want them to look at their job like they’re the chief of their area.”

Ramsay wants officers at all levels to make decisions without looking over their shoulders, while following departmental policy and lines of authority. While officers have always exercised some discretion in their duties, Ramsay’s remarks on the topic should provide them with more autonomy. Asked how officers have responded, Ramsay says, “The majority of them are excited about it.”

He acknowledges that some have “legitimate concerns … but I’m encouraging it.”

In addition to decision-making, Ramsay encourages his officers’ efforts to innovate, whether they’re

related to traditional crime-fighting or the building of relationships with the community.

For instance, the department received good publicity when SWAT team members dressed as superheroes rappelled down the outside of Wesley Children’s Hospital, to the delight of youngsters inside.

Ramsay says the idea came from a subordinate.

Officers have made a video spoofing the supposed addiction of police to doughnuts while promoting a fundraiser for an injured officer. On the day he sat down for an interview for this article, other officers held a news conference inviting the public to name its new mascot. While these efforts may seem manufactured or trivial to some, Ramsay says good works by police too often go ignored.

The chief has also made it a priority to meet as many of the department’s employees as possible, using in-service training days as an opportunity.

He tries to share policy moves before they become public, because “cops like to hear things are happening before they hear it on the news.”

Policing is difficult. Ramsay says no officer can be expected to make the right decision in every situation. And it’s dangerous. Earlier this year, veteran Wichita officer Brian Arterburn suffered severe injuries when he was struck by a car during a police chase. Ramsay frequently posts comments about Arterburn, who is slowly recovering, on his Facebook page.

“My heart goes out to him,” Ramsay says.

LIFE AS AN OUTSIDER

Ramsay says one of the biggest lessons he’s learned since arriving has been how an outsider can be misunderstood.

“Growing up in Minnesota, they knew my character.

One thing coming here, I think I underestimated how people can misread you or misread your comments.”

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But Salcido, the deputy chief, says Ramsay has won over employees with his obvious passion for the job and the well-being of departmental employees. When it comes to disciplining officers, Salcido notes, Ramsay’s goal is to “make them better and whole again” rather than punish. As for the morale of rank-and-file officers, Salcido says, “In my 20 years here, I’ve never seen the relationship between the (police) union and chief as good as it’s been since he took over.”

Community policing is not Ramsay’s only priority.

Ramsay wants the department to more closely mirror the makeup of the city as whole. For instance, he notes that female officers comprise only 13 percent of the force. Last year, Ramsay launched an effort by the department to recruit people who might want to work in law enforcement as a “second career,” saying life experience can be valuable to an officer. He has discussed relaxing hiring standards, saying someone arrested for smoking pot as a teen shouldn’t be disqualified from being a police officer.

In promoting officers, Ramsay says he is “really trying to promote people with different backgrounds, different views, different ways to police. Not the traditional what you see in management, those that follow directions. I’ve promoted people that a lot of people never saw being promoted.”

He’s appointed liaisons to the city’s Hispanic and LGBTQ communities. In a bid to make the department’s work more transparent, Ramsay has endorsed the wearing of body cameras by all patrol officers – a goal realized last summer.

The department spent a large portion of its training budget on what’s known as “scenario-based training,” borrowing a vacant school to set up a dozen simulations in which officers had to decide whether to use their weapons. “We had officers with 20-plus years (experience) say, ‘I wish I would have had this when I was a young cop,’” Salcido says.

On a day in late June, Wichita media outlets carried several stories about departmental activities that could be considered innovative, such as officers

“THOSE PEOPLE WHO WERE A N G R Y AT P O L I C E , T H E Y S T I L L H A D A P L AT F O R M . T H O S E W H O WERE OK (WITH POLICE) H A D A P L AT F O R M A S W E L L .”

- LAVONTA WILLIAMS, Wichita City Council member on the First Steps BBQ suggested by Ramsay

Lavonta Williams, a City Council member representing part of Wichita’s urban core, says that residents of her district view police officers “in a different light than before” because the police chief follows through on his promises.

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he has accomplished something similar through an agreement with the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office. Going forward, the agencies will investigate each other when one of their members is accused of a crime.

Williams, the City Council member, says Ramsay has followed through “very, very well” on promises to that community and made other improvements as well, such as expanding the use of surveillance cameras in the city’s Old Town entertainment district.

Residents of her district view police “in a different light” than before, she says. “We have a good relationship.”

Chief Gordon Ramsay’s efforts include participating in candid conversations about race and policing with community representatives like Claudia Yaujar-Amaro and Hussam Madi.

helping a homeless veteran find a home and forming a partnership with Starbucks to provide safe spaces for members of the LGBTQ community and victims of hate crimes. Yet another article detailed how police are mailing letters to 74 parents and guardians of children who on the department’s documented gang member database. That move came in response to community questions about the composition of the database and shows another instance of Ramsay tackling issues head-on.

LOVING THE ROLE

One of the truths about navigating the productive zone in leadership is that it’s hard to get everybody all-in at the same time.

While the reaction to last summer’s barbecue was overwhelmingly positive, a chapter of the national Black Lives Matter organization based in Washington, D.C., tweeted that the get-together was “not in keeping with (its) principles.” Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the national Black Lives Matter organization, told Wichita media that activities such as cookouts and panels that don’t hold police

accountable for actions don’t bring about change.

Ramsay says all the attention on the barbecue – good and bad – misses the bigger point.

“We committed to quite a few things with that,” he says. “And a lot of people have forgotten about that. They’re stuck on that: ‘Well, that was nothing.

That was just to placate us.’ No, there were some really good things to come out of that.”

Specifically, Ramsay promised to support a citizens’ review board to examine complaints against police officers, to implement cultural sensitivity training for department members and to advocate for legislation requiring independent prosecutors in shootings by police. The review board is expected to come up for approval by the City Council soon (Ramsay supported the creation of a similar board while in Duluth that faced opposition from the police union there). Ramsay says all officers will receive training in “implicit bias,” which he described as “bias you may not even be aware of.”

No legislation to require an independent prosecutor in police shootings was approved in Topeka during the most recent session. Ramsay, however, says

DeShazer agrees, saying he knows the community officer and captain assigned to his neighborhood well. When residents asked for additional patrols around an elementary school in the neighborhood, police promptly complied. After officers showed up at a funeral to make an arrest, Ramsay appeared at the church the next Sunday, speaking to the congregation and apologizing to the family of the deceased for the disruption, DeShazer says.

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At this point, it’s hard to find anyone with many cross words or criticism for Ramsay, on or off the record. But whether such good feelings are sustainable remains to be seen.

Policing, after all, is both reactive and relationshipdriven. The practices, policies and culture of the police force – not to mention the dynamics in the broader community – are decades in the making.

What will happen if and when there are events or challenges that raise the heat higher on Ramsay, the police department and the community? How will everyone respond then?

There’s work to be done, and Ramsay relishes the task.

“I LOVE THE ROLE I P L A Y I N S O C I E T Y. I believe I was put on Earth to do this job.”

Discussion Guide 1. What was the level of heat in the community prior to Gordon Ramsay’s arrival as chief? What is the level now?

2. In what ways has Ramsay raised the heat? In what ways has he lowered it?

3. To what extent do you think that the stakeholders described in this story are in the productive zone (Ramsay, the police department, the public, minority communities, etc.)? What makes you think that?

4. What might Ramsay need to consider doing in the future to keep stakeholders in the productive zone?

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Revealing what hides in plain sight

CHANGING THE

STO R Y

A surprising revelation led professors at the University of Kansas to identify a widely accepted police practice – the investigative stop – as a threat to the rights of racial minorities. This is the story of their provocative interpretation and how it became a book that’s prompting dialogue in the law enforcement community.

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By: BRIAN WHEPLEY

It became what researcher Charles Epp, a professor at the university, calls a “holy crap” moment.

Sitting in a Lawrence coffee shop, Epp was paging through several dozen narratives he and his fellow researchers had collected. The stories sprang from a survey of more than 2,300 Kansas City-area motorists that took an in-depth look at the consequences of police stopping drivers.

Feeling he was onto something but not sure what, he sorted them into two piles – one detailing the stories whites told, the other describing the experiences of black people.

Public Affairs and Administration, authored along with fellow public affairs professor Steven Maynard-Moody and Donald Haider-Markel, a KU political science professor.

The narratives captured voices that had not been extensively studied or heard in discussions of motorists pulled over by police: the drivers themselves. From those stories they learned that the experience – of flashing lights, pulling to the roadside and interacting with a law officer – is often profoundly different depending upon whether you’re black, Latino or white.

No, what was most telling was the deep impact that a very particular type of stop had on AfricanAmericans. Black drivers weren’t deeply bothered by quick stops when police pulled them over and gave them a traffic ticket. It was only when stops – often for a minor violation like a broken taillight or failure to signal a lane change or going 2 mph over the limit – turned into drawn-out investigations, often punctuated by probing questions and requests to search the vehicle, that the stops left a deep impression. Even if the officer ended the interaction by letting the motorists go on their way.

The contrasts that took shape in those separate stacks helped form the basis for “Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship,” an April 2014 book from the University of Chicago Press that Epp, a professor in KU’s School of

It wasn’t just that black people were more likely to get pulled over by the police than whites. For many African-American drivers, “It’s like, ‘Duh.’ It’s obvious. They live this,” says Maynard-Moody.

The “holy” revelation, the one that led the professors to call the drivers their “teachers,” was their delineation of police stops into two distinct groups: traffic stops and investigatory stops. The distinction is, along with the stories, a major contribution that “Pulled Over” makes to conversations about race and profiling, reviewers say. The findings amount to a striking systemic interpretation about why it’s so difficult to move the needle on a significant adaptive challenge – healing the oft-strained relationship between minority communities and law enforcement.

expands to target Latinos, these unjust and antidemocratic patterns, unless deliberately checked, are likely to only become more widespread,” they write in their concluding chapter. “Police stops to check for immigration documents will be ethnically framed in the way investigatory stops have been racially framed.”

Trying to understand how a police stop “hit so deep” – often not bringing a ticket but leading black motorists to feeling “violated” – drove the researchers’ search for answers.

“When I made a car stop,” says Sullivan, a former reserve deputy in Lyon County, “I wanted to make sure that I was extremely professional and very, very polite. I was just crushed that, while that’s important, it doesn’t fix anything.”

“Why does this momentarily polite stop that didn’t end up with any consequence bring this extreme word that’s somewhere between having your rights violated and having your person violated, why would they use that word?”

Maynard-Moody says they asked themselves.

“Because in some sense, it’s inexplicable … because what happened was ‘nothing.’”

The explanation the professors developed was that investigatory stops fall disproportionately on African-Americans – especially young black men – and leave them less willing to cooperate with authorities and even doubt their place in society and as citizens.

“What’s communicated is that they are worthy of surveillance, worthy of control, that they are the legitimate target of this gaze of the state,” Maynard-Moody says. “They are less powerful, less citizen in a way; they are diminished citizens in our community. … They are equal in front of the law, but not really.”

The researchers found that when African Americans experienced an investigatory stop, it mattered little whether the officer was nice and polite to the driver. They still felt violated.

It’s a feeling that more minorities may be at risk of feeling more often, the authors write.

“As laws encourage police to hunt for illegal immigrants and the use of investigatory stops

Such findings have hit home for some in law enforcement, such as Robert Sullivan, coordinator of the Johnson County Criminal Justice Advisory Council.

Exploring a tough interpretation about something like police investigatory stops might be enlightening, but it’s not exactly comforting. This way of diagnosing a situation means looking beyond a scapegoat and instead working to understand how policies, people, systems and culture fit together to create a problem. Using this kind of explanation to drive what you do is fundamental to exercising leadership well, but it also means embracing a challenging, drawn-out process of incremental change and weighing trade-offs.

