Better Together St. Louis concluded a series of town hall forums on policing practices Thursday, February 12 at the O’Fallon Park Recreation Complex-YMCA in North St. Louis.
Better Together and state Senator Jamilah Nasheed (D-St. Louis) hosted the seventh town hall forum organized to gather community input for a regional policing study Better Together commissioned from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF).
“We’re going to get an outcome because Better Together has rolled up their sleeves and have said, ‘Enough is enough!’” Nasheed said. “It’s time for the community and law enforcement to come together and begin to have a dialogue.”
This is the second town hall Nasheed has co-hosted. She said it was essential to hold the forum in an area where the voices of her constituents could be heard.
After a brief rundown of the agenda, Marius Johnson-Malone, deputy director of Community Based Studies at Better Together, divided the room into two groups for a 45-minute break-out session. One group included a Ferguson resident wearing a “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” T-shirt, a young black man grappling with a love/hate relationship with police, and elders who spoke of a new breed of civil rights activists who would rather die than live like slaves.
David Jackson Jr., president of the St. Louis Public Schools’ elected Board of Education, said back in the early ‘80s before enlisting in the United States Air Force, he applied to be a police officer in St. Louis. He was reared to respect the police and revered them as “heroes” until he discovered as a teenager that he was being viewed as a “criminal.”
He recalled an earlier experience.
“We were hanging out on the corner. A police officer was driving by, rolled the window down and says, ‘You guys get off this (expletive) corner!’ That kind of took us aback,” he said.
Evelyn Joseph, a retiree, agreed with Jackson that respect was lacking on both sides and said she has witnessed police manhandle teenage boys.
“I’ve seen them throw them down on the sidewalk and make them sit down in a line while they do whatever they do,” Joseph said. “That’s not right.”
Facilitator Gladys Smith, a counselor at Webster University, asked participants to select a few words to describe the police departments in their communities.
Sister Amatullah Muhammad, a member of the Nation of Islam, said she views the police as racist with a hatred for black youth.
“Our children are marked for death,” Muhammad said. “That’s why it’s called ‘justifiable homicide.’”
Seated next to Muhammad was her husband, Yusuf, who said the police could benefit from diversity training from the Nation of Islam and that perhaps white and black law enforcement officers should police their own communities.
Missing from the February 12 forum was Chuck Wexler, executive director of PERF, who is leading the study and plans to release the group’s findings in April.
