Building Public Trust Episode 5: Building Trust with Youth

In this episode, youth leaders and police share successful strategies for engaging and establishing trust with youth to improve overall community relationships with police, as well as reduce crime. 

Speakers (12) in order of appearance: 

• Dustin Waters, PERF Editor and Audio Engineer 
• Chuck Wexler, PERF Executive Director 
• Rachel Apfelbaum, PERF Writer, Producer, and Narrator 
• Abrianna Morales, CEO, Sexual Assault Youth Support Network (SAYSN) and Program Manager, National Organization of Victim Assistance (NOVA) – Youth Advocacy Corps  
• Romero Davis, Senior Program Manager, Social Current 
• Chuck Ramsey, Co-Chair White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing, former Commissioner of Philadelphia (PA) Police, former Chief of Metropolitan (DC) PD, and former Deputy Superintendent of Chicago PD 
• Sergeant William Corrales, Tucson (AZ) Police Department 
• Chairwoman Karen Gaal, Metropolitan (DC) Police Department’s 3rd District Citizens Advisory Council 
• Bryan Kelly, Golden (CO) Police Department Community Engagement Group  
• Ron Huberman, CEO/Founder Benchmark Analytics and former Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools & former Assistant Deputy Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department 
• Chief Leo Schmitz, Cook County (IL) Sheriff’s Police Department  

This podcast series is part of the Critical Issues in Policing series, supported by the Motorola Solutions Foundation.

Thanks for listening to PERFcast, the official podcast of the Police Executive Research Forum. For more information on PERF, visit www.policeforum.org.

Transcript

Dustin Waters: 0:03

Welcome to PERFcast, the official podcast of the Police Executive Research Forum.

Chuck Wexler: I'm Chuck Wexler, PERF's executive director. Thank you for joining us for this podcast series on building public trust. This episode will focus on a part of the community that is especially vulnerable and requires creative engagement strategies: 0:10

youth. Establishing trust with youth is a crucial part of improving the relationship between local police and the community they serve. It is also an important way to reduce crime. The series will be narrated by PERF Senior Research Associate Rachel Apfelbaum, who conducted many of the interviews with law enforcement leaders, academics, and community members.

Rachel Apfelbaum: 0:50

Hi, I'm Rachel. Abrianna Morales is founder and CEO of the Sexual Assault Youth Support Network, SAYSN, and the program manager of the Youth Advocacy Corps for the National Organization for Victim Assistance. She discusses how current local events shape young people's perspectives on policing.

Abrianna Morales: 1:08

Like I said, the killings of George Floyd and Tyre Nichols, and so many others that haven't caught the attention of national media, have brought to light a lot of the violence that has been enacted upon Black and brown communities by policing as an institution. And though these events are recognized on a national scale, they're things that have happened in local communities and in people's neighborhoods and young people's neighborhoods. And they certainly impact how much trust people have in their local police. And for young people in particular, that are kind of engaging in this or seeing these things, it's a very informative time in your life to be a young person and kind of seeing the narrative around policing being so fraught and difficult and scary. I think it's very natural to see all these national events and even witnessing them in your own communities and feeling very, kind of confused or a bit uncertain on how to engage with police and policing.

Rachel Apfelbaum: 1:58

Romero Davis is a senior program manager with the nonprofit Social Current, which works with community-based organizations to drive equitable solutions and bridge the community gap with police agencies. He explains one cause of adolescents' mistrust in police that he witnessed.

Romero Davis: 2:16

There was a time where I was leading this demonstration, this initiative in this community that had been really affected by crime and a lot of impact of crime. Obviously, when there's a lot of crime, there's a lot of police involvement, a lot of victimization. And so I actually was a part of opening a community center that brought in young children from the local schools, and a part of that was, well, let's bring in law enforcement to talk about trust with these young folks, with these young, young babies--you know, third graders and fifth graders, fourth graders, and let's hear, let's see what this engagement is like. And, you know, what was interesting to me, Rachel, was that the children didn't want to talk to law enforcement. Whenever we get lost in this conversation, we must always go back to root causes. We must always go back to what happened and how did it happen? And why did it happen, right? When we think about building this trust, because these young folks, the last time that they saw law enforcement, for many of them it was the last time that someone in their family was hurt. It was the last time that, you know, maybe they sat in a child advocacy center and had to talk about or be interviewed about something that was really uncomfortable for them. It was the last time that, you know, maybe a family member who they loved and they couldn't quite understand--like maybe why this family member did something that probably wasn't healthy, or whatever the situation may be, whether it was right whether it was wrong, but the common denominator was law enforcement. They were the ones that were always there responding.