For instance, as compelling as they can be, the book’s findings have hardly revolutionized law enforcement. In a 2015 study by another researcher, Michael Birzer of Wichita State University, a survey of 61 Kansas law officers from 15 different agencies found authorities overwhelmingly “agreed that the pretext stop is an important and necessary tool to suppress crime.”

For the officer on the street, pretext stops – another name for investigatory stops – carry useful benefits and have led to newsworthy arrests and drugs being taken off the street.

It’s seen as a fundamental way to stop more serious crimes before they happen. The opposite view, one the KU researchers take, is that many, many police stops are required to make those

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arrests and seize those drugs, and the cost to the innocent drivers stopped and let go in the process isn’t worth the trade-off.

the authors say, in a form of institutional racism – one where the practice is responsible, not the people practicing it – that is very difficult to get your head around, not to mention confront or resolve.

NOT ABOUT ‘BAD APPLES’

Throughout their book, the KU authors were able to point toward some of the lesser-noticed consequences of stopping lots of drivers for minor, sometimes even contrived, offenses in the hope of finding a few criminals.

They found that African-Americans were five times more likely to have their vehicles searched, and that a black man had to hit age 50 before his chance of being pulled over equaled that of a young white man.

They documented how, being pulled over more often, members of the black community share those stories, reinforcing distrust of police.

They heard recollections of being followed home night after night by police, of being handcuffed at curbside and then being released with little explanation, of an officer pulling a gun because a driver asked why he’d been stopped, and of the overall feeling of being violated on both a legal and personal level.

“Steven said we really ought to follow up and get … their own stories in their own words,” Epp recalls in an on-campus interview with Maynard-Moody in late April. “That ended up being the crucial element of the data gathering, because the stories were so revealing.”

What Epp and Maynard-Moody found is provocative because the practice of using investigatory stops is deeply embedded in training and criminal justice theory, with some departments acknowledging they use the approach and others practicing it somewhat quietly and to varying degrees. But it results,

“Part of the challenge … is that you can have racialized practices and you can act in a way that is based on and perpetuates bias, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are any more racist than anyone else,” says Maynard-Moody.

“That I think is a hard part of the conversation.”

“We don’t want to paint this as evil intent,” Epp says. But “we would never argue that there aren’t bad apples.”

Factoring into the discussion are studies like one in New York City that found that police found drugs or guns in less than 2 percent of stop and frisk searches. The debate over police stops and other intrusive practices involves weighing competing values that include the desire for public safety and police visibility versus others in the community feeling resentful and less safe when police are around.

However, there’s a larger context that also needs to be understood. Reducing the use of something like the investigatory stop means re-examining the ways in which law enforcement has worked and finding other effective ways of doing their jobs.

“To be fair,” Epp says, “the practice comes out of a tradition in policing that’s really developed in the last 40 years to use research and to use training to improve police performance. And that has produced many good developments in policing. … So it’s a little bit hard to shift the leadership in policing on this question when they are so convinced this tradition is good. … Their failing has been to not track the downsides of it, to only look at the catching-the-bad-guys side of it and to not really see how those people who are stopped feel about it or perceive it and how it affects their willingness to cooperate going ahead.”

PRACTICES CAN BE CHANGED

“Pulled Over” came out just before the 2014 Michael Brown shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri, which didn’t involve a traffic stop, and more than a year ahead of the controversial fatal shootings of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati, both of whom had been pulled over by police.

The researchers didn’t expect the book to lead to quick change. In fact, they believed that change, if it came, would come slowly. Still, they felt driven to change the conversation.

“I remember feeling very strongly through that summer, after Michael Brown was shot, that a big part of the underlying reality was just being missed in the discussion,” Epp says.

“Usually what you see if you look at all of the post-Ferguson events in particular, the leadership narrative is what we would call the ‘bad apple narrative.’ So it’s not the fault of the department, it’s not the fault of the leadership of the department, it’s the fault of a few bad apples overreacting, or of a racist cop,” Maynard-Moody says.

“If you say the problem is institutionalized racism, which is a very legitimate statement, it’s almost like, ‘Whoa, we can’t deal with that.’ When you get it down to various clearly articulated institutionalized practices, then you can change practices. Those can be changed,” he says.

When newspapers called the authors asking for comment on this shooting or that, they sometimes felt “strange” to be looked to amid the tragedy.

They felt far more comfortable to have others, black journalists among them, take in their ideas and have a new frame of reference.

“So many of these issues are hiding in plain sight. So part of our job is to make them less hidden,” says Maynard-Moody. “That’s part of the goal of the academic, to reveal what’s hiding in plain sight.”

The researchers not only shined the light but also suggested solutions, while recognizing the powerful pressures that those working in law enforcement face.

Their proposals address investigatory stops on several fronts – including departmental policies, training and the courts – and in steps both immediate and longer term. These include banning stops where there isn’t a clear violation of the law and requiring officers to clearly record the reason for each stop. In addition, they say, searches should be banned unless there is clear probable cause of a crime, as “consent” searches often leave drivers feeling like they have no choice but to say yes, contributing to feelings of violation and bias.

They maintain the courts bear responsibility, as rulings have helped legitimize investigatory stops, yet concede change isn’t likely to come quickly via that avenue. Still, a 2016 dissent by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor citing their book holds out the possibility of change.

Most directly, they say senior police officials have the greatest, most immediate power to alter policies and practices and drive change in training methods that prescribe investigatory standards as an effective law enforcement tool.

“I have immense respect for progressive police chiefs and command-level officers. They’re often really trying hard to do the right thing. In many areas, they are committed to community policing and good relations with neighborhoods. Ironically, at the same time in some of those places, they are also deploying this kind of stop,” Epp says.

“The police who are most willing to talk frankly say something like this: … ‘I sort of get this, but what else can we do to fight crime in these communities? Until we have another tool that we are convinced works, we are sort of left to using this one.’ And that is an interesting and sort of frustrating response, a kind of, we get it, which means we’re starting to see the downsides but we need to have some sort of alternative.”

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SHIFTING THE CONTEXT

being targeted, say for speeding or running a red light. In the survey done by Wichita State’s Birzer, officers reported that they were commonly accused of racial profiling by motorists, which they saw as an effort at intimidation to get out of the citation or back off their suspicions.

(Interestingly, the KU researchers indicate that black people are more likely than white people to challenge the fairness of traffic-safety stops, a possible reflection of the bad taste left by investigatory stops. The researchers also point out that black people perceive traffic stops

The topic of racial profiling is often a deeply frustrating one for police officers, who feel as though they’re being put in a no-win situation.

Kansas officers, for instance, tend to see a media-driven narrative that over-reports incidents involving police and minorities, and often “jaded coverage against the police.”

Furthermore, community members often want to crack down on crime unless they’re the ones

TRAFFIC STOPS VS. ‘INVESTIGATORY’ STOPS

In their book, “Pulled Over,” University of Kansas researchers Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody and Donald Haider-Markel distinguish between two types of stops used in law enforcement.

Traffic stops involve clear-cut speeding and other violations that most people, black or white, accept as proper uses of authority and application of the law.

Investigatory stops are built on suspicion, on the thought that a person looks like they might be up to no good, on the belief that to fight crime an officer must seek it out, and that means stopping and interacting with a lot of people – most of whom will prove innocent – to shake out the bad apples.

What The Authors Found n

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Across the age spectrum, black people were over three times more likely to undergo an investigatory stop than white people.

And black people were five times more likely to have their vehicles searched in investigatory stops than white people.

One in six black people surveyed said they weren’t comfortable calling the police for help versus one in 20 white people who said the same thing.

Sixty-four percent of black people reported thinking they could not trust police to do the right thing, versus 23 percent of white people.

What They Heard n

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Deana, who wasn’t speeding when stopped on her way home from work late one night. “They didn’t give me a ticket or anything. They just wanted to know … what I had been doing and where I was going.”

Darrell, who got pulled over with some teenage buddies in a mostly white neighborhood where they “fit the profile” for a recent burglary. Ordered from their car and handcuffed, they sat on the curb as police conducted a street-side lineup of sorts. “I just kept cool about it,” Darrell said, not wanting to “give him (the officer) a reason to do anything else.” After an hour in cuffs, they learned the identification was “negative” and were free to go.

“I felt really bad” is how Darrell summed up the experience.

Joe, who was doing the speed limit when pulled over.

The officer, when asked, told him he was stopped for a warrant check. The officer ran his license and his plates, found nothing and let Joe go. “I felt violated.”

where they are lectured by an officer as being more legitimate because it shows they actually did something wrong.)

Birzer found that officers do not believe that they should be required to provide a race-neutral reason for a stop or complete additional paperwork each time they make use of a pretext stop.

Some even question the very use of the term, saying that the violation officers observed is the purpose of the stop. “As one officer explains,” Birzer writes, “‘They either used their turn signal or not; the brake light is cracked, or it’s not cracked.’”

For some officers, though, the book has offered an opening for better understanding of how they are viewed by others.

“Officers who actually read the book, as opposed to just getting an impression of it, they never say, ‘I can’t believe you called us racists.’

They get that we’re not making that kind of an allegation,” Epp says. “So that’s heartening, and that makes it at least possible to have the conversations with the police officers.”

Sullivan, the Johnson County criminal justice coordinator, recalled that in his reserve deputy days there was an expectation of being “on the radio” and showing action and initiative through many check-them-out traffic stops for equipment or other violations that rarely brought a ticket.

“I had no malicious intent whatsoever. Until I approached the driver’s side window, I didn’t have any idea of the race or gender of the person I pulled over. So I used to bristle a bit when people would suggest that police officers are racially biased.”

Having been tipped to “Pulled Over” by a colleague, and finding much to mull in its pages, Sullivan asked Epp to speak at the advisory council meeting. The county, he says, has been working on a number of fronts to be more inclusive of minority residents. The book fit well into those discussions.

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“I did not want our law enforcement officers to immediately be on the defensive. That wasn’t the intent of having this discussion,” Sullivan says. “The discussion was just to know that there seems to be a difference between traffic safety enforcement and investigatory stops and that investigatory stops cast a much wider net for minority individuals than it does for white individuals. And that is a policy decision that might be causing more harm than good in the long run. The harm it causes may or may not far outweigh the short-term gains of disrupting criminal activity. “ Those affected have increasingly owned the problem, raising their voices against police stops that disproportionately affect them and their community. In some communities, such as North Charleston, use of the stops has plunged.

“The debate in the last three years has shifted, and it’s shifted in large part because of protest

by African-Americans who have been experiencing this thing for a very long time,” Epp says. “They have actually shifted the debate, more than anybody else. To the extent that the book has gotten attention, it’s got attention because of that shift in context.”

As a result, it’s become possible for more people in law enforcement and beyond to consider the potential downside of the investigatory stop and begin reconciling that with what they know about creating safer, lower-crime communities.

“Up till now, the message has been, ‘Make a stop, because you may well catch a criminal, you may well catch a drug dealer, you may make the big bust that leads to fame,’” Epp says. “We suggest the message ought to be flipped, that when in doubt don’t make that stop, because most of the time the person you stop is innocent and is harmed in the process. So the stop based on suspicion that asks probing questions, even if the person is let go with no legal sanction, there are harmful consequences to them and also to the police going down the road.”

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The research findings of Charles Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody and Donald Haider-Markel are a great example of what a tough interpretation can look like. Here’s what we can learn from their efforts.

1.

LISTEN BEYOND THE USUAL VOICES.

The Making of a Tough Interpretation Tough explanations of a problem are ones that recognize the gravity of a problem without making it seem hopeless. Exploring them is crucial for leadership because they help us consider the complexity of a situation without letting us off the hook when it comes to doing something about it. The best tough interpretations implicate as many as people as possible in doing some work to make something change.

Tough interpretations are hard because you fail to see the full picture alone or with a group of people who are just like you. It takes the views of people who have had totally different experiences to begin to fill out the picture.