Rachel Apfelbaum: 4:10

Abrianna Morales talks about her experience as a youth organizer and the approach she finds successful in engaging youth.

Abrianna Morales: 4:16

Having done this work for the past few years, I found the best way to engage youth is to take them seriously--to give them a platform for their voices to be heard. And we don't often, I think, recognize the marginalization that young people experience. They're frequently not taken seriously and don't have the same rights and privileges that adults do. And they don't really have agency or capability to choose their direction or their destiny in the same way. Engaging youth really is about recognizing that lack of agency and doing what we can to facilitate it. All it takes, really, is giving them the opportunity to be heard and to make a difference on their own terms.

Rachel Apfelbaum: 4:53

Chuck Ramsey, co-chair of the White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing, gave youth agency by forming a Youth Advisory Committee when he was the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Police Commissioner.

Chuck Ramsey: 5:03

I had a Youth Advisory Committee. And one of the first things that I saw that was letting me know that I was just an entirely different generation, it was about eight of them that showed up. And each one must have had three different devices. Because as we're talking, they're tweeting, they're doing stuff on social media, they're doing all kinds of things like that. It's a totally different generation. But you have to understand them, because that's where they are right now. And when you start talking about building trust and reaching people, they're not going to be coming to a church basement at seven o'clock at night for a community meeting. You had better be online; you better understand and be able to leverage social media; you better be able to reach them where they are, not where you want them to come. And that's one of the first lessons that I think police leaders need to really understand if you want to really touch young people.

Rachel Apfelbaum: 6:02

Abrianna Morales describes how she leveraged online platforms to motivate youth, and how social media can involve them in conversations around policing issues.

Abrianna Morales: 6:11

I founded SAYSN when I was 15 years old, really out of a desire for a resource that represented me. And more than anything, I wanted to feel that my voice was heard. And I wanted to elevate the voices of other young survivors. And I decided that the best way to do that was really to embrace the power of the internet and social media to facilitate connection. You know, I was born in 2001. So I really much came up alongside the internet and I thought that, you know, why not use that to engage with young people the way that I was engaging with them in my day-to-day life--which is online. And one thing that I really noticed and appreciate about Gen Z is their unwillingness to kind of like stand by in the face of injustice. And I think social media has played a really large role in this and how we've seen it. So you know, the killings of George Floyd, Tyre Nichols, and all these current events over the past few years have really inspired like a lot of, I think, uprising, a discourse around the role of police in our society. A lot of that discourse and a lot of those perspectives have come from young people and young people on social media. TikTok has been a really interesting thing for me to see, given that so much of the conversation around policing was happening in this sort of short-form content and in the comment sections of these videos. I think it's a matter of allowing youth to engage with policing or engaged with any sort of, I guess, resource or attempt at engagement, on their own terms, and social media is a great way for doing that. I think that it's a sort of hands-off approach, where you are allowing people to engage with any sort of content on their own time or on their own terms, as opposed to trying to, you know, create some sort of town meeting and getting a bunch of young people to show up to it. But allowing that content and that kind of conversation to kind of stand on its own and facilitate a kind of give and take over time between young people and the content itself. But really, what I think it comes down to, regardless of the format, is just taking you seriously and listening to them.

Rachel Apfelbaum: 8:12

Though many young people are immersed in online platforms, they can be engaged in person as well. Sergeant William Corrales from the Tucson Arizona Police Department describes a few successful strategies.

William Corrales: We have officers who volunteer at the YMCA. They could be in uniform or non-uniform. They are at the recreation centers in areas that probably have a little more violent crime than in other parts of the community, so we go in there. Officers help with--it could be anything. It could be homework. We have Officer Scooby: 8:25

Ricardo Fernandez, we call him Scooby. He helps children with homework. It could be just a conversation about police work. It could be just maybe playing basketball, doing those positive relationships with these neighborhoods that see maybe some gang activity, violent crime. And it changes perceptions. Sometimes these children don't even know--he might be in civilian clothes, not in uniform. They have no idea he has a uniform and later on, they find out this cool guy is a police officer, which is really cool.

Rachel Apfelbaum: 9:24

Bryan Kelly is a member of the community engagement group in the Golden, Colorado Police Department. Here he shares a fun approach for reaching students.

Bryan Kelly: 9:31

Getting in the community, getting the officers to know the community members and the community members to know the officers, especially at a younger level. So my wife is on the the elementary school PTA board and somebody came up with the idea of, we should ask the police department if they would be willing to do a silent auction item. And somebody came up with the idea of, what about if one of the silent auction items was to have a police officer come pick up a kid, drive them to school, and then walk them to their classroom. To me, I just see that as a huge, a major win win--maybe even third win when you know the PTA is going to raise money. But also at the same time, more importantly for me, it's going to be just an opportunity for the kids at the school to see a police officer in not a policing situation or maybe a different situation than they're used to seeing police officers.

Rachel Apfelbaum: 10:30

School-based programs can be an effective way to build relationships with students and enhance their perceptions of police. The community engagement strategies need to be consistent and equitable across neighborhoods and school districts, as Chairwoman Karen Gall of the Metropolitan DC Police Department's Third District Citizens Advisory Council points out.

Karen Gaal: 10:49

I grew up where I did not have an adverse relationship because MPD was implemented into our school system at those various levels. And we had the Officer Friendly, the side by side and we had all the the interaction with the police in a positive way. They're sharing those stories of a positive nature, as opposed to bringing the dogs into school, bringing in law enforcement saying, Hey, you know what, don't be on drugs. You know, constantly negative reinforcement. If they get that out of their approach--and that is helpful--you make people aware of what's going on, don't mistake that. But you don't want to constantly feed negative reinforcement into certain areas of the city. It needs to be a cross-city approach. If you teach children in one area of the city about riding bikes, that should be the same thing you do across the city.

Rachel Apfelbaum: 11:53

One common police program in schools is providing school resource officers, also known as SROs. This program's outcomes have been debated in recent years in light of frequent mass shootings but also SRO-involved use-of-force incidents. Abrianna Morales discusses how SROs can help or hurt efforts to build trust with youth.

Abrianna Morales: 12:13

I think the role of school resource officers and building relationships and trust with youth is very complicated. Obviously, there's a lot of perspectives at play here, especially in light of recent mass shootings and a demand for more security in schools. But I think it really comes down to what role that school resource officers themselves want to play and their relationships with young people that they come across. And so, you know, the school-to-prison pipeline, or that practice of pushing kids out of school and towards the juvenile criminal justice system, is a very real thing. And it's associated with the elevated presence of police in schools. I think that choice comes down to police discretion, the choices that police officers can make, not even just on campuses but in general--in their interactions with people about whether to arrest or how to interact with people basically. And so when a young person at school is acting out or has gotten into a fight or has been caught with drug paraphernalia or whatever, I think the question is, will arresting this child--will introducing them to the juvenile system--really be the best way to support them? Or do they really just need support? And if officers can offer that supporct--can be the person who offers resources, guidance, and understanding--I think that's fantastic.

Rachel Apfelbaum: 13:23

Ron Huberman is the CEO and co-founder of Benchmark Analytics, a provider of an evidence-based public safety management system. He's also the former superintendent of the Chicago public schools and the former assistant deputy superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. At PERF's annual town hall in 2022, Ron Huberman and PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler discussed the lessons learned from the Chicago public schools' partnership with the Chicago Police Department and its SROs to reduce youth-involved community violence.