2.

DATA MATTERS.

Tough interpretations may be launched by a hunch, but they are built on multiple data points.

Through data, we can identify patterns and test different views about what that data means. You may not base your tough interpretations on a large survey as the researchers did. But you’ll need to collect your own sets of data through multiple observations before you can develop a truly meaningful explanation.

3.

DON’T LOOK FOR A SCAPEGOAT.

One of the best ways to know if you’ve landed on an interpretation that’s too easy is if you can place the blame on a single individual or group. The world is almost always far too complicated for such an explanation to be useful. The researchers reject the idea that the problem with police stops can be adequately explained only by the individual racism of officers or the acts of a few bad apples.

4.

START TO RECOGNIZE THE TRADE-OFFS AT PLAY.

Tough interpretations often force us to consider that something we hold dear isn’t all good or all bad.

Because if that were the case, our decisions would be easy. As the researchers point out, the roots of investigatory police stops lie within a broader push for more proactive policing. If we can begin to see the ways in which something we’re deeply loyal to has negative consequences, we can manage to be more honest with ourselves that we’re handling the trade-offs in more appropriate ways.

5.

GET READY FOR A LONG HAUL.

If you’re going to make a tough interpretation, you can’t expect it to be resolved in an instant. The reason tough interpretations are tough is that they deal with dynamics that aren’t easily changed, which can be frustrating. But they can also, as the researchers point out in this case, be a starting point for exploring alternatives.

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CHANGING THE

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SYSTEM PRESSURES Even a relatively uneventful Sunday afternoon ride-along with Shawnee County Sheriff Herman Jones can bring into focus the many duties of a law enforcement officer. Jones is an authority, caretaker and enforcer, along with many other roles he plays.

What might his experiences teach us about the leadership challenges being faced in law enforcement?

Shawnee County Sheriff Herman Jones knows than any working day can suddenly change from mundane to mayhem.

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By: KIM GRONNIGER

Sundays are typically the busiest day of the week for law enforcement. Custody exchanges, sports team losses and the looming start of the workweek create tensions leading to poor decisions. But my Sunday ride-along in June with affable Shawnee County Sheriff Herman Jones was uneventful. The only action was on Interstate 70 when he gave a warning to a young man who had been speeding and changing lanes without using a signal and checked on a couple who had pulled their car over to make sure things were OK. However, while he and I were discussing what deputies face in the line of duty, a dispatcher was sending colleagues around the county to car accident scenes, to a home where a mother feared her teenage daughter might be suicidal and to a residence where a woman reported her ex-husband was violating a restraining order.

My ride-along was courtesy of the Shawnee County Sheriff’s Office, part of a program that encourages adults 18 and older to accompany a deputy on calls to get a glimpse of activities unfolding in the county and cultivate respect for the difficult and diverse duties officers perform to keep the peace and promote public safety.

proceeding would have endangered the safety of other motorists. Unfortunately, the driver eventually hit another car head-on, seriously injuring two passengers. In another situation, a mother who was eight months pregnant was driving with her two children, including a 10-yearold daughter whose leukemia had recently gone into remission. The mother became disoriented and drifted into another lane and her car was hit and pushed against a guardrail. Jones witnessed the accident and immediately called 911 and requested an air ambulance. Ultimately, everyone lived except the daughter.

In a more personal instance, a deputy whom Jones had mentored was shot several times after pulling over a couple of drug dealers.

The deputy recovered, but the emotional toll still lingers for Jones.

“I look at these deputies as my kids,” Jones says. “When you see one of your own in a hospital bed with tubes everywhere, you realize this is real. You feel rage and want to rip someone’s head off. But instead you gather your composure and do what needs to be done.”

“If I stop a car for speeding, it’s probably not the first time that driver has exceeded the limit,” says Jones. “If they get away with going 5 miles over, then they might move the needle up to 8 or 12 miles over and so on. Most people start in the shallow end of the pool of inappropriate behavior and then before too long they’re comfortable floating in the deep end.”

Jones oversees a $16.9 million budget and staff of 178, 108 of them law enforcement officers.

He immerses himself and his staff in issues and initiatives that allow them to engage with civilians through casual encounters, promoting causes such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, Special Olympics, the Boy Scouts of America, Ronald McDonald House Charities and CASA of Shawnee County to enhance the office’s visibility as a community partner.

Ride-alongs, whether with a sheriff’s deputy or a Topeka Police Department officer, are a requirement for all Leadership Greater Topeka participants, including Jones, who completed the program in 2015. The Sheriff’s Office also sponsors a participant for the leadership program each year and works with the Latino Leadership Collaborative of Kansas.

However, it’s the officers’ participation in extensive educational interactions with children that might yield the best long-term results for Shawnee County – playing four square or basketball with kids who may have behavioral problems at a

local elementary school following a pizza party, implementing the 10-week DARE curriculum for sixth-graders to discourage substance abuse and bullying, or facilitating summer youth camps for sixth- through eighth-graders to promote citizenship.

Youth mentorship is particularly important to Jones, whose personal tagline —“Aspire to inspire before you expire”— is not only embedded into all of his email correspondence but also into the Sheriff’s Office culture.

“Everything we do is about service,” Jones says.

“We try to balance the good and the bad.”

Unfortunately, there is a lot of bad to balance.

Jones estimates half of all arrests involve people under the influence of alcohol, drugs or both.

Mental health issues are pervasive, including veterans contending with post-traumatic stress disorder and children coping with untenable family situations.

“They see their parents do drugs and witness domestic violence and then grow up to repeat what they know,” Jones says. “We don’t have enough services to support people with these issues.”

Technological advancements and internet access also exacerbate crime, enabling someone in a small Kansas town to create child pornography locally and distribute it globally or make meth as easily as counterparts in metropolitan areas.

Discussion Guide BALANCING THE GOOD AND THE BAD

It’s a daily crapshoot for law enforcement officers.

Their shifts can change from mundane to mayhem in a single moment, a wearing reality they are conditioned to accept.

Jones recalled several incidents that demonstrated how quickly things can change. In one, he had to cease pursuing a drunken driver who was speeding and weaving on icy roads because

Jones strives to dispel the simplicity of a “black hat/white hat” dichotomy in law enforcement.

He believes that “most people are essentially good,” but sometimes they make bad choices.

For Jones, the work his team does on the front end through participation on and off the job in community service initiatives is every bit as essential to performance as integrity, a badge and a gun.

1. How would you describe the pressures Sheriff Herman Jones faces on a daily basis? Which of his roles, pressures or responsibilities surprise you the most?

2. In what ways does Jones encourage officers to take care of themselves? How much attention do you devote to taking care of yourself so that you can perform a difficult role?

3. To what extent is being a law enforcement officer about using authority? To what extent is it about exercising leadership? What leadership opportunities do you see available to officers such as Jones?

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“Meth doesn’t take much to manufacture, and its effects are more damaging than cocaine’s,” says Jones. “We’re seeing users from the homeless to the well-off and young to old, despite the fact that it’s essentially like ingesting rat poison or car exhaust into your system.”

Even societal shifts in attitudes toward parenting and being neighborly can wind up with calls to law enforcement officers.

“We get calls from parents to talk to sons and daughters who refuse to attend grade school and from neighbors complaining about loud noises because people just aren’t as neighborly as they used to be,” he says. “If you know your neighbors, they’re more apt to help you or accommodate you because it’s harder to go against someone you know.”

BACK TO NORMALCY

A self-professed lifelong “do-gooder and rule follower,” Jones grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, in a loving family where accountability, curiosity, courtesy and learning something new every day were expected behaviors, character traits he strives to instill in his colleagues too.

Jones initially thought his academic path at Emporia State University would culminate in a bachelor’s degree in business or engineering instead of one in psychology. His career shift occurred gradually as the campus security position he took evolved into a tangible fascination with law enforcement.

The psychology degree helps Jones in every aspect of his role, including his criteria for determining who gets a warning or a ticket for a moving violation, like the young man pulled over during my ride-along. Jones explained to the driver the importance of following the speed limit and concluded the cordial exchange with a smile and a handshake.

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“When I see a violation, I assess how egregious it is, and I know before I get out of the car whether I’m going to give the person a warning or a ticket,” he says. “My rule is that I can go down but not up once I encounter the motorist. I may decide to reduce the citation to a warning, but I won’t escalate a warning to a ticket just because someone snapped at me or irritated me. Then it becomes an attitude ticket, something that’s personal instead of a matter of law, and that just leads to trouble.”

Jones likens dealing with the ills of society that officers witness on the job to a balloon that keeps inflating.

“It’s not normal for most people to see an arm torn off in a car crash or bleeding holes in someone’s chest. If you don’t release that pressure, something’s going to happen.”

Officers have personal things to deal with in their lives like everyone else, from finances and family relationships to sickness and other stressors, so he encourages officers to pursue hobbies or become involved in church and community activities as healthy outlets after hours.

“People seem to think we all have that Superman ‘S’ on our chest. And although we’re trained to work through the situations we encounter, at the end of the day we need to do something that takes us back to normalcy,” he says.

The constant, quick shifts from danger to do-gooding would be daunting to many, but Jones thrives on law enforcement’s ability and agility to make a positive difference in any scenario, from car crashes and criminal apprehension to community causes and character development programs.

“There are good people who genuinely appreciate what our officers do in law enforcement,” he says.

“Their expressions of support fuel my purpose and encourage me to keep coming back.”

“EVERYTHING WE DO IS ABOUT SERVICE. WE TRY TO BALANCE T H E G O O D A N D T H E B A D .”

Speaking at a summer youth academy camp is an example of the type of community presence that Sheriff Herman Jones believes can help aid in crime prevention.

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TWO PERSPECTIVES Powerful narratives illustrate the divide between minority communities, police on racial profiling.

Illustrations By: ERIN DEGROOT

Based on Research By: MICHAEL L. BIRZER

Over the past decade, Michael L. Birzer, a professor of criminal justice at Wichita State University, has explored perspectives on racial profiling in Kansas. In 2010, he published a report for a state task force on minority views of dozens of police stops, which led to a book called “Racial Profiling.”

In 2015, he published another report detailing the perspectives of 61 Kansas law enforcement officers from 15 agencies. Both publications at times make clear the stark division in how police and residents experience their interactions.

Drivers report long-term emotional distress as a result of being stopped by police. They feel singled out if the vehicles they drive are too expensive or exemplify a minority culture or travel to white neighborhoods. They think they’re often singled out for petty violations and that officers talk down to them. Racial profiling, especially for black men, is considered a normal part of their lives.

Police officers tend to see allegations of racial profiling as a way for drivers to intimidate them into backing out of their suspicions or not giving citations (about 64 percent of the officers surveyed

by Birzer indicated they had been accused of racial profiling during a motorist stop). They believe that negative views of police are driven by distrust passed down through generations in minority communities. They think the media over-reports allegations of racial profiling and often provides jaded coverage of police. For police, it’s a problem that calls for more effective communication, education and more positive interactions.

To help understand both perspectives, The Journal enlisted artist Erin DeGroot to develop illustrations summarizing two of the narratives detailed in Birzer’s research, one a police officer’s, the other a driver’s. The goal of these stories is to give readers a deeper understanding by immersing them in each viewpoint.

– CHRIS GREEN, Managing Editor of The Journal

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THE TRUST FACTOR CHANGING THE

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Last year’s foiled plot against Somalis living in Garden City shows how the police department has successfully used relationshipbuilding to enhance public safety.

Now law enforcement in this increasingly diverse city faces the challenge of sustaining that trust as immigration has become an even more polarizing issue.

By: SHAJIA DONECKER

When he received a call from Garden City’s chief of police related to the safety of the Somali community he helps represent, Mursal Naleye’s initital reaction was trust.

It’s an example of how law enforcement has earned the confidence of immigrant communities over the past three decades.

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On a warm day last October, Mursal Naleye was getting ready to attend Friday afternoon prayers at a mosque inside his local apartment complex. It was around noon when he received an unexpected call from Garden City Chief of Police Michael Utz.

“Mursal, some things have come up regarding the safety of folks in your neighborhood,” Utz told him. “I need you and the other tribal leaders down here at the police station – by 1 p.m.”

“OK, chief, no problem,” Naleye quickly replied.

This wasn’t the first time the chief had reached out to the 27-year-old Tyson Foods trainer for help.

But the request made him nervous. His initial thought? There was a problem within his Somali community. Perhaps someone had committed a serious crime. Were they all in trouble? Why would the police want them together? And on such short notice?

There wasn’t much time. He started making calls. As president of the local African Community Center, Naleye was connected to leaders in the Somali society, composed primarily of refugee families who have migrated to the southwest Kansas city of about 27,000 over the past decade. Some were his friends on West Mary Street in northwest Garden City. Others were his co-workers at the local Tyson Foods beef-packing plant outside of town, where most work the evening shift starting at 3 p.m.

They met at the African Shop just down the street, a local business that then served as

an informal gathering place. And they were brimming with the very same questions.

“I told them, there’s no ‘why?’, and no time for questions,” Naleye recounted. “The chief told us he needs you and me out there now.”

It’s telling that despite some wariness, Naleye’s initial reaction was trust, especially since he hails from a country that has struggled with government instability for decades. It isn’t simply a matter of luck, either. The trust that Naleye and others in Garden City’s immigrant community have in the police is built upon more than a year’s worth of work. To some extent, you could say the buildup of trust with immigrant populations has taken place over three decades, years before there was a substantial Somali community in Garden City.

Through community policing, police develop a familiarity with civilian populations to aid in crime prevention. Garden City officials have worked hard to engage unusual voices by establishing strong relationships with liaisons and volunteers from immigrant communities, such as Naleye.

They’ve also undergone cultural training and have tried to connect with these new residents directly rather than waiting for them to reach out.

But such strategies face challenges as both legal and illegal immigration become more polarizing in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. It’s resulting in pressure to put state and local governments closer to the front lines of immigration enforcement, a shift that some fear could endanger the relationships that police have built over time to stop other crimes and bolster public safety.

Utz says his force already cooperates fully with federal authorities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, when individuals have illegally re-entered the country, committed felonies or crimes against persons.

However, if the local department was directed to enforce civil immigration violations – overstaying a visa or otherwise having unlawful presence in the United States – it would prove difficult for a variety of reasons, according to the chief.

“We don’t have the resources available to us to take that on,” Utz says. “If we were directed to, would it impact our trust in the community?

Absolutely. We have a great relationship with our community, and the community has a great relationship with the police department. My concern would be that it would potentially erode that trust but also make these individuals more vulnerable to being victims of crimes.”

A COMMUNITY POLICING ‘GRAND SLAM’

Trust with the public is important to law enforcement, because even when there’s a climate of trust, interactions with police can be fraught with tension for all immigrants, regardless of legal status.

Naleye and his fellow Somalis took two vehicles downtown on that October day to meet with police. When they arrived, there were others waiting: members of the sheriff’s department, captains of the police force and a few FBI

agents. The police chief thanked the men for their timely arrival to help ease the tension in the room.

“You could see the fear and concern that they had as they walked into the building,” Utz says.

The chief, too, had reason to be worried. There were limited details he could share. He explained that three men had been planning an attack at their apartment complex, home to about 120 people, including families and children. For several months the FBI had been investigating the men, who lived in neighboring southwest Kansas towns and who were then in police custody.

Additional details surrounding their alleged plans would be made public that afternoon: The men had been stockpiling guns and explosives and were planning to detonate bombs at two addresses the day after the November general election. A court affidavit would also reveal that the location had been chosen specifically because of those who lived there – immigrants and refugees – many of them Muslims and Somalis.

Naleye, who immigrated in 2010 to seek refuge from decades of civil strife in Somalia, had never before felt unsafe in America. The news about the thwarted attack was shocking.

“I was crying inside my heart,” he says, recounting how he simultaneously had to process the details he was hearing and also translate for the parties at the police station.

Utz had called the meeting because he wanted the residents of the neighborhood to hear the information firsthand. He and his department needed these men – ordinary townspeople – to help organize a public meeting at the apartment complex the next day and to help minimize fallout from news reports in the weeks ahead.

“There is a lack of trust in their culture of law enforcement and government,” Utz says. “But

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“If you have the knowledge, you should help others. I see my community needs help, and I am encouraged because of Allah to help them.”

ABOVE: Community policing,

such as a law enforcement explorer program for those ages 14-21, has been an important part of the department’s effort to build relationships with the public in Garden City.

RIGHT: Mursal Naleye uses a smart phone app to determine which direction he needs to pray to face Mecca. A growing Muslim population represents just one of the major demographic changes unfolding in Garden City because of growth in its immigrant population.

OPPOSITE: Mursal Naleye’s motivation to work as a liaision between the Somali community and the police is rooted in his desire to live out his Islamic faith.

In Garden City, he worships at an apartment-based mosque.

MURSAL NALEYE

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the trust that Mursal and I and the tribal leaders were building with the department was strong enough to overcome that.”

The young Somali-American acknowledged the task at hand and immediately took steps to engage the others. His past experiences as an interpreter in courtrooms, health clinics and places of employment for both neighbors and strangers had taught him how to handle important conversations with care.

“They told us to take this message and spread it to the community – that you can go to work, you can go to school, that you are safe,” Naleye recounted. “I told the elders, ‘Don’t tell them the wrong way – you must make them feel safe.’”

The plan worked. Despite the menacing nature of the alleged attack, there was no widespread panic. Hundreds of residents, some from outside the neighborhood and others from local church groups, came to show their support the day after the news broke and listen to law enforcement officials speak and answer questions. People continued to go to work and to school. Few if any families left town because of safety concerns, and reports of community support for the families flooded the national media in the following weeks.

It’s what Utz, in his second year as chief of police, describes as a “grand slam” case of how community policing works.

“There’s never enough police officers to meet the needs of the community,” he says. “We have to embrace the community, partnerships and (build) trust so we can work together to solve problems.”

IF WE DON’T KNOW ABOUT IT, WE CAN’T FIX IT

Utz’s approach is one that most law enforcement agencies have adopted to varying degrees over the past few decades, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. While strategies and implementation can vary widely across the nation, the objective in every agency is the same: “solving problems through collaborative partnerships built on mutual support, trust and respect,” according to the Justice Department.

“I believe the men and women of (my department) are truly engaged in objective community policing strategies that is a model for law enforcement,” Utz says. “Every day we strive to do better, and every day we learn what works and what doesn’t.”

Keeping a community safe can become especially challenging in diverse places such as Garden City, a regional center within a rural geography, where less than half the population – about 43 percent – identifies as white alone, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“There’s never enough police officers to meet the needs of the community; we have to embrace the community, partnerships and (build) trust so we can work together to solve problems.”

M I C H A E L U T Z , Chief of Police

The town is often characterized as a community in flux because of its changing demographics, largely the result of low-skilled jobs in the meat-packing and production industry that are the economic mainstay of the region. Most recently the Tyson Foods plant has been a magnet for Somali, Burmese and other African and Asian refugees resettling in the United States who are looking for steady employment.

proposals like Trump’s are “set out to destroy community policing.”

For sure, there are some who feel a sense of loss – or even threat – by such significant demographic changes to the community. Local officials often bring attention to the positive contributions of immigrants to the city’s economic and demographic growth since its founding in 1878. In 2011, as a show of agreement, thousands of residents voted to adopt a new tagline – “The World Grows Here” – a reflection of the city’s cultural and linguistic diversity against its agricultural backbone.

“We’ve worked at community policing for over 20 years in Garden City,” Hawkins says. “I think that’s why the Garden City Police Department is fairly successful in communicating with everyone who arrives, because they understand it’s not a headache – it’s a challenge to help these folks, and it also helps the department.”

But changes in federal policy, especially toward immigrants, stand to threaten decades of trust-building and rapport in communities like Garden City.

In his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order – Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States – aimed at broadening immigration enforcement priorities and encouraging states and local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration laws where possible. The order also established the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office, a support agency for victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants.

Supporters see these directives as a way to protect public safety, but in the view of former Garden City Police Chief James Hawkins, they are simply misguided.

Hawkins, who served three decades with the department – the last two decades at its helm – says immigration and law enforcement

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The retired chief, who left the force in 2015, belongs to the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force, a group composed of law enforcement supervisors from across the country – from San Antonio to St. Paul, Minnesota – who have voiced their opposition to such policies.

Since at least the early 1990s, the department has attempted to engage unusual voices by making use of a police-citizens advisory board, composed of volunteers from various community factions – Hispanics, African Americans, schools, churches and businesses, to name a few – who serve as liaisons to their representative groups and as a sounding board for the police.

Once he became chief in 1996, Hawkins decided that if the force was going to preach community policing, it had to practice it fully by engaging more voices. That meant starting annual cultural awareness training to learn more about the newcomers and help them assimilate as they learned more about Garden City’s rules and regulations. As a fluent Spanish-speaker, the retired chief also participated in call-in programs on a local Spanish-language radio station as a way to connect with the Mexican and Central American populace.

“Community policing is nothing more than getting to know your community and your community getting to know you. Which means you have to get to know everybody – Somalis, African-Americans, Asians, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Mexicans, Cubans,” Hawkins says.

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“Community policing is nothing more than getting to know your community and your community getting to know you. Which means you have to get to know everybody – Somalis, African-Americans, Asians, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Mexicans, Cubans.”

J A M E S H AW K I N S

Directives encouraging states and local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration laws are misguided and destructive to community policing, says James Hawkins, who served as Garden City’s police chief for nearly two decades.

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“They’re all here, and they all contribute to Garden City.”

The former chief, who still lives and works in Garden City, says there’s no subculture or society within the community that is immune to crime.

However, he says, most immigrants, even those in the country illegally, are otherwise law-abiding residents, often with families and children.

“Are most visitors criminals? No,” Hawkins says. “Their main crime is driving without a license because they can’t get one. I think the problem lies there. If we could issue them licenses, we could identify who they really are.

And if they got arrested, there would be better documentation of whether or not they had a criminal record.”

The idea that police should prioritize enforcing local and state laws over directing their attention to ensuring that immigrants are in the country legally is a divisive topic. Kris Kobach, the secretary of state and a candidate for Kansas governor, crafted a pair of bills this year that would have affected state and local officials.

One proposal would have required the Kansas Highway Patrol to partner with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, on immigration enforcement. Another would have prevented cities from adopting policies that prevent law enforcement officers from inquiring about a person’s immigration status or cooperating with federal authorities. Neither bill advanced in the 2017 session but could be reconsidered next year.

Supporters of such measures contend that tighter immigration enforcement would help discourage illegal immigration. But Hawkins says there’s a downside to making state and local police the frontline for policing the nation’s borders.

When immigrants – especially undocumented immigrants – are afraid to report crimes, call an ambulance or assist with ongoing investigations, it can serve to undermine, rather than improve, public safety, Hawkins says.

1. In what ways have Garden City police worked to create a trustworthy process in their dealings with immigrants? What do you see as the key parts of their efforts?

2. What competing values do you see at play in this story?

3. What are the risks for the police in creating a trustworthy process with immigrants? To what extent should they be considering the concerns of those who are worried about legal or illegal immigration?

4. How would you characterize the leadership challenges facing the police and immigrants in relation to this issue? What actions might need to be taken to ensure that trust continues to build?

“As a police department, you want them to report it if it happens,” he says. “Because if they don’t, then we don’t know about it, and we can’t fix it.”

WHERE DOES IT GO FROM HERE?

In the meantime, the work of building trust through community policing is continuing in Garden City.