Ron Huberman: 13:55

And that's one big mistake that I've seen is that police departments take this all by themselves; they don't pick institutional partners. Chuck, you helped me a lot with this in Chicago when I was superintendent. We had incredibly good quantitative results in reduced shootings. We engaged the Chicago public school system with the Chicago Police Department on violence as a community policing partner. The Chicago public school system is the number-one employer in the city of Chicago, with 50,000 employees. The schools are the center of the community. And very often the schools speak for the most legitimate voices in the community are involved in those local school councils. So I would recommend in community policing, the school is the center; it has to be the partner. You can't ignore that institution.

Chuck Wexler: 14:42

You know, we did something together in Chicago. He had Chicago public schools, I was working for the police department, and we had the principals of the schools and the commanders together in a meeting and they did nothing else but exchange telephone numbers. So when someone got shot--like on the weekend in Chicago, and that's when it happens--then they notify him because they know it would spread into the schools. So they pull them together into the schools.

Ron Huberman: 15:08

And the schools are the carrot to the police's stick, right? So the police all too often in community policing want to be the carrot. It's a really hard ask, when your job is to lock up folks who are committing crime. So who is your partner for the carrot? If you remember, we did an analysis, we knew that there were 2,000 students registered in the Chicago public school system with a 20% likelihood of getting shot in the next 18 months. And we knew it because of their in-school discipline; we knew it based on their IEP record; we knew because they were failing and dropping out in a certain pattern.

Chuck Wexler: One other point here: 15:40

when you say you identify those kids, they do that in Los Angeles and other cities, and they've been accused of sort of stigmatizing those kids--having an algorithm that picks up on those kids. Are you stigmatizing those kids when you identify those kids having been arrested six times, and you're trying to reach them?

Ron Huberman: 16:01

This is why there's the carrot versus the stick comment that I made before, Chuck. The reason that we were able to do that and able to heavily intervene is because we were the public school system. If the police department was doing that analysis, in today's modern age, it would get stigmatized. But we weren't going to do anything but alter their behavior, right? And we know that when we engage those kids thoughtfully, what else do we know about those kids? We knew that, generally speaking, there was no responsible adult in their life. We knew that they had massive mobility. They were hopping schools, they were hopping locations, they had no permanent address. This is very knowable when it comes to those kids. So I would say when you're thinking about the care--and police departments want to take it on, right? We've heard it, there's basketball leagues, and this is not saying that those things are not great--but I think there's more power in saying the carrot is the community partner. And we're going to do that analysis because it saves lives.

Rachel Apfelbaum: 16:57

We just heard about the partnership in Chicago between the public schools and the police department regarding the school system's role in reducing youth violence. Now we will hear about the police department's role. Here's Chief Leo Schmitz from the Cook County, Illinois Sheriff's Police Department talking with PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler about the police role and its results when he commanded the Chicago Police Department's gang unit.

Chuck Wexler: 17:22

Chief, you know, we worked together for years in Chicago. And a lot of our work started with a school program where we brought commanders and principals together, and you were part of that. But at that time you were working in Chicago, and you were head of a specialized unit that looked at gang activity. I rode with you and we began talking. And we talked about, How do we prevent some of these shootings? You guys were understandably focused on apprehension. But your thinking began to shift a bit, to How could you get in front of it? How could you prevent it? How did this philosophical change happen between the police and the community? And what do you remember about that period?

Leo Schmitz: 18:21

When you're talking about going from apprehension to prevention, that's what we try to do all the time, Chuck, and getting in front of gang-related shootings or murders or anything, narcotics sales. We had put together a citywide unit called the gang enforcement unit. And what we wanted to do is, we wanted to drive crime down; the superintendent that time wanted to drive crime down. So we developed a unit that we can address where most of the murders and shootings are happening. So we're always good at apprehension, right? We're going to go get somebody; we're going to work it and we're going to find them. The trick is to try to stop some of that. So the prevention end was multifaceted for us. We had units, gang units, that we would send out to specific gang areas where the fight was going on. So it encompassed anything from working the street, getting out of the car, building a rapport with the youth--a lot of them in grade school, high school. And at first, you know how that goes, there's not a trust factor. But once you're out there and you're not just trying to go through them, and you talk to them and at times when there's no calls, you start building up a little trust. And when you build up that trust, now they know you care. You know, they're not going to say you care but they know then that you care about them more than just making an arrest. So we started doing a lot of that with the unit. We even moved into the schools.