In the aftermath of the events that brought Garden City into the national spotlight last fall, local law enforcement officers began monthly visits to the apartment buildings on West Mary Street, according to Utz. Police officers still call on the families and kids living in these neighborhoods to talk, connect and sometimes even play soccer.

The informal gatherings now take place about every three months.

“Some of these kids, when they got to the United States, they did not even know how to cross the street safely,” Utz says. “We taught them how to go to the corner and look both ways – there’s a lot of education. What we do up there, we do constantly.”

“It really comes down to: If you see something, then say something. We’ve heightened that message after the thwarted attack.”

MICHAEL UTZ

Discussion Guide

It’s just the latest effort to build community bridges with the newest residents of Garden City.

Utz and his force began meeting periodically at the African Community Center in early 2016.

At these meetings, officers and members of the Somali community discussed a range of topics, from the police department’s role and accountability to residents’ concerns about driving, traffic regulations and burying deceased loved ones, Utz says.

During that fateful Friday meeting before news of the domestic terror bomb plot emerged in public media, Utz hoped the relationship he, his officers and Somali community leaders had forged was enough to get law enforcement’s message across and avoid community panic.

“I knew from experience in the mid-1980s dealing with Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian cultures that building that trust was going to be important,” Utz says, referring to the first waves of immigrants that had come to work at the then new meat-packing plants in southwest Kansas.

“They had that similar lack of trust of government and law enforcement.”

the early 2000s – almost in half – according to the chief.

So far, news out of the nation’s capital and presidential executive orders have not impacted crime reporting across the community, according to Utz. In fact, crime rates in Garden City have dropped steadily and significantly overall since

For instance, just a few hours after he had been told of the alleged plot, the young SomaliAmerican ventured into work at the packing plant, where he had started on the production floor in 2013. A televised news conference was to begin any minute, and so Naleye

For a diverse community where cultural and linguistic barriers are common, Utz thinks that is significant. It’s why his organization continues to urge all residents to be vigilant of their surroundings and always call law enforcement for assistance when necessary.

“It really comes down to: If you see something, then say something,” he says. “We’ve heightened that message after the thwarted attack.”

Lower crime rates and safe neighborhoods are two of the reasons Garden City continues to attract immigrants and refugees who want to build better lives. Even after the news of last October, the Somali community has not dwindled.

If anything, more families have moved to the area, Naleye says.

Naleye’s role as a liaison between the police and the Somali community demonstrates the power of community policing to give the work of enhancing public safety to the residents themselves.

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quickly walked through the facility visiting with shift supervisors and managers to explain why some of his co-workers might be missing from work or distracted.

“I told them: ‘If people are not at work today, do not let it be a problem,’” he says. “I was walking and talking all day.”

At the beginning of this year, with the encouragement of Utz, Naleye joined the city’s Cultural Relations Board, an all-volunteer group that serves to promote cultural diversity through community-wide events and dialogue.

His motivation to work as a community liaison, to volunteer and to lead the Somali community in Garden City is strong and has spiritual roots.

“If you have the knowledge, you should help others,” he says. “I see my community needs help, and I am encouraged because of Allah to help them.”

However, his efforts are not without challenges.

Members of the African Community Center no longer have a physical space to meet, after being unable to renew their last lease. Money is a major problem. Naleye, along with seven other board members, volunteer their time to assist other residents with the logistics of paying bills, resolving traffic tickets and translating during health care appointments. However, the group has not figured out a fair or proper way to generate revenue for the organization so these activities can be sustained.

And there is still a lot of work to do. Many neighbors lack basic English-language skills and lack the confidence and knowledge to navigate what for them are complex and new legal systems in southwest Kansas.

But Naleye, who has made Garden City his home, is up for the challenge.

“I don’t have family here with me, so who is my family?” he asks. “It is my Somali community.”

The Law Enforcement Explorer Program, in which Garden City Police Office Juan Martinez talks to students about how to use handcuffs, allows the police to connect with young people and provide them insight for a career in policing.

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Fostering a dialogue about police-community relations in Kansas City, Kansas, has required Mayor Mark Holland, here at a ceremony honoring fallen officers, to learn from his mistakes.

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CHANGING THE

STO R Y

When tensions increased last year in Kansas City, Kansas, Mayor Mark Holland sought to build bridges between the police and his community’s diverse population. But he also made a high-profile misstatement and had to make reassessments along the way. It’s a reminder of the difficult path elected officials face in trying to foster change without upsetting the apple cart.

By: DAWN BORMANN NOVASCONE

Years before he stepped into elective office, the Rev. Mark Holland learned something about addressing complex challenges.

LEARNING O N T H E F LY

Successful pastors don’t hide difficulties from their flock.

They engage their voices to look for solutions. Holland has applied the same philosophy to governing during his first term as mayor of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas.

“There’s this squeamishness I find among elected officials.

They don’t want to tell people bad news,” he says. “It’s our church. It’s our city. Tell people what the issues are, but don’t try to protect your citizens from the challenges you’re facing. Share it with them, and invite their input.”

Getting people involved, he says, allows everyone to gain an understanding and work together on solutions.

“If you’ve got a problem with violence, share that with your community,” he says. “If you have a problem with community relations with your police, talk about it.”

Last year, Holland organized a series of community forums designed to help ease tensions and allow residents and the police to move forward. The informal sessions allowed people

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to ask questions about police tactics. It gave law enforcement officers a chance to explain procedures. Above all, it was meant to open dialogue.

But opening a conversation, as Holland learned, doesn’t come without risks. Is it possible to work on the challenges facing policing in a community without alienating law enforcement officers?

Does expressing support for law enforcement make those who feel they have legitimate concerns about policing feel excluded? Is there a way to push for change without rocking the boat so much that you upset too many people?

It can be particularly difficult when you’re dealing with a host of other issues (as most officials usually are). For Holland, the conversations about policing began as the community faced lingering concerns about high property taxes; disappointment among some residents about redevelopment lacking in the urban core while the area around The Legends added businesses; and the renegotiation of union contracts for public safety workers, the unified government’s largest expenditure.

The task of orchestrating a dialogue about policing amid complicated circumstances is a delicate, difficult task that can put an official in the uncomfortable position of balancing obligations to stakeholders who have very different vantage points on the issue. These are conversations that have no clear road map and require a willingness to move forward through trial and error. Mistakes, as Holland found, are inevitable and they must be learned from.

LEARNING FROM A MISSTEP

By the summer of 2016, it was clear to Holland and likely every American mayor paying attention to the national narrative that law enforcement agencies had problems with community relations, especially when dealing with communities of color.

Although the Ferguson, Missouri, riots and unrest had unspooled two years earlier, headline after headline decried the killings of minorities by law enforcement officers. Then the country saw several incidents in which police officers were targeted and killed. The July 7, 2016, ambush that killed five Dallas officers was one of the deadliest days in U.S. law enforcement history, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. Kansas City, Kansas, had already experienced two devastating blows of its own.

In May, a high-profile detective, Brad Lancaster, was shot to death in the line of duty. In July, a beloved police captain, Robert D. Melton, was gunned down after a police chase. The violence stunned the community. And though city officials were quick to point out that the officers were not targeted as part of the national narrative, the community was on edge.

Holland, spurred by more than 60 members of the clergy, embarked on a series of community forums designed to discuss the violence and hostility. He says he used the forums to let the public know he stands behind the local police, fire and sheriff’s departments. That means supporting them as they shift policing strategies, too.

The listening sessions were followed up with a Facebook Live presentation featuring Kansas City, Kansas Police Department Chief Terry Zeigler and Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark A. Dupree Sr. But it was an overall effort that would be complicated, at least temporarily, by the mayor’s own words.

After the police officers were killed, Holland and Zeigler stood united to try to help stitch together a wounded community.

But at a news conference about Melton’s death, Holland made a comment he would later regret.

It started off well enough, with the mayor saying:

“Captain Melton’s death reopens a raw hurt still festering within our community. Further, in the two months between our officers’ deaths, our nation has erupted with violence.”

Then he said: “We have seen the loss of innocent lives at the hands of police, and we have seen the ambush and murder of police who were actively protecting the public. Our nation is in uncertain times.”

The “innocent lives” phrase offended several in the local law enforcement community.

Melton’s sister-in-law, Lynn Melton, criticized Holland for using the term in the context of Melton’s death. Holland apologized repeatedly but despite that, Melton remains displeased with Holland’s approach.

“He hasn’t demonstrated in any way that he respects or wants to represent, in a favorable light, any kind of first responder,” Lynn Melton says.

As the mayor, police chief and district attorney held the Facebook Live wrap-up to discuss the community forums, it came up again. One person asked: “Police are disrespected daily, by residents and politicians, as we’ve seen from within our own government in the past year.

What as a staff (elected officials) have you (Holland) done to make officers feel like they’re just not a tool to get beat on but a vital organization to our community’s safety?”

Holland acknowledges that his wording that day was a mistake. He also realizes that it’s one he could have avoided if he had checked in with law enforcement before he made it.

“The mistake would have been fixed had I simply given it to the chief to read before I read it, because he would have caught it.

And so I apologize for that. I apologize to the family because I misspoke,” he said. “That comes back to the humility piece. I talk all the time. I’m going to misspeak.”

Holland says errors are the price of reaching out, to a certain extent.

“I think engagement is more important than getting it exactly right. You’re going to make mistakes.

I don’t have any ego about it.”

It’s hardly the first time that Holland has faced criticism in his role as mayor. He’s been at odds with a Unified Government commissioner who had also run for mayor, Ann Murguia, over issues such as ethics. The commission has at times been split over their differences. When you have authority, conflict can come with the territory.

But the situation with the Melton speech is a telling reminder of just how hard it can be to hold and test multiple interpretations and points of view, and how what we intend to say can sound very different to those who come to a situation with a different mindset.

The issue isn’t going away. Opponents have brought it up during Holland’s bid for a second term in office this fall.

It was one of several reasons that opponent David Alvey filed for the mayor’s seat.

“Trying to draw the local story to the national narrative really seemed to me inappropriate and insensitive to the police officers and their families,” Alvey says.

Yet Alvey, a lifelong Wyandotte Countian with deep roots in the community, credits Holland with taking the time to listen to others. Still, he wonders why Holland has become attached to certain projects and not others pushed strongly by community members.

“I think he’s very attached to his own ideas,” Alvey says of Holland, whose proposals include the championing of a “healthy campus” to spur

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Since becoming the Kansas City, JOURNAL 11 Terry Kansas, THE police chief in 2014, Zeigler has espoused an approach to policing that includes de-escaclation techniques and an emphasis on courtesy. At the same time, he has dealt with the killing of two of his officers in the line of duty.

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a revival of downtown. “I don’t mean to imply that he has bad intentions.”

Several critics have expressed anger that northeast Kansas City, Kansas, does not have a grocery store while in western Wyandotte County tax breaks have been available for several new businesses. Pastors in the northeast part of town have long argued that the grocery should be the city’s top priority.

It might seem unrelated to law enforcement, but frustration has a way of filtering into seemingly unrelated discussions because it makes it harder for the public to trust government officials.

Yet some of the criticism during the election season has troubled Rev. Jimmie L. Banks, the pastor at Strangers Rest Baptist Church.

Banks points out that Holland has been a firm supporter of law enforcement and the forums are one example.

Banks and other local officials, many who declined to speak publicly, believe that union officials haven’t taken kindly to some hiring policy changes and are using the election to rewrite Holland’s actions.

Holland, Banks says, listened to the community and law enforcement at a time in the nation’s history when dialogue was crucial.

“In the forums there were people with strong negative feelings because of how they were treated by the police, because of how they were denied what they call equal opportunity for employment,” Banks says.

It gave government officials a chance to remind the community that they made long-term changes to public safety union contracts that would allow more diverse people to take advantage of the county’s top paying jobs. The forums allowed police to explain why many procedures are critical.

It provided an outlet for those who might otherwise have turned to violence, or protest marches, to get government’s attention in a nonviolent but efficient way, Banks believes.

Holland and police officials, Banks said, took a listening approach to build understanding and create relationships. ͞ “You listen, you talk, you communicate,” Banks said. “Otherwise you’ve got people who will say I’ll try the other way.͟”

BRINGING PEOPLE TO THE TABLE

The community forums Holland organized provided opportunities for him to both explain and listen. He and law enforcement officials explained the policies that government adopted to eliminate barriers that kept many Wyandotte County residents from obtaining high-quality jobs in the police, fire and sheriff’s departments.

Before Ferguson, the city had asked the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct studies of those three public safety departments, which account for 60 percent of every tax dollar the Unified Government spends. There were criticisms of employee recruiting, training and hiring. Minorities long complained that the system had catered to select families.

When departments don’t reflect a community’s diversity, it lowers trust.

Among the Unified Government commissioners, Holland has led the charge to adopt policies that eliminated several barriers to hiring, including the requirement that all police applicants have a college degree. Other policies lowered the starting age for firefighters from 21 to 19 and moved the responsibility for promotions from the unions to the Unified Government human resources department.

“The devil was in the details,” Holland says.

The changes weren’t well received by the city’s unions, with whom Holland had been in contract negotiations.

The listening sessions over policing meant that Holland had to be ready for criticism in the pursuit of solutions. He couldn’t get defensive.

“WE WORK IN A DANGEROUS WORLD.

We have a good community, but you’ve got to be courteous to every citizen you come in contact with.”

P O L I C E C H I E F T E R RY Z E I G L E R

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“There has to be a certain level of a willingness of leaders to take a step back from the problems because I think the things that get in the way of leaders addressing problems are either defensiveness or ignorance,” he says.

They asked authorities for more engagement on social media and encouraged more dialogue.

But for all that he had done, Holland couldn’t anticipate every decision that needed to be made. Again, learning through trial and error became important, especially when it came to seeking out those liable to be affected by change but who usually would not be consulted on policing issues.

But the listening sessions were hardly a slam dunk.

Local Pastor Adrion Roberson helped facilitate them. He watched as city officials and police officers provided important information to residents.

He listened as a handful of them voiced their concerns, distrust or pleasure about the police.

Holland says he learned early on that mobilizing people is impossible without a broad cross section at the table. In this case, officials had planned four forums but quickly realized they failed to engage the young. They added forums at all nine high schools in Kansas City, Kansas; Donnelly College; and Kansas City Kansas Community College.

“You can’t mobilize anybody you haven’t brought to the table. And don’t just bring people to the table to implement your solutions. Bring people to the table to identify what the solutions might be,” Holland says.

The exchanges with students were among the more honest and frank discussions, according to City Hall officials. Students wanted answers and asked pointed questions about police policies.

FIGHTING PROGRESS?

“I believe the mayor is sincere in really gathering information from constituents,” he says. But Roberson questions the follow through. What will change? Anything less than change would feel like a betrayal. Without change, Roberson wonders whether the forums might have been more about political agendas than meaningful input.

Roberson admires Holland for taking complex issues including policing in communities of color, especially when the powerful police and fire unions are unhappy with the mayor for shaking up hiring practices.

“We disagree on a lot of stuff, but I respect his attempt,” Roberson says.

Yet Roberson admits that years of government distrust left him feeling uneasy at times during

Discussion Guide 1. How would you assess the ways in which Mayor Mark Holland has responded to the leadership challenges in his community?

2. How would you characterize his attitude toward mistakes? To what extent is this helpful or hurtful to his efforts?

3. What mistakes have you made in your leadership efforts? What have you learned from them and how have you responded?

the sessions. He saw instances of a good ol’ boy system and legacy hiring practices in policing that kept people of color feeling like they were on the outside looking in. He worried that by volunteering he might have endorsed a system he doesn’t always trust. He questioned what really had changed, knowing that an acquaintance was recently turned down for a law enforcement job. Was it a valid attempt at dialogue? Or posturing? Roberson is conflicted.

It’s hard for Roberson to ignore the past and trust government, including Holland.

It reinforced the daunting nature of the challenge at hand.

“If you’re the mayor in Wyandotte County with this decades and hundreds of years of systemic crap, how do you even consider maneuvering?

How do you measure gains of movement and progress in a place that fights against it tooth and nail?”

Murguia, who says she’s moved on from disputes with Holland, points out that forums can be difficult for residents when they don’t see change. Asking for input doesn’t open dialogue if you’re not willing to listen and build the opinions that are offered into your political agenda – even if they don’t match your favorite projects.

“In my opinion, if you’re going to call a meeting about something, you better be ready to take action,” she said. “Because it’s confusing to the general public when you call them together and you ask their opinion and then they don’t see, hear or feel differently about anything.”

But Holland says he’s trying to look at a bigger picture, one that doesn’t respond quickly to decisions made by those with authority.

While community policing grabs the headlines, the challenges in Wyandotte County are more deeply rooted than that, in part because of racism, poverty, white flight, blight, education and much more.

“People don’t want to look at systemic issues around poverty and choice.

People want it all to be individual choice. Because if it’s all individual choice, then you and I have no responsibility for it,” Holland says.

“But if it’s systemic issues, then we all have a responsibility and an opportunity to make a difference.”

Inside his office, Holland relies on a massive city map to explain the city’s history of diversity.

“We’re one of the most diverse cities in the country,” Holland says, adding that the population is 42 percent white, 28 percent Latino and 26 percent African-American. It’s the kind of ethnic mix that more parts of the country are headed toward, based on demographic projections.

Holland understands the city’s history not because it’s a requirement of the job, but because he believes that to be able to move forward you must acknowledge what happened in the past. When someone demands answers to the problems that spark violence, blight and crime, Holland asks them if he should start pre-Civil War or with the National Housing Act of 1934, when the federal government authorized redlining, a form of discrimination in home financing that both hurt black neighborhoods and kept blacks out of white areas.

“Our entire city of Kansas City, Kansas, was redlined from Third Street to 18th Street, from river to river,” he says.

It left devastating effects. The overt racism caused a monumental divide in education and jobs. Absentee landlords moved in as white families left the urban core, which left fewer owner-occupied homes and more owners with no commitment or care for the city’s future.

“There’s a one-to-one correlation between the redlined areas and poverty, crime, drugs – everything that’s wrong with America is in a one-to-one correlation with the redlined areas.”

It’s an important narrative to tell, he says.

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INVITING THE CONVERSATION: Otherwise children grow up believing a false narrative, much like Holland heard from his own grandfather.

“He’d say, ‘Black people ruined downtown.’

When in fact wealthy white people in Washington, D.C., ruined our town,” Holland says.

The listening tour wasn’t always easy. Yet it was the right time to take the temperature among residents. Holland encourages other elected officials not to put off the complex, controversial issues.

“Take on your hardest challenges in the first term. There are a lot of people that will tell you to wait until you get re-elected. You’ll be waiting forever. Take on the hardest challenges, open up the dialogue, begin the process,” he says.

Solving deep-rooted problems will likely take more than four years, he admits.

SMALL STEPS

Still, there have been small steps forward. The city started a comprehensive crisis intervention training effort that Zeigler had embraced after he was named police chief in 2014. The chief also espoused a new paradigm of policing, including the idea of de-escalation techniques. He added a line to the department’s “safety first” motto in 2015 to include “courtesy always.”

“We work in a dangerous world. We have a good community, but you’ve got to be courteous to every citizen you come in contact with,” Zeigler says. “Since then our Internal Affairs complaints for attitude and conduct and harassment have dropped 52 percent. That is phenomenal.”

The small but subtle shifts have gotten attention.

Although he’s been open to conversations and changes, Zeigler has not backed down from his commitment to the men and women in uniform.

Holland, too, has emphasized his strong support for the police.

“I’m sympathetic because we’re asking them to respond to everything that’s wrong in America – on their shift,” he says. “They’re walking into

a situation where they don’t know if they’re in harm’s way.”

Leadership Lessons from Kansas City, Kansas

Yet slow, intentional strategies aren’t always rewarded by people eager for change. But Holland is convinced it’s the right approach for him.

“My model of leadership ... it gets criticized sometimes because people say, ‘We need somebody to do something. We want action!’

Well, me too,” he says with a raised tone. “We have limited resources. I want to make sure the actions we take are the actions that are actually going to make a difference. I’ve been accused of moving too slowly on some things, but I’ll tell you the impact is long-term.”

1

The new public safety hiring policies will give more Wyandotte County residents a chance at well-paying government jobs, but he can’t promise change overnight.

2

“You can’t just go out and say, ‘Well, we’re going to have 25 percent of our police officers be black next year.’ That’s not possible. And you can’t discriminate based on race. What you need to do, though, is recruit actively within your community and create opportunities for people so you don’t have to be a legacy to know how to get through the system,” Holland says.

Ultimately it comes back to his pastoral roots and sharing the city’s problems with his flock, a bigger constituency now that he’s mayor. It’s a job he hopes to keep through a re-election campaign this year, but there are no guarantees.

Regardless, he doesn’t plan to stop sharing the good with the bad.

“It’s not all great news, but it’s our news.

If we’re not willing to tell the truth, because I believe – if I can switch hats for a minute – the truth will set you free. I read that in a book somewhere,” he says, smiling.

“The man who built his house on the solid rock when the winds came and storm came, it did not blow away. But the man who built his house on sand, when the wind and rain came, it washed away.”

MAKE ENGAGEMENT MORE IMPORTANT THAN PERFECTION.

If you’re going to take on tough, adaptive challenges, you’re going to make mistakes. The nature of the work doesn’t lend itself to perfection. Mayor Mark Holland acknowledges that he made a mistake in a statement at a news conference, but he also says that’s a reality of trying to conduct meaningful conversations. He wanted to make engagement the top priority.

SEEK OUT HELP WITH YOUR BLIND SPOTS.

What sounds fine to our ears may sound quite different to someone else. When you’re dealing with a tough problem, it may help to check in with people you trust to ensure that the messages you are intending to send will be received well by key stakeholders. As Holland says, he might have avoided offending the law enforcement community if he had first run his comments about “innocent lives” by the police chief. The chief could have warned him that the comment would not be well-received.

LOOK FOR UNUSUAL VOICES TO EMERGE.

3 4 5

No matter how well you plan, you’ll always fail to plan for the emergence of some important voices as a tough conversation proceeds. When these voices emerge, you’ll have to make a decision about whether you’ll slow down to hear them or keep moving at your previous pace.

When Holland realized that they had failed to engage crucial young voices, officials added forums at all nine high schools in Kansas City, Kansas, and at two colleges. The effort paid off, because students provided some of the most honest and frank feedback.

FOCUS ON EVOLUTION, NOT REVOLUTION.

Adaptive challenges aren’t unwound in a day. They take time, patience and persistence.

The challenges in Kansas City, Kansas, are deeply rooted in history, as Holland recognizes.

That doesn’t mean that progress can’t be made, but it’s often slow. Holland recognizes that the speed of his leadership approach won’t please everyone, but he’s betting on being able to make a long-term difference.

YOU’RE GOING TO DISAPPOINT PEOPLE.

Holland’s efforts, including his misstatement, have clearly left some in the first-responder community disappointed and disillusioned with him. Those wounds are not going to heal easily.

Leadership requires walking the razor’s edge by raising difficult or uncomfortable issues without making people take on more than they can tolerate. It’s likely that only time will tell whether Holland has found the right balance, pushed too far or not pushed out hard enough.