Chuck Wexler: 20:12

At the same time, we had brought together principals of some of the worst schools. And when I say worst, I mean toughest. We had the principals and the commanders and we were exchanging information. One of the things you taught us, Leo, was that something that would happen in the weekend would spill over into the schools the next Monday. And that made you and Kenny start to think about, How do we communicate from the weekends to Mondays, when you're going to have it? And that made you all kind of rethink how you could prevent things by going into the schools, which was a different kind of role for your unit, right?

Leo Schmitz: Sure. So, Chuck, when you were out in Chicago with us, and it was always a privilege to have you as a ride along, I made you my partner--I think I even gave you a vest. We wanted to get into the schools because here's what would happen: 21:09

we'd have a fight over the weekend, or during the week, we'd have somebody shot or murdered. We know what schools they are going to. So we would go to that school on that Monday morning. And let's say it happened Saturday night. We'd go to the school on Monday morning and we'd find our SROs--our school resource officers, which in the city of Chicago, the ones that worked for me did a fantastic job and I actually don't know how we would do our job without them. We'd go, Hey, we had some Gangster Disciples shot from two blocks over and we think they were being in a gang fight with, let's say, the Black Disciples. I'm just giving you context, it could be any gang. And we would go over there and say Hey. He goes, Yeah, we see it this morning, they're flexing up, everybody's nervous. They're talking to me because he built a rapport with them and has their respect. And he or she, whoever's working as a school resource officer, would be a mentor, either as a father or mother in some way. And these people would go to him. So when we talk to him he'd say, Hey, listen, we want to get in front of this, right? You got to talk to so and so. And you got to talk to so and so because they're really nervous, and they think things are going to jump off today. So what we did was set up an intervention. We picked who would be in it, you know, and say Here's what we're going to do. On the street, we'd go to their gang members to go, Hey, what's going on? What's the problem? Why are we in this fight? Why did somebody shoot this guy, and you know, we'd get some information. But now we're going into their school. And this is where they feel safe, and we want them to feel safe. And we go, What's the problem? And we get in there and we get people in there such as the student, we get the parents, CPS staff, somebody from security in Chicago public schools. If Cook County Probation was involved with this student, we'd get them in. And we get somebody--you know, like a parent or somebody faith-based, whoever we could get in, a principal--and we'd have a meeting. Now we did it so we would never put the student in any kind of predicament. They'd bring him into a side room in the school. We'd all be in there. And at first they'd be like, Well, what did I do wrong? Sit down, son; you didn't do anything wrong. We're trying to save you and your buddies and other people. What's going on? Tell us what's happening. And we're not looking to arrest you; we're not looking to do anything. We're just trying to modify what's going on. What's going on? And you'd be very surprised. Sometimes, at first they'd be a little scared to say something. After a while they'd be going, Hey, they're fighting for this part of our area and we want it, that's ours, and we don't want them to take it, or somebody disrespected somebody and they're coming at us and now we gotta go back at them. And everybody who's involved in this student then knew that we cared more about that student and his friends than we did about making arrests. Making arrests is needed, but making an arrest doesn't solve all the problems.

Rachel Apfelbaum: In this episode, we explored the state of trust between youth and the police and some innovative strategies to engage this demographic. Throughout the series we have given you the foundations for understanding and building trust through concrete actions. In episode six, we will dive into how these strategies were used successfully in one department: 24:48

the Camden, New Jersey Police Department, which has been cited as a model for police reform.

Dustin Waters: 25:15

Thanks for listening to this episode of PERFcast, the official podcast of the Police Executive Research Forum. Please be sure to subscribe on your podcast platform of choice and stay tuned for upcoming episodes. For more information on PERF visit www.policeforum.org or follow us on Twitter @policeforum. Thanks again for listening. This podcast series was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Motorola Solutions Foundation.