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SEEKING JUSTICE N OT ‘KUMBAYA’ By: LAURA RODDY

CALE B STEPHEN S IS A VIS IBLE, VOCAL A N D M UC H TA L K E D A B O UT O RGA N I Z E R OF A BL ACK LIVES MATTER M OVEM E N T I N L A W RE N C E . H E A N D T H E G ROUP’S TACTICS HAVE IN F LU EN CED TH E D I A LO G UE A B O UT D I S C RI M I N AT I O N I N THE COMMU N ITY WHILE D RAW I N G S I G N I F I C A N T C RI T I C I S M .

WHAT LEADERSHIP LESSONS CAN BE DRAWN FROM SUCH EFFORTS TO RAISE THE HEAT?

CHANGING THE

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More than 100 Lawrence businesses signed letters expressing solidarity with Black Lives Matter and other minorities at the behest of Caleb Stephens and Lawrence’s Black Lives Matter group.

But a corresponding list of 30 business that didn’t sign on, which includes at least one black-owned business and another known for supporting LGBTQ issues, drew criticism.

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L A W R E N C E A C T I V I S T C A L E B S T E P H E N S I S B L U N T. “ W E ’ R E N O T H E R E F O R ‘ K U M B A Y A ,’ ” H E S A Y S . “ W E ’ R E H E R E T O K E E P O U R K I D S F R O M B E I N G K I L L E D .”

Stephens, a 28-year-old social worker and drug and alcohol counselor, first gained prominence when he organized a candlelight vigil for Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, two black men killed by police in July 2016. About 600 people in the northeast Kansas college town of 95,000 attended. During the vigil, Stephens asked that only fellow black people speak, viewing it as a chance for the community to get together and validate individuals’ pain and anger.

“I don’t know if there is anything I would rather cuss more about than children being killed or parents being killed in front of their kids without any justice in sight,” he says.

Since then, Stephens has been a visible and vocal organizer of Black Lives Matter-LFK (LFK is an in-your-face nickname for the city, reportedly coined by a local artist, that incorporates the first letter of an expletive in the middle).

The group has led rallies and protested in multiple venues. Members staged a sit-in at a Lawrence City Commission meeting that ultimately led commissioners to approve a statement of solidarity in support of both Black Lives Matter and Native Americans protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. They also took control of a school board meeting to protest the handling of a situation involving a teacher who resigned after being accused of making racist remarks, which resulted in the meeting being adjourned.

The group, which indicates it’s trying to become an official chapter of the national Black Lives Matter organization, also has published a list

of more than 100 Lawrence businesses that have written letters expressing solidarity with Black Lives Matter, as well as supporting people who are brown, indigenous, LGBTQ, have gender identities that aren’t exclusively masculine or feminine, disabled and Muslims.

The goal of the effort, according to its Facebook page, was to “establish a new community dynamic, that recognizes, validates and protects the bodies and life truths of all marginalized identities in Lawrence.” It also published a boycott list of about 30 businesses that didn’t sign on.

“People know now that they can expect us when things are going on that are killing and damaging the folks in this community that do not have the power or the voices or that access to be able to speak up on these issues,” Stephens says.

Defenders of Stephens and the group say their tactics have a long history in advancing social justice causes, and that discomfort with some provocative approaches doesn’t prove they are wrong or ineffective.

But some in Lawrence have been angered by the methods Stephens and the group have employed, particularly the boycott list. Some critics have called them bullies on social media.

Others, even those who support the group’s underlying goals, have contended that their tactics have been ill-considered and counterproductive while alienating potential supporters.

Jesua Rodriguez is a Mexican immigrant who has lived in Lawrence since 2008.

“I have personally felt discriminated against here in Lawrence,” she says. “It frustrates you, it angers you and it saddens you.”

While she supports the mission of the Black Lives Matter movement and appreciates anyone who is trying to make a difference, she views the tactics of Stephens’ group as too aggressive.

She doesn’t believe the group is gaining new supporters or changing minds.

“I don’t think it’s effective because there is so much pushback from the white community,” she says. “I feel like educating is the better way to go.”

Black Lives Matter-LFK’s efforts also didn’t please African-American church pastors trying to conduct an August 2016 community conversation about the relationship between black people and law enforcement at a church in Topeka. About 30 Black Lives Matter supporters attended the meeting with Stephens.

According to The Topeka Capital-Journal, the meeting ended abruptly halfway through the program after Black Lives Matter supporters began shouting as then-Topeka Police Chief James Brown spoke of the department’s initiatives to create positive interactions between officers and the community.

The Rev. T.D. Hicks, pastor of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, who served as moderator of the event, told the newspaper that he thought the group came for the purpose of being disruptive.

“The unfortunate part about it is these guys came in from out of town, from Lawrence, trying to bring their negativity to our city,” Hicks

said. “But certainly we’re not going to allow this to stop the conversations that need to happen.”

RAISING THE HEAT?

One of the ideas that the Kansas Leadership Center teaches is raising the heat, which requires influencing people to get out of their comfort zone and act in service of progress on a difficult issue. There are lots of ways to raise the heat, but an especially provocative one is to ask people to pick a side or make a choice, which compels them to decide which of their values are important enough to them to live out in that moment. The risk is that such efforts expose divisions that may need to be worked across for progress to occur, or they turn off more people perhaps, many more, than they mobilize.

There’s little doubt that Black Lives Matter-LFK has impacted Lawrence’s conversations about systemic racism, violence against black people and other forms of discrimination. Scott Criqui, a KLC alumnus who is an equal rights advocate for Lawrence’s LGBTQ community, says Stephens plays a useful role in the community.

“He raises the awareness of issues that we need to have in-depth conversations about – race, gender, and sexual orientation, the whole gamut,” Criqui says.

Stephens believes that, by that measure, the group has been successful, and he makes no apologies for its tactics.

“ I H A V E P E R S O N A L L Y F E LT D I S C R I M I N A T E D A G A I N S T HERE IN LAWRENCE; IT FRUSTRATES YOU, IT ANGERS Y O U A N D I T S A D D E N S Y O U .” JESUA RODRIGUEZ

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“ A S A N I N T E R S E C T I O N A L A C T I V I S T, M Y J O B I S A L W A Y S TO WORK IN SUPPORT AND COLL ABORATION WITH FOLKS T H A T N E E D P R O T E C T I N G A N D D E S E R V E P R O T E C T I N G .”

CALEB STEPHENS

“We know ... folks that remain neutral side with the systems of oppression,” Stephens says. “Folks are going to have to take a stance.

They either move closer or they move farther away. ...Some of them are people I care a lot about.”

Stephens calls himself an intersectional revolutionary activist. Intersectionality refers to interconnected social categories, such as race, class and gender, that can combine to exacerbate the disadvantages or discrimination one faces. He says that any work with a minority or oppressed group must take their other intersections into account. And he’s quick to point out that he, as a black cisgender, heterosexual male – cisgender means people whose gender identity corresponds to their birth sex – learned from black queer feminists who started the national Black Lives Matter movement.

“A lot of people hear me as a speaker and hear me as a leader. I also recognize that a lot of it is because of male privilege, it’s because of patriarchy and it’s also because of the fact that I’m a big, intimidating person,” Stephen says.

“I also have braids, and I have muscles. So I’m just naturally scary to folks that are anti-black. ...

As an intersectional activist, my job is always to work in support and collaboration with folks that need protecting and deserve protecting.”

Despite Lawrence’s reputation as a fairly liberal town, Stephens says, it is “closet racist – it’s very closet all the ‘isms’ unless you’re white.”

“Lawrence acts and fronts like it’s so progressive,” he says. “I got tired of seeing the things that I read about that happen all over

the country, including in Lawrence, just being swept under the rug by folks saying, ‘It’s not as bad here.’”

Stephens grew up in Lawrence, attended Bethel College in North Newton, returned to Lawrence for his master’s work at the University of Kansas and then became a private practitioner in town.

But he didn’t learn about intersectionality in school. He learned it through personal interactions and through social media.

He has also been involved with racial inclusion and equity activism on the KU campus, including a tense 2016 exchange where he yelled at the then-dean of the school of social welfare, according to The University Daily Kansan, KU’s student newspaper.

For him, the first step for Black Lives Matter-LFK was educating people in Lawrence about what intersectionality is and raising awareness about the reality of the damage that a so-called ordinary police stop can cause.

“Emotional trauma lasts longer than physical trauma,” he says. “It’s not that we hate every individual police officer – it’s we hate the institution of oppression, no matter what it looks like.”

Anthony Brixius, Lawrence’s interim police chief, says his department is “committed to the fair treatment of all of its citizens and visitors, regardless of race, gender or any identifying factor for individuals or groups of individuals.”

He says the department is moving forward on two fronts: body cameras and a community

review board, “which will allow citizens to have additional safeguards in place in the event they have a complaint regarding racial or other biased based policing.”

well as another that was known to be an early supporter of LGBTQ issues, which prompted some backlash from those who saw the move as a strong-arm tactic.

In August, the city of Lawrence announced the hiring of Gregory Burns Jr. as the city’s new police chief. Burns, an assistant chief in Louisville, Kentucky, will be the first African-American to hold that post since Samuel Jeans served as city marshal in the mid-1890s. Stephens served as a representative of Black Lives Matter on one of the two community panels that interviewed the four finalists.

“Some people wanted more control, and the reality is that these were nonblack folks,” Stephens says. “White folks and allies don’t get to dictate whether they’re good allies.

That’s where power dynamics come in.”

Stephens says the next step for Black Lives Matter-LFK is building up the black community in Lawrence through networking, such as a black brunch at a diner every Sunday. Related to that effort is the solidarity list.

On a recent weekend, he was on his way to Topeka to lend his support and protection to a “nurse-in” at a restaurant where a breastfeeding mother of color was asked to cover up in opposition to state law.

“It’s the first time that some folks have ever felt like they could be completely comfortable, or as comfortable as possible, going to places and spending their money,” Stephens says.

“We don’t go back to sleep because once you know, you know,” he says.

Amid all the criticism – Stephens says he receives death threats – the activist in him keeps going, he says, because he doesn’t have a choice.

Journal managing editor Chris Green contributed to this story.

On the flip side is the boycott list, which includes at least one black-owned business as

Discussion Guide 1. How would you evaluate the efforts of Caleb Stephens and Black Lives Matters-LFK to raise the heat in their community? What have the consequences been? In your opinion, to what extent have they been effective in accomplishing their aims?

2. What, if anything, makes you uncomfortable about their approach? Why do you think that is?

3.

There is a long history of raising the heat in the civil rights movement. Some prominent leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., are now widely celebrated. But there have been other champions, such as Malcolm X, who staked out positions that were even more challenging to mainstream thought at the time. What value might there be to having people working on the same cause raising the heat to different degrees? What challenges might that create?

4. When you think about your own philosophy of raising the heat, what level of increase is acceptable to you? Is it appropriate to force people to choose a side? How much discomfort is necessary to mobilize people? When is raising the heat counterproductive?

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The habit of denial, 2.0 By:

Myrdal addressed America’s denial problem in a 1,500-page 1944 study,

MARK MCCORMICK

Were you aware that America has endured a race riot nearly every 10 to 20 years dating back to the turn of the 20th century?

Did you know Kansas had more than 20 race riots from its founding to 1927? That there were riots in Wichita in the 1960s and 1970s?

“Their public opinions are not their private ones.”

Gunnar Myrdal

“An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.”

Swedish economist, sociologist and Nobel Laureate

Gunnar Myrdal

American racial discussions often turn on denial: first, the denial of personhood to justify slavery’s horrors; then, the denial of equal rights once a semblance of citizenship was offered; and today, the denial that process or structural bias even exists.

It’s work avoidance, really. Americans have regularly avoided the adaptive work of exploring unsettling interpretations about their behavior – behavior fueling cruel societal inequality.

A 2015 documentary revisited what Myrdal found about

“At what point do the stories you tell about yourself conflict reality?.”

Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist, sociologist and Nobel Laureate, addressed America’s denial problem in a 1,500-page 1944 study. Myrdal died in 1987 but left behind research offering plausible escape routes. But we’ve known that route all along. It leads from the parking lot, where these discussions tend to languish, to the discussion table and into the places we harbor our most intimate beliefs.

Society can acknowledge his research, use a mirror to target a new locus of work and finally break this cycle of denial.

Or it could maintain the charade.

And await the next riot.

In 2017, events like those that unfolded in Charlottesville show that attitudes about white supremacy, which contribute to unconscious bias, remain a strong force in the nation.

Gunnar Myrday

The film asked Americans to square their perceptions of racial progress with the reality of their own behaivor.

unconcious bias.

America has endured race riots and unrest roughly every 10 to 20 years since the turn of the century.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE KANSAS AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM AND GETTY IMAGES

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THE BALANCED VIEW A father and his son, who is learning to drive, discuss race and interacting with the police.

CHANGING THE

STO R Y

As he learns how to drive, Christian Williams, 14, of Wichita, does more than just practice manuevers with his father, Van Williams. The two also talk about race in America and race in terms of law enforcement.

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Photos By: JEFF TUTTLE

Story By: CHRIS GREEN

This is the situation that Van Williams presents to his 14-year-old son, Christian, at the dining room table of their Wichita home in the middle of July: What would you do if you saw the flashing lights of a police car behind you as you were driving?

The answer comes almost instantaneously to Christian, a soon-to-be freshman at Wichita Collegiate School who has a permit to practice driving under adult supervision. ͞ Pull over.͟ Would you think that you were being pulled over for violating a traffic law? Or something else?

A traffic law.͟ Would you be afraid? ͞ Maybe a little.͟ What do you think you would say when the officer approached? ͞

raised children of different races in their blended family. As a biracial kid, Christian is growing up in a country – even as it grows increasingly multiracial and multiethnic – where he might face different risks and challenges behind the wheel than his eldest sister, Kelsey, who is white.

(Kelsey now lives in New York; Christian’s other elder sister, Brooke, is black, and is completing a doctoral program in psychology at the University of Houston.)

That reality calls for such acts of parental leadership that are all too easy to feel conflicted about. On one hand, Van feels a responsibility to make sure his son knows about his rights and how to protect himself behind the wheel and while traveling to environs where people don’t know him.

But he also feels resentment toward the fact that he needs to have the talk with Christian. How many of Christian’s peers, especially his white ones, are having to sit down and talk with their parents about how to stay safe in their interactions with police? It doesn’t seem fair that he should have to think about more things than they do.

Hello, Officer.͟͞ Good answer,͟ Van says.

Driving a vehicle is a rite of passage into adulthood for teenagers in Kansas. Eventually Christian will be driving by himself. As a father, Van wants to teach his son how to grow into a new world of opportunity and responsibility.

But to do that, Van will talk with his son about race, something that not every parent has to deal with when it comes to driving. Van is black and his wife, Kristi, is white, and together they’ve

And yet, with this reporter at the table observing and interjecting questions, Van and Christian talk. It’s not really͞the talk, as if there’s just one occasion when this exchange of knowledge happens. As Van recalls, his mother and other family members over time prepared him for driving by conversing. This talk, which comes after a weekend of basketball tournament games, is one of perhaps many moments for learning.

Van is clear that he wants his son to see the police as being there to protect him. His day job is as a spokesman for the city of Wichita, and

Van has had the opportunity to get to know a lot of good officers. I’ve had great interactions with law enforcement, he says, mentioning a recent out-of-town traffic stop where the officer treated him respectfully and let him off with a warning.

academics studying the issue as well as police officers, including Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay. Hearing the insights of reasonable, intelligent people only gives you a bit of hope about it, he says.

On the other hand, there’s well-documented history when it comes to incidents of police brutality toward black people, as well as long histories of systemic and institutional racism in this country. Haunting video recordings of black men being killed by police in seemingly routine traffic stops are a social media click away these days. There are tough, complicated interpretations to be considered here, too.

One of the comments that struck a chord with Van was the concept of having local law enforcement officers be seen as the Wichita Protection Department, emphasizing their role in protecting people rather than arresting them. When people see the police in that light, we’ve just made progress, Van says.

Father and son have already talked about the importance of being polite and using titles of respect for elders –͞yes, sir and no, ma’am͟– who also show respect. They talk about the importance of obeying the law and de-escalating any potential conflicts. Van mentions the need for Christian to be aware of his surroundings, and cognizant of when he’s in a place where people don’t know him by reputation.

If any of this is news to Christian, it doesn’t seem like it. He says he appreciates having the facts and being informed. He’s already plugged into the goings-on of the world through social media news.

He hails from a family, an extended family even, that is knowledgeable and has deep discussions about issues such as race, gender and diversity.

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But even though Christian has a wide knowledge base to draw on, the idea that someone would treat him differently because of race seems distant from his daily life of being a teenager, going to school and playing basketball. He’s witnessed a teammate get called a racial epithet. But of his own experiences, he says: I’ve never really had an encounter. It seems kind of foreign.͟ Maybe he never will face a tough situation, and Van says he’ll be thankful if that turns out to be the case. But in his city, state and nation in the year 2017, hope for that outcome is necessary but not sufficient. It takes hope, preparation and knowledge to deal with the world as it presently is.

To responsibly practice for reality, Van says, you give your kids a balanced, informed and accurate view of race in America, and race in terms of law enforcement.

Van recently finished a master’s degree in public administration at Wichita State University where he wrote a 30-page paper examining policecommunity relations, for which he interviewed

Discussion Guide 1. In what ways might Van be exercising leadership in this story? What leadership skills might he be asking Christian to practice on his own?

2. Was anything mentioned in this story surprising to you? What tough interpretations might you explore based on your answer?

“To responsibly practice for reality, “you give your kids a balanced, informed and accurate view of race in America, and race in terms of law enforcement.”

VA N W I L L I A M S

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FEATURED POET

Blue Highways By: KEVIN RABAS

We forget how many trees line our interstates, how many fields, how Kansas is mostly open, not pockmarked blacktop, and cracked gray strips with faded white lines— but long blue highways and tan gravel tracts leading to little farm houses and barns and sheds and corrals, where what feeds the nation graze and are bred.

These heifers don’t look up long at you, with eyes dark as starless space, and then back to that grass.

Kevin Rabas, the poet laureate for Kansas for 2017-19, teaches at Emporia State University, where he leads the poetry and playwriting tracks and is chairman of the Department of English, Modern Languages and Journalism. He has authored seven books, including “Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano,” a Kansas Notable Book and Nelson Poetry Book Award winner.

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FEATURED ARTIST

my story today By: HEATHER SMITH JONES

In my current work, I transfer the immediacy of thought and composition from my sketchbook drawings to canvas and make modifications as I move from a private scale to an accessible format and slower medium. The accumulated marks, shapes and colors form an autobiographical iconography referencing nature, passage of time and gesture of the hand. My paintings and drawings, both representational and abstract, express an inner tension. Through them I relay personal conversations about common experiences such as loss, growth, grief and hope. The titles I choose, poetic or descriptive, reflect part of the process in that dialogue and hint at the underlying story.

Throughout 2017 I am working on a project titled “my story today” in which I combine a photo I shoot each day with written thoughts or prose. I share the day’s entry on a private Instagram account and plan to print the photos and words in a book at the close of the year. Serial practices, the online project and consistent drawing and watercolor work in my sketchbook express my interest in accumulating specific details into a phenomenological event. Gathering ephemeral moments in such a way allows me to acknowledge development and patterns within the form of a visible anthology.

Heather Smith Jones is an artist working in painting, drawing, photography and printmaking. She is the author of “Water Paper Paint, Exploring Creativity with Watercolor and Mixed Media.” She was included in Issue 120 of New American Paintings and has contributed to numerous books and publications.

She earned a master of fine arts from the University of Kansas in 2001, and a bachelor of fine arts in painting from East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, in 1996. Since 2004, she has been an instructor at the Linda Reimond Arts-based Preschool at the Lawrence Arts Center and has taught children, college students and adults. Originally from the mountains of Tennessee and later the South Carolina coast, Smith Jones moved to Lawrence in 1998. She lives with her husband, Matt, who is co-owner of the Lawrence-based design/build company Struct/Restruct, and their four cats.

HEATHERSMITHJONES.COM

WRITTEN ENTRY FROM “MY STORY TODAY”:

5.19.17 Stillness, raindrops resting in the mouths of lilies, on necks of leaves bent and green.

A red poppy opened today alone amongst the daisies and larkspur. I retreat to paint for resolve, to color my feelings, sip hot tea.

I go downstairs a moment and find the boys snuggled together and I think of how much I love these little lives and how that doesn’t seem small at all.

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ADVERTISEMENT THE BACK PAGE

Rectifying our Empathy Deficit By: MARK MCCORMICK

When William Allen White said “liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others,” he must have been campaigning for greater community empathy. A good dose of empathy wouldn’t hurt today.

Can empathy go too far? Sure. It could lead to coddling and enabling.

A political radio show host claims the murder of 20 first-graders in 2012 was a hoax and their parents, paid actors. A political television host blithely drops an “N-bomb” on air. Cities insist that Confederate memorials maintain places of honor in public spaces.

Living it and overcoming internal barriers would be another story.

Today’s bitter divisions would have troubled White, who ran for governor in the 1920s on an anti-Ku Klux Klan platform. His work remains a passionate appeal for civic empathy.

“If each man or woman,” White wrote, “could understand that every other human life is as full of sorrows, or joys, or base temptations, of heartaches and remorse as his own … how much kinder, how much gentler he would be.”

White supported social uplift in defense of civic life, saying, “no man can give a government an intelligent vote whose life and environment is cramped.”

It’s difficult, though, to imagine too much opposition to empathy.

What makes empathy difficult is not only its requirement of deeply understanding someone else, but embracing the fact that understanding could mean having to give up something important.

Could people actually do that, or would they stand pat? White said there was room for everyone, even “standpatters.”

“It takes all kinds of people to make a world,” he wrote in 1912, “and I am willing to admit that the conservative brake on the progressive wheel is a good thing.”

Empathy asks us to understand someone else’s point of view. To speak from our hearts.

He encouraged heart-felt conversations.

To move closer to someone else’s vulnerabilities as you ask them to move closer to yours. It won’t make us agree, but the disagreements might be less bitter.

“We … say that money talks, but it speaks a broken, poverty-stricken language. Hearts talk better, clearer, and with wider intelligence,” said White, for whom the University of Kansas named its school of journalism and mass communications.

This seemed a non-negotiable with White, whose hopefulness assured him this state and nation would prosper.

According to another KU journalism great, John Bremner, empathy is more personal than sympathy.

“Empathy involves vicarious identification and extends beyond feelings of pity or commiseration to an understanding of the very soul of another,” the late editing icon said.

Society wrestles with empathy.

People record unfolding dramas on their phones rather than help. People wonder what sex assault victims were wearing and what police shooting victims did to provoke police. People with health insurance don’t seem to understand the horrors of not having it.

“The orderly business of life will go forward if only men can speak in whatever way given them to utter what their hearts hold,” he said.

Mark E. McCormick is the executive director of The Kansas African American Museum in Wichita.

BRING THE

CONVERSATION TO YOUR

COMMUNITY

COMMUNITIES OF COLOR AND LAW ENFORCEMENT Interested in hosting a conversation about the relationship between communities of color and law enforcement where you live?

WE NEED YOUR HELP TO INITIATE THESE DISCUSSIONS THROUGHOUT THE STATE.

MORE INFORMATION: Contact Shaun Rojas at 316-712-4956 or srojas@kansasleadershipcenter.org.

Here’s the text (Obviously there would be no front and back):

325 EAST DOUGLAS AVENUE

ON M

FO

R THE CO

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KLC PRESS

GOOD

WICHITA, KANSAS 67